The Shape of Night(30)

While I wait for her return, I can already feel my pulse kick up to a gallop. I’ve learned just the barest details about Captain Brodie and have seen only the one portrait of him in the historical society. All I really know about him is how he died, on a storm-tossed ocean, his ship battered by wind and waves.

That is why you carry the scent of the sea.

Maeve returns from her car and places a folder in my hands. “My friend made photocopies for you.”

I open it to the first photocopy and see a page filled with ornately looping handwriting. It is a ship’s register, dated September 4, 1862, and I instantly recognize the name: The Minotaur.

His ship.

“Those papers are just a start,” says Maeve. “I expect my friend will turn up much more, and I’ll check your local historical society. But for now, that will give you some idea of the man who may be haunting this house.”





Twelve


By the next morning, my fever has broken and I wake up feeling famished but still weak. I wobble downstairs to the kitchen, where I find Hannibal finishing up the last nuggets of dry cat food in his bowl. Maeve must have filled it before she left last night. No wonder I wasn’t rudely awakened this morning by a demanding claw to the chest. I fire up the coffeemaker, scramble three eggs with a dash of cream, and drop two slices of bread in the toaster. I devour it all, and by the time I finish my second cup of coffee, I’m feeling human again and ready to focus on the documents that Maeve left me.

I open the folder and find the ship’s registry for The Minotaur. Last night, I’d had trouble reading the ornate handwriting, but now, in the bright morning light, I’m able to decipher the faded description of Captain Brodie’s doomed ship. Launched September 4, 1862, The Minotaur was built by Goss, Sawyer & Packard in Bath, Maine. Wooden hulled and classified as a “Down Easter,” she was a three-masted sailing ship, 250 feet long, 44 feet wide, and she weighed a little over two tons. She required a crew of thirty-five. Owned by the Charles Thayer syndicate of Portland, The Minotaur was a merchant vessel built for speed, but she was also rugged enough to survive the brutal passage around the Cape of Good Hope as she sailed between the Maine coast and the Far East.

    I page through the next documents, which list the ship’s voyages, the various ports she visited, and the cargoes she carried. Sailing to Shanghai, she carried animal hides and sugar, wool and something called case oil. On her return to America, she carried tea and silk, ivory and carpets. On her maiden voyage, she was under the command of Captain Jeremiah Brodie.

For twelve years, he was master of The Minotaur as she sailed to Shanghai and Macau, San Francisco and London. While these ship’s documents do not tell me what he was paid for his services, it is clear from this house he built, with its grand proportions and fine woodwork, that his income from these voyages must have been handsome, but it was also hard-earned. After toiling so many months at sea, what joy he must have felt when he could finally return to this house and sleep in a bed that did not sway, and dine on fresh meat and greens pulled straight from the garden.

I flip past the registry pages and find a photocopied news clipping from the Camden Herald, January 1875.


Tragedy has befallen yet another Maine vessel in the turbulent waters off the Cape of Good Hope. The Down Easter The Minotaur, which sailed from Tucker Harbor six months ago, is now believed lost at sea. She last put in to port in Rio de Janeiro on the 8th of September and departed three days later, bound for Shanghai. Her route would have taken her round the fearsome cape, where heavy winds and monstrous waves regularly threaten the lives of the daring souls who brave the sea. It is in these waters that The Minotaur most likely met her terrible end. A portion of the mail bags she was carrying, as well as splintered fragments of wood, have washed ashore at Port Elizabeth near the southern tip of Africa. Among the thirty-six souls presumed lost was Captain Jeremiah Brodie of Tucker Harbor, an experienced ship’s master under whose command The Minotaur had safely made the same passage five times previously. That a seasoned captain and crew on a sound ship could meet their doom on a voyage so familiar to them is a reminder that the sea is both perilous and unforgiving.



I open my laptop and google the Cape of Good Hope. It is a cruelly misleading name for the passage that was once called, by the Portuguese, “the Cape of Storms.” I study photos of terrifying waves crashing on a rocky coastline. I imagine the howl of the wind, the groan of ship’s timbers, and the horror of watching your men wash overboard as the rocks loom ever closer. So this was where he died. The sea claims even the ablest sailor.

I turn the page, expecting to read more details of the tragedy. Instead I find several photocopied pages of a handwritten letter, dated a year before the sinking of The Minotaur. In the top corner is a yellow Post-it on which either Maeve or her research librarian friend has jotted an explanatory note:


Found this among papers from the estate of a Mrs. Ellen Graham, died 1922. Note the reference to The Minotaur.



The letter itself appears written by a woman’s hand, the words neatly and elegantly formed.

    Dearest Ellen,

I send this latest news to you, along with the bolt of China silk which you have so eagerly awaited all these months. The shipment arrived last week aboard The Minotaur, a vast array of silks which were all so tempting that Mama and I were quite unable to decide which ones to purchase. We had to make our choices quickly, because all the young ladies in town will soon be clamoring to snatch up what they can. Mama and I chose bolts of rose pink and canary yellow. For you, I chose the green, because I think it will suit your red hair quite nicely. How fortunate we were to have our pick of the treasures straight from the ship. By next week, the rest will be on their way to shops up and down the coast.