I’m a historian researching shipping records from Argentina in the 19th century.
This month, I’m in Buenos Aires, spending my days looking through shipping manifests and insurance declarations. This morning, I dropped a folder behind one of the shelves in the sub-basement. When I pulled the shelving unit away from the wall to get it back, I found a small black notebook sitting in the dust.
The notebook is in terrible condition, with yellowed pages, a cover half torn off, and some sections missing completely. If the dates written inside are real, this notebook is over two hundred years old. It describes a voyage on a whaler called “The Ebony” that, as far as I can tell, is not recorded anywhere. I’ve checked the registries I have access to here and I cannot find a single reference to it.
I’m supposed to report finds like this immediately, but selfishly I put it back where I found it. I figure that since I found it, I should have the first chance to post the findings. Translation is going slowly (it's written in Spanish), but I got through a good chunk today and I’ll be back tomorrow to transcribe more.
If this is real, which I have a sinking feeling it somehow is, it blows the lid off of a lot of what we think we know about history, geography, and potentially biology. I wish I had any further context on this, but as somewhat of an expert in the field, all I can tell you is that this shouldn’t exist.
Here’s the first entry.
July 11th/1815
^(“The Laplander is dead. The doctor said his lungs filled with fluid overnight, his final moments spent drowning in his own blood. I have found myself increasingly unaffected by death. As I watched those first bodies float in the frigid waters two weeks past, I felt horror and despair I had never before known. Now, all I found myself thinking of when I heard of the death of the Laplander is the bitter irony of dying in such a fashion. The whales we kill die the same way. Drowning in blood. Regurgitating bits of tentacles and other spoils of hard won battles deep below the surface in a world man should know nothing of. I remember my grandmother's disappointment in the life I had chosen. She had told me that He did not give man gills because He did not make us to be creatures of the sea. She was wiser than I had ever given her credit for.”)
July 13th/1815
^(“I fear it won’t be much longer until disease and frostbite will take care of us each and every one. The Fuegians the captain had us take some weeks ago will likely be next. This disturbs me more than the death of the Laplander, whom I had cared for very little. To see these Fuegians, people accustomed for generations to the frost, freezing to death slowly in the hold has affected me, and I suspect most of the others, in a way we would rather not admit. I marked this day as the 13th of the month, but I am not confident that that is correct.”)
^(“We have sailed below the sun, where the day and night blend together into a mist of constant gray. I estimate it has been two months since the Ebony left the port of Buenos Ayres, and three weeks since we left Tierra del Fuego. This is my third whaling expedition, and while this one had felt different from the beginning it wasn’t until we had taken those Fuegians that I felt something was truly wrong about this voyage.”)
^(“We found the group of five Fuegian men hunting seals on the frozen beach, practically naked. They warm their bodies by coating themselves in seal fat, the smell of which was putrid to my nose. The captain ordered us to bring them on board to serve as foremast hands, as several men had backed out of the expedition shortly before leaving. How I envy them. One Fuegian had died in the struggle to bring them onboard. I envy him too. I have never known cold like this. In this strange part of the world, there is no fat to coat the body, nor would it do much good.”)
^(“The Fuegians are simple, peaceful people. I am only a cook, and it is not my place to cast judgement upon the captain's decision to enslave them, but I suspect the decision was not his but the Chilean’s. I only caught a glimpse of him once, as we were boarding. He was tall, his hair unkempt and whipping wildly in the wind. But I hear his voice often. I first believed him to be just another pilot, but he seems to be acting as a sort of consultant to the Captain. He bunks in the Captain’s quarters with him, and I have yet to see him emerge.”)
^(“My cot in the hold presses up against the captain's cabin. The adjoining wall is often damp with condensation, at times dripping on my head and waking me. When this happens, I often awake to the sounds of quiet discussion, barely making its way through the damp wood. He whispers things I cannot make out to the Captain, deep into the night. His voice is low, and sounds aged. It reminds me of the songs sung by the whales.”)
