Status Updates From The Ghost Pirates and Other...

“By the Lee”

A prose poem of flash fiction where sailors desperately try to sail their ship through a storm but are unsuccessful. It’s not bad, it’s just very short and more about the mood of desperation and Hodgson’s relationship with the ocean, how it relates to the human struggle in that people can fight for their lives but then be swallowed by the ocean with barely a trace.

“The Sharks of the St. Elmo”

In an absurdly morbid situation, a steamer breaks down and at the same time it’s surrounded by a literal sea of sharks, writhing like a pit of snakes. This twigs the bo’sun and the second mate in that something is up—they have something that the sharks want. The captain and the officer are smuggling something, but what is it?

“The Heaving of the Log”

This is a semi-humorous anecdote with a grim twist. It features an abusive officer and apprentices who get back at him with a practical joke, except the prank results in the breaking of the man’s neck. Manslaughter!! The story doesn’t play out the rest of the drama, but I assume that everyone on deck will claim it to be an accident, just as was intended had the victim survived.

“The Riven Night”

Sailors come across a place where the spirit world intersects with ours. Some ghosts accuse their murderers; some are just content to reconnect with their loved ones; and some relationships are shorn so recently that the living are compelled to join the dead. There’s something else, too, on the borderland, something with an undefined but malefic intent.

“The Habitants of Middle Islet”

Hodgson wrote a story where his protagonist follows his buddy, who commandeers a ship in a fugue to find his sweetheart. This starts out feeling similarly, but the stories diverge, with this turning into a badass horror story. What was on the boat? Did Trehorn’s fiance turn into a Lamia or something? Or a siren? Or what???

“The Wild Man of the Sea”

This is a grim tragedy where a Natural seaman is resented for his purity, prowess, and poetic nature, and the course of the ship comes to blame him as a Jonah (a passenger who brings bad luck) while at the same time he foments an inspirational relationship with one of the cabin boys who can feel him but not really understand or articulate their camaraderie.

“Demons of the Sea”

A vignette worthy of Glen Carrig. A boat passes through a part of the ocean that appears to be on its way to boiling. They see some weird things, here, but the only bit for sure are some human-seal-monsters that have recently massacred a boat from Glasgow, and only barely manage to escape a similar fate by the mercy of the ocean breeze.

“Old Golly”

A murderous Captain gets his comeuppance after murdering a sailor of African descent. Was it a ghost, or was it just superstition??? Hodgson gives a ridiculous half-explanation for one of the haunting’s symptoms, the rest I suppose being a Biercian fear-causing-death through clumsiness, but there is enough unexplained to believe that Old Golly got his revenge.

“In the Danger Zone”

Another WWI story except this has more of a proper fight against the submarine as the merchant vessel has been toting some sort of gun, clandestinely, presumably for this purpose; Hodgson was an advocate for mariners being armed because not being so put them at the mercy of pirates, and this story is basically pirates in a submarine.

“A Fight With a Submarine”

Like one of his last two smuggler stories, this story features a boat that’s taken advantage of by a German submarine. It’s a little too bonny or cavalier considering all of the death, but the tone of his last Smuggler story was pretty off, too. The MC gets several over on the Germans but isn’t as inhumanly fortunate as his smuggler character.

“Jack Grey, Second Mate”

This combines the valiant characters under siege on a boat with a romance between the chivalrous second mate and a woman passenger who is being pursued by a scoundrel. There’s a lot about Jack Grey that reminds me of Howard’s protagonists, though without the preponderance of describing how animalistically he moves. A lot of action in this piece.

“The Real Thing: ‘S.O.S.’”

This is a lovely melodrama steeped in poetic imagery as Hodgson narrates in present tense a steamer dashing to the rescue of a cruise liner that is on fire. The only thing that I couldn’t help laughing at is the desperate disclosure of how inadequate the liner’s lifeboats are for their situation. Like, it’s true, but the delivery is so humorously and informationally dramatic.

“The Haunted Pampero”

Hodgson hedges his bets more for his protag’s sanity, here. A dude gets his first boat but it has a reputation of being haunted, so his wife demands to come along with him. Her sensitivity saves the lives of the entire crew as she puts them on to the sea-ghoul, though it takes until the end for everyone to figure out that their rescued man is the thing that’s been terrorizing them.