July 14th/ 1815
^(“The Captain has stopped pretending like we are anything other than completely and utterly lost. It was evident to the rest of us weeks ago, after the storm. Two days after enslaving the Fuegians, one of the Basques spotted our first whale as we sailed east towards the Malvinas. I watched for the rest of the afternoon from the deck as we followed the whaleboats. Antonio, a young man who had been on my previous expedition, was the first to harpoon the beast. It put up a good fight, dragging the whaleboats behind it for hours, but eventually it died in the same manner the Laplander later would.”)
^(“In the excitement, we had paid little attention to the clouds, but by the time we latched the carrion to the side of the ship it was evident a storm was coming. This was the first time I had seen a dead sperm whale, and I remember my surprise at how human its dead eyes looked, despite being over twice as large. Furthermore, as some of the men cut into the beast to harvest some whale-steak before we went below decks, I found myself fascinated by the fins of the beast. Something about the skeletal structure deeply unsettled me, and it was not until later that I realized it was because of how similar they were to the hands of a man.”)
^(“Thinking back on this, I find my memories blurring. I know that they butchered that whale, and I would spend hours over the following day salting and preparing that very meat. But although I know this occurred, when I look back it feels as if it was the flesh of the Laplander they were harvesting. We hunkered below decks the rest of that night as the winds shrieked outside. The Basque who had spotted the whale said it sounded like the screams of men fell overboard.”)
^(“The winds and rain subsided around midnight, and when we stepped out to assess the damage I felt as if we had entered some new world. The edges of the sky were vivid colors of green, pink and orange. One of the Russians compared it to Aurora Borealis he had seen in the Arctic seas. We had not had time to process the Spermicitti or take much meat from the carcass, and the sharks had made fast work of much of what remained of the poor creature.”)
^(“I looked down into that eye, surrounded by mangled flesh and oozing yellow liquid. Then I looked up into the sky, and saw what looked like that same dead eye, enlarged a thousandfold directly above us. The storm had not passed, we were only in the center of it. While a storm was not surprising, a typhoon in the South Atlantic, at this time of year, should not have been possible. Within half an hour, it was back upon us, raging for days straight as we prayed in the hold. I drifted in and out of sleep to winds that sounded like dead sailors shrieking, and through the wall the deep singsong of the Chilean. We emerged onto the deck again, two and a half weeks ago, to find the head mast destroyed, the whale carcass gone, two whaleboats absent, and several inches of snow covering the Ebony.”)
^(“Small chunks of ice floated by us on eerily calm waters, with no sign of birds nor any other life. The sky was completely and utterly gray, entirely absent of stars, and I felt that if we were still on the earth, it was a part of the world that God was ignorant of. We were able to somewhat repair the mast, but the canvas was torn badly. We had little control over what direction we went in, but that mattered little as our current location was entirely unknown and the compass spun wildly.”)
^(“One of the old Russians said he had heard of this before, and it was not uncommon if we were near some vast iron deposits, but this made little sense to me as we were not near any land and whatever ore was below us would have been leagues beneath. The wind is strange here. Our wake does not linger, instead fading quickly into nothingness, and within moments of us moving past the water does not betray any evidence of us ever passing through. With no control over the Ebony’s movements, we continue to drift aimlessly in the grey. With no stars or landmarks visible nor other means of charting our navigation, it is impossible to tell if we are even drifting in a straight line or simply circling the same plot of water.”)
July 17
^(“The Captain kept us busy for what I believe was two days and nights before the first deaths, but I am not confident of how much time truly passed. The sky maintained a steely gray appearance at all times, rendering day and night indistinguishable. During this time, we did not see a single bird, seal, or any sign of life other than us whatsoever. There is not much labor to be performed, yet the crew eats voraciously. I watched them, my countrymen, men from the old world, some men from distant geographies who practice backwards and ancient religions, tearing into the meat like sharks devouring the corpse of a whale. I spent much of this time salting and preparing the whale-steak and what other meat we have left in the warmth of the kitchen, surrounded by the sick who crowd around the ovens dying light.”)
^(“We were already low on coal to burn as we had planned on restocking in the Malvinas around this time, and the cold was bitter, so when we first saw that distant green light no one questioned the Captain's decision to send a whaling boat to investigate. An old Andalusian in the Crows nest first spotted it, far in the distance. The light was cool, pulsating, a sickly looking and iridescent shade of green. We first believed it be St. Elmo’s fire, but as we got closer it appeared to be on top of an ice sheet, at least a half league starboard. It looked almost like some ghostly campfire, drifting solemnly on this dead and frozen ocean. Being unable to navigate the Ebony, we watched as the men, a group of Porteños like myself, rowed towards the light as we continued to amble without direction. Not long after they had departed, a wind picked up for the first time since that cursed storm, and we stood helpless on the deck as a mist began to trickle in, obscuring their silhouettes as they gained on that light.”)
^(“Eventually, both the Ebony and the whaleboat were consumed by thick fog, snuffing out the light in the distance. Antonio and I climbed up the mast with the strongest lanterns on board the Ebony to guide the men back, but as we reached the top I heard what sounded like that wind again. This time, it was no superstition. I could hear their screams echoing across the ice as if it was coming from all directions at once. The mist cleared several hours later, and to our horror we spotted the Whaleboat heading in a perfect line towards the Ebony, absent of any men. That night, or what we believed to be night, I drifted off to the Chilean’s melody only to be awoken by crying out above deck. We all rushed out to see the bodies of those four Porteños floating several feet out from the Ebony, their clothes torn and limbs bent at odd angles.”)
^(“The way they bobbed and turned about in the water deceived me, or perhaps I simply refused to believe my eyes, because I at first believed them to be a school of porpoises. Within minutes, those mutilated bodies sank beneath the gentle waves. We were too terrified to retrieve them, and the Captain gave no order to do so. In my state of shock and bitter cold, I found myself thinking of how comforting it would feel to return to my bed. I could sleep there forever, separate from this; below the sun, among the lapping waves, encompassed in the cooing whalesong-voice of the Chilean.”)
I don’t know what to make of this, but I’m going back tomorrow. There are still a lot of pages left, and it only gets harder to read as both the condition of the pages continue to deteriorate.
Again, I haven’t found any record of a ship called The Ebony. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything as plenty of documents from that period are incomplete, but it bothers me more than I’d like to admit.
I’ll transcribe more when I can. Right now I’m not sure I want to keep reading this alone, but I don’t know anywhere else other than here to post it.
Part 2
I was able to spend a few hours this afternoon transcribing some more. I think I should be able to finish in another week or so. I’ve also started digging into shipping logs from the time from several of the biggest ports from Buenos Aires at the time to see if I can find anything about a ship called “The Ebony”. I’ve been unsuccessful thus far, but I’ll make sure to keep everyone updated on anything I find. Another note I thought I should make is that the handwriting is getting more and more erratic as I work my way through this diary. It almost looks frantic, as if the author was writing as fast as possible. Here’s what I was able to transcribe today.
July 18th
^(“The remaining Feuguens have succumbed to the cold, bar one man by the name of Key-huk. I believe him to be about my age, no older than 25. He remains sickly and near death. This leaves fourty-odd men left on the Ebony. Coal is running dangerously low. The cold has grown progressively worse by the day, and I suspect we are floating further south. Antonio fancies himself as a sort of amateur geographer, and believes if we are indeed continuing south we will inevitably strike Terra Australis, a continent speculated by cartographers to exist in the far south.")
^("Order is breaking down fast. The men have grown increasingly superstitious, and much time is spent huddled below decks praying and whispering in all manner of tongues. Illness is spreading quickly, with the 6 sickest men at any given time being allowed to stay in the kitchen near the stove.”)
^(“The captain paces the deck frequently, muttering to himself, but has given up any sense of control over the men or the situation. There is nothing to be done, other than having rotating crews of men on the crows nest and the deck to watch for land as we continue to drift. As the Captain has grown obviously hopeless, the work of assigning men to patrol the deck and perform regular maintenance has been picked up by one of the first mates, Johann, a 45 year old man who has somehow been able to keep a good humour and a semblance of a positive attitude despite the situation. The wind is near constant, but ebbs and flows in strength. Fog comes and goes intermittently.”)