“We Two and Bully Duncan”

Our hero and his best bud get one over on another pair of abusive officers, both kicking the shit out of them AND stealing their ill-gotten gold. The gold plot leaves a lot of elements to chance, but hey, they’re the heroes, and so they weather the beatings and come across as clever men who best the boorish malcontents.

“The Mystery of Missing Ships”

I’m not so used to Hodgson’s steamer stories but this is one of them, a beaut that contains an improvised cannon, modern piracy with the steamer under siege, and some fine shooting, all in service to shedding a light on the mistaken belief that the seas were civilized. This is a pretty good action piece, way better than the one posthumous smuggler story in the first volume.

“The Regeneration of Captain Bully Keller”

Hodgson digs into his brawling experience for a semi-humorous story where a converted ex-prize fighter tries to win the soul of the man who beat his son nearly half to death… and then it delivers with a long and fascinatingly detailed and choreographed fight between the two men. I wonder if this is anything like Robert E. Howard’s brawler stories?

“The Stone Ship”

A very creepy and seemingly unnatural story that ends up with a bizarre but scientific explanation. Idk, I could go either way with this one. The ship is a fossilized vessel that was brought to the surface by a “Call of Cthulhu”-style upwelling of the sea floor, bringing up giant, lethal centipedes and exploding eels and stuff. A supernatural ending would have been cool, too.

“The Island of the Crossbones”

This is about an old pirate who commandeers his vessel in order to find his old pirate island, but it’s played as a pretty straightforward maybe-murder-mystery until we find out that the old pirate has never intended to kill anyone, merely hijack the boat and—after a conflict—ensure that the captain finds some recompense. A tidy little tale.

“The Derelict”

A ship is somehow processed into a bizarre, fleshy organism that traps and eats… anything, but for the purpose of this particular story it’s people. I wasn’t exactly sure where this story was going to go but when it became some sort of solid-state amoeba that swallowed one of the sailors during the action it turned into an awesome sea-oriented horror story.

“On the Bridge”

This is an emotional plea in the wake of the wreck of the Titanic that means to communicate just how stressful it was to be in the position of sighting icebergs while on a recreational ocean liner, from the POV of the guy who is on watch, sees the iceberg, and makes the right command, and still has to take the wheel himself because the quartermaster turns it THE WRONG WAY.

“The ‘Prentices’ Mutiny”

Nothing supernatural, here, but the way in which the ‘prentices are holed up against three of the senior officers and under siege echoes a lot of Hodgson’s nautical weird fiction. The brutal officers remind me of the not-quite-ghost story in the second volume, of the stowaway who had been rendered insane through the relentless hazing perpetrated by the officers.

“The Albatross”

This story is vaguely similar to “The Mystery of the Derelict” except the emotional story is a woman, lost at sea, desperately sending out a message by way of an albatross. And, it’s not set in the Sargasso. In this case, in a similar story beat as Glen Carrig, the man who establishes the daring rescue achieves the lady’s hand in marriage.

“Out of the Storm”

The only problem I have with this piece is how verbose the Morse code message is. Other than that, this is a dying communication from a man who is witnessing nature at its absolute worst, driving people to fruitless, amoral acts for their own survival. It’s a short but brutal story with the Storm and sea described in terms typically reserved for Eldritch horrors.

“The Shamraken Homeward-Bounder”

This feels more like wish-fulfillment on Hodgson’s part. It’s a story about a bunch of old sailors, the youngest of whom is 55, who sit around and reminisce and then think that they are sailing toward the gates of heaven, hearing the voices of their loved ones, when it’s actually an electrical storm that precedes an intense cyclone that presumably kills them all.

“The Voice in the Night”

A++. Dudes out fishing are hailed by a mysterious voice who talks very weirdly and does not want to be seen in the light. There seems to be something sinister afoot, but the presence in the dark has a very good reason for not wanting to come aboard the ship. If you’ve read A Series of Unfortunate Events through then you should give this one a try.

“A Tropical Horror”

After reading the more or less normal but eerie stories of giant octopi and squids of the Sargasso Sea, this