^(“While patrolling the deck earlier, Antonio and I spotted more green flame far in the distance. We chose to hold our tongues, for fear of making the paranoia worse among the men or worse yet, for fear of the Captain ordering more people to assess it, a declaration that likely would have resulted in mutiny. Worse yet, I could have sworn I saw the outlines of figures crowded around that distant green glow, tall and far outlines drifting lazily on the ice floe like some upright, malformed walruses. All sense of day and night have been lost as the sky maintains its steely gray, as if the heavens themselves hold the vast quantities of iron that have been interfering with our compasses. An old Black man, a sailor named Ezekiel, has been spending much of his time staring at the erratically rotating needle of the compass, following its movement with his wild, aged eyes.”)
July 20th
^(“What was once fairly small ice floes has grown into larger and more frequent packs of ice that jut up against the Ebony and crowd around it. Men have been dispatched to break it up with oars and large sticks, for fear of the ice completely impeding our movement. Our only hope at this point is to somehow come across an island or another ship, but I cannot help but think that no man has been or ever will be in this place we have come to find ourselves.”)
July 21st
^(“We seem to have come across a vast bay, as the ocean has finally brought us to Terra Australis. The ocean flows into a massive rivermouth at the edge of this great white continent, bordered by sheets of ice at least 4 yards tall.”)
^(“The ice is a pale shade of blue, the only color mother nature has seen fit to gift our eyes as respite against the constant, cold, grey. The wind and flow of the sea are pushing us towards the continent. Johann ordered the anchor dropped, as this confirms we have been moving south, further away from any civilization or chance of survival. While the coal rations are in a worse state than the food, I estimate we have perhaps 6 weeks worth of food rations left, generously assuming more people do not succumb to illness and cold by that time.")
*^("The Ebony sits about a quarter league from the rivermouth. While we still have not seen any signs of animal life in months, I cannot help but picture some great albatross soaring above us. Perhaps it would notice our ship, a brown spec on the gray and blue landscape, or perhaps it would only see the vast ice walls that God has seen fit to bring us too)*^(.) ^(Strange noises have been echoing from deep in the river mouth that Antonio suspects is ice shifting.”)
Editors note- a page has been torn out here, with only a small bit of the bottom left hand side remaining. The words I am able to make out on the first side are:
^(“The green light has”)
^(“Ezekeil was in a state of”)
And on the other side:
^(“The anchor was quickly”)
^(“Careening downwards”)
July 26th or 20
^(“We are without a doubt the first men to ever be on this river. The mast is broken in half at the midpoint, and we are without the supplies to even rudimentarily repair it at this point. The river is wider than any I have seen, and some of more experienced sailors have said it rivals that of the mighty Amazon. There is little to do, and much time is spent on deck, gazing at the hellish pale blue slopes surrounding us as we move gently southwards. The water is calm, and there is little wind, but we continue drifting.”)
^(“I found myself growing nauseous the longer I looked upon the ice, and I spent much of the day in my kitchen that now doubles as an infirmary. Johann is in good spirits, but the wound in his side appears to have grown infected and he is clearly in much pain.”)
^(“Ezekiel is locked in a storage container below deck, and much discussion has been had about what to do with him. Although no consensus has been reached yet, I and many others are of the opinion that he should be thrown overboard. This state of affairs and godforsaken landscape are enough to make us all susceptible to madness, and the awful wailing that comes from his room is only worsening the already abysmally low morale on board. Although he was clearly mad, no one had any hope of him being sentenced for his crimes in any court, and his presence only saps our already dwindling sanity and reserves.")
^("I spent some time today attempting to converse with the Fueguen. His language is completely unknown to us, but we have been able to teach one another some basic words in each other's tongues. If any of us are to survive, I hope it shall be him, although his fever refuses to break. He is the only innocent in all of this.”)
June 301
^(“Ezekiel was killed in the night with a sharpened wooden stick. Johann is unhappy, and ordered an investigation but no one else is particularly concerned. The Captain has not left his room in some time, and I still have yet to see the Chilean leave the room. I have asked some of the other men about him, and there seems to be some debate around whether or not he truly exists. I had only told Antonio and an old Spaniard on board by the name of Sarmiento about those discussions I heard late into the night, but when I brought up the man to the rest of the party, many did not believe that anyone was in the Captains room with him.”)
^(“A few others testified to hearing strange noises at night coming from that room, and a few others agreed to seeing the man I described when we had first boarded, but the others seemed to think us mad. It was Sarmiento who had told me the man was from Chile. I had asked about him early into the journey, and Sarmiento told me of a brief discussion he had held with the Captain prior to our boarding. When Sarmiento asked about who the man he had seen go below decks was, all the Captain said was that he was an old salt, a Chilean who had much experience in this part of the world. Some of the Irishmen believed me to be trying to trick them and grew quite angry.”)
^(“I somehow had not thought of this before now, but I am not sure what he eats. While everyone else crows around the mess hall, he remains in the Captain’s hold, never emerging to my knowledge. If not for that voice I hear most nights and other occasional sounds, I would not be confident he existed at all. Perhaps he wanders the deck while the rest of us slumber, morbidly carrying out some unknown duty like the nightwatchmen of some forgotten graveyard. Perhaps he sneaks into the kitchen at night, my kitchen, and helps himself to some scraps I have not noticed to be missing. I don’t think I will talk about him again.”)
July
^(“I spent much of the day today helping the sick. They have not lost much appetite, begging me for more and more food in their feverish states. I salt meat, I ration it, I sharpen knives, I care for the sick, and I try to spend little time committing myself to the useless endeavor of wondering where we are or if we have any hope of survival.”)
^(“While fishing in an attempt to alleviate our hunger, an old Russian netted a hand. The hand was rotted and waterlogged, appearing human but with strange tissue between the fingers. It was severed at the wrist rather violently, with shreds of skin hanging around the sides and the bone broken in half. Antonio speculated it was a sharkbite. Its size indicated it belonged to a man, but the strange tissue and something about the texture of the thing caused me to remember the fins of the whale.”)
^(“The hand was thrown overboard. There were hushed discussions about attempting to cook whatever flesh could be wrought off of the thing, but it was too far rotted. Besides, I am not yet sure that we are at a point where most of us could bring ourselves to eat the flesh of a man, if it was indeed from a man. I can’t help but think of those figures on the ice floe. From afar I could tell that they too held the shape of men, but like the strange bits of extra flesh on the hand, something about them was not entirely human. I don’t want to die here, on this grey river, surrounded by ice. I watched the hand sink into the water, and I wondered that if my flesh were to similarly sink below those waves, would I be changed? Would something below these too-calm waters rip my bone and flesh? Would I scream from atop ice floes, drifting among the green light, as more flesh grew between my fingers and I became something other than a man?”)
July
^(“Last night, I dreamt of faces in the ice. I saw the dead Fuegians, the Laplander, the Porteños, the two Frenchmen, and Ezekiel, their faces magnified by a hundred times, surrounding us on all sides, gagging on their own blood and vomiting up tentacles, Ezekiel's eyes spinning wildly as the grey river was marred with red splotches of viscera.”)
^(“The dream is fractured as some distant memory, but I remember the sound of the wind, and screams above it, nearly deafening. All of us were on deck, screaming and pleading for the noise to end, and I saw the wind take the Captain into the air. He hovered above us, his limbs stretched in all directions as if he was being pulled apart by spectral horses, until finally with a sickening squelch and a scream somehow audible above the wind he became many pieces and his innards rained down on the ship.”)
^(“In the dream, I closed my eyes and suddenly the noise stopped. I opened them to find myself on an ice floe in the vast open ocean, the immediate horror instilled in me by the violence and those gargantuan ice walls replaced by a more muted fear of utter alienation.”)
^(“I turned and saw him. He was facing away from me just as I remember seeing him for that brief moment entering the hold of the Ebony, his dark hair down past his shoulders and moving slowly as the wind picked up, dressed in leather boots and pitch black overcoat, towering over my kneeling body as he faced towards the open ocean, his body tall and thin, he was whispering, singing, chanting, his form and words alien and unknowable as the river itself, terrifying in its power, he was the river, he was vast, mighty, all powerful and god help me I could see the shape of gills on his neck between the movements of that oily hair, slick and putrid as if covered in seal fat.”)
^(“I awoke screaming and before I knew what was happening or if I was even awake I was beating the wall that separates me from the Captains quarters and the Chilean until my fists were bloody. Antonio and several other men had to restrain me, and they seemed ready to put me into Ezekiel's former holding cell until I finally calmed and they believed I was sane. What meat we have left is quickly rotting. I pray we find more food soon.”)
I’m going home next week, but I think I’ll be able to get the rest transcribed and posted before I do. I tried to take pictures so that I could transcribe it at home, but the ink is in such bad condition that I can’t really make out the text in the pictures. I still don’t know what to do with this, so I guess for the time being I’ll just keep posting the transcriptions on here. Maybe this text is just getting to me but I'm getting more and more creeped out the longer I'm down in that basement. I'm ready to go home soon. I’ll make sure to update with more in a few days.
Part 3
I’m getting close to done here. The condition of this notebook is rapidly deteriorating, this thing is in really rough shape. I’ve found myself getting pretty sick lately too. I spent most of last night vomiting, and I’ve got a bad headache. I’ve been hardly sleeping too. I just can’t stop thinking about this document. The last time I felt like this was when I took a cruise with my parents when I was younger and I got really seasick. Here is what I’ve got from today, the next update will likely be my last.
July
^(“Two more have died of sickness and Johann is in bad shape. We continue to move down the river, with no way of stopping ourselves without the anchor. The Frenchmen were smart to give their lives in their attempt to save the anchor to prevent us from moving down this river. While I have been certain for some time now we are no longer on this earth, I would rather have died in that vast grey than among the towering blue ice. Vast mountains jut out to what I believe to be the west, the east appears flatter. While I had very little desire to talk to them in the initial weeks of this voyage, I spent some time conversing with the group of four Asians.”)
^(“They have a small jade idol they worship, a fat, bald man called the Buddha. In their broken Spanish, they told me of their strange religious beliefs, a religion originating from millennia before our savior was born and died on the cross. They believe that upon dying, we are reincarnated into different life forms. A man can become a bird, a fish, a tiger, a god. Their beliefs brought me no comfort, and I left in disgust. They keep to themselves for a reason. I have found myself thinking of that hand. If God truly does not know of this backwards land, as I suspect we lie outside of his influence, perhaps some older barbarian religions such as theirs still retain some influence.”)
^(“Maybe hundreds or thousands of years past, some barbarian from the Eastern continent or the isles of the Pacific found himself near here. Perhaps he drowned, in a storm or some other disaster, and his body went below the waves. In the belief of his god and his backwards religion, maybe this man was being reincarnated into some creature of the sea. I can see him, sinking slowly, long dead, slowly turning, as gills form on his neck, his legs morph slowly into one, webbing connects his fingers. But something stops this transformation. Perhaps he went too far down, or simply drifted too far south, but his religion was stopped by whatever holds power here. He was devoured by things that lay below this ice, strange creatures never documented by man that are outside of the influence of any eastern or Abrahamic religion. His half-transformed hand, the only testimony to the sorry process, was netted by some old Russian without even the slightest ability to comprehend what he was seeing. To think we had considered eating it. By God, my hunger penetrates so deep.”)
July
^(“What I would give to see life. I don’t believe anyone around me is alive. Their faces all blend together at this point, the foreign tongues that infest this ship blend into a hideous alien language that sounds like the screams of the wind, the moans of the dead. There is no life in this river, it is so sickeningly unnatural that it permits none of His creations to swim within it nor walk on its frozen walls or even to fly above it.”)
Later
^(“Only an hour or so after writing my last entry I found myself proven wrong. While attempting to move some ice that was jutting against the port, a Basque was blown overboard by a sudden gust of wind. We rushed to the side of the ship to see him facedown in the water, blood pooling up around him. He had struck his head badly in the fall. His body rolled over and I felt for a moment that he was me yet I was the ice towering above him. His eyes were like the whale. He didn’t move, bobbing up and down in the water as the Ebony slipped past him. In that moment I saw life. We have moved further downriver, away from his corpse and the life that it represents. By god what I would give to see more life.")
August
^(“Men are dropping like flies. We have found ourselves hunkered in the kitchen and the warmth of the oven and men's feverish bodies. We are all sick now. Johanna screams often, begging for someone to kill him. I would throw him overboard myself if I could manage. The smell coming from his wound disgusts me. The Captain has gone completely insane. He stands leering over Johanna now, rocking back and forth his skin almost green. He is drooling, his eyes like Ezekiel’s.”)
^(“I think I was wrong about the Fuegian. Maybe he was innocent once, but innocence is no longer possible, not in this place. Twenty odd men crowd around the dying oven in our own filth, groaning, crying, praying in foreign languages that sicken me to hear. Someone is missing. In the depth of my fever I think I asked the Captain where the Chilean was, if he was sick too. He just stared at me dumbly, taking monstrous gulps from his flask and staggering around the room stepping on groaning bodies. If this is where I am to die, in this pit of bodies, I want to see life one more time.”)
August
^(“Utilizing a small pillow, I brought the Fuegian to life.)
^(All is backwards now.”)
December
^(“It is warm now so it must be summer. The men dropped like flies but now I am above them. I miss all those prayers in foreign tongues. For a moment towards the end, I could understand them all perfectly. When all is backwards, everyone is one. They all want the same. When there were 20 of us in that room, we were one, and even as different people came and went between cold and warm and life and death we all kept each other aground. When I crawled up those stairs onto the deck, I saved us all.”)
^(“I am filthy”)
(Editors note- this was scrawled across an entire page in something other than ink)
1915
^(“I have been thinking today about angels. The sky continues, gray and sickly, and the ice continues to offer its pale blue. Maybe the water is the heavens, and to swim in water one does not use wings but fins. I am not sure how much time has passed since I have been on the deck. I think everyone else is dead now, and while I am badly weakened, I have been slowly recovering. In my time lying alone, I have noticed something. We are not going straight down this river, but at a continual angle, a sort of spiral. The Mountains are to the other side of me now. What river spirals? What lands could God know of that look like this? What lies below the ice? Is there any other life out here? He continued alive dead people”)
^(“Snow and ice”)
(Literally; Continuó vida muerte gente
Next page- Hielo y nivel)
^(“The waters flow faster here.")
1915
^(“I was wrong. There is movement below deck.”)
Part 4
This will be the second to last update, unless I find some document proving that this ship was real. I have finished transcribing. I don’t think I want to tell anyone about this book. I’m considering destroying it. There is no way to steal it, as they check my bag before I leave. I would almost certainly have my career ruined if someone found me tearing this book apart or lighting it on fire in this cold basement.
I truly hope something is lost in the process of translation and that what I have been experiencing does not happen to anyone reading what I have published. I have been having vivid nightmares, and I feel myself growing obsessed with this book, with this river. I have yet to find any evidence of the Ebony or any of the described passengers ever existing. But I am almost confident it is. While in the cold basement of the archive, among walls of shelves and cold grey walls, I keep finding my reading interrupted by strange noises I am never quite sure I really heard.
Maybe I haven’t been sleeping enough. But I am almost certain that at some distance, between the rows and rows of shelves, some deep voice is muttering. Once, I thought for a second I saw someone passing between the rows, some dark figure wearing black and dragging a small bundle of rope. Since I’ve gotten this far, I’ve decided to post the end of the book here, but I figure I should warn you that this has genuinely deeply disturbed me. I don’t know if I want to spend my life like this anymore, spending days among forgotten documents that could contain stories like this. A lot of the end of this book was badly damaged, but I tried my best to write down its contents.
August
^(“I have recovered all but completely from this sickness, but there is a bad gash in my leg. I am not sure what I was thinking as I wrote some of those earlier passages, I have little memory of the past several weeks. I do know however, that I was wrong about it being summer. The cold continues to penetrate my body now that the fever has passed, but I do not wish to go below deck. I don’t want to see those bodies in the kitchen. I don’t want to see the body of the Fuegian, for fear of knowing if it was suffocation or sickness that caused his death. Most of all, I have no desire to confirm what I already know, that the strange sounds of heavy objects moving, of mumbled indecipherable words and knots fastening, is coming from the Captain’s hold. While we rotted and cried and sat in our filth and fever in that kitchen, someone had worked above deck. The ropes contain strange knots, circling the ship like the web of some spider gone mad, and the nets have been thrown overboard.”)
August
^("I had hoped that it was some sick mirage, but the river has come to an end. Nothing I am seeing makes any sense. The Ebony is circling a small, frozen island. At least a half-dozen other rivers flow from varied points into a large pool, where the waters flow in a circular fashion around this island. At the center of this island, composed entirely from pure blue ice, is a castle. It is unlike anything I have ever seen. I remember stories my Grandmother had told me about the old country, where ruins of castles and old fortresses could be found deep in the countryside. Men had died in battles fought over centuries to control these sites, but now they sit forgotten, decayed and fallen apart. This castle does not look European, and I wonder if perhaps some old culture from the Asian continent had forged it in explorations centuries past. I suspect this is my mind attempting anything to hold onto sanity, as I am almost confident it is not European in origin.”)
^(“The castle does not look carved. It simply looks as if it always was here, as natural a part of the environment as the walls of ice. The ice composing the castle is strangely textured, with odd circular lines dotting the exterior. My eyes start to hurt if I look at it for too long, as if I was looking at snow made blinding by the sun, and it is difficult to determine its exact dimensions. There is still no wind, but we continue circling, the current spiraling us quickly around this godforsaken yet somehow predetermined destination as I grow nauseous and dizzy.”)
Some thoughts on whales.
^(“As we circle this strange place, I am writing down some final thoughts I have been considering. If I do not return, I hope someone, somehow, can read and understand these ideas.”)
^(“I think much of the look in the eye of that whale, and I have developed a theory. Despite coming from a poor family, I have always been passionate about the sciences, and not long before coming here I had read speculations by some Englishman about the process of evolution. I wonder if perhaps Angels, residing on Earth for ages, had gone through this process themselves.”)
^(“If Angels breed, perhaps their form slowly transformed, from something unknowable and incomprehensible into something that inhabits the sea. I imagine that after witnessing generations of war and violence, these Angels, or at least some of them, could have grown disgusted with man and chose to live among the fish instead. Over time, they could have evolved into what we today know as the whale.”)
^(“Their hands transform from being like those of a man into the fins of the whale, their wings press back against the body and grow into gargantuan form, but the eyes remain largely the same.”)
^(“I understand that for my role in the commercialized slaughter of those holy creations, I deserve death. Perhaps I deserve eternal damnation. My only plea, my only hope, is that I die away from this place, in oceans not dead and frozen but one sailed by man and patrolled by Angels. Perhaps I would transform and be reincarnated. Perhaps I would go to the heavens, or to hell. Perhaps I would simply rot.”)
^(“Here, I fear that none of these processes can occur. With no way to sail, I know that there is no way to get out of the current that forces me to circle this island. My only hope is that God was the one who brought me here, and that there is something in this strange castle that can let me leave this place. I am almost certain that this is untrue, but if there is any chance of salvation, it lies in that glittering abomination.")
^("The water is hungry as the men once were in their sickness. Perhaps this entire land, the ice, the water itself and whatever lies beneath it, is sick as well.”)
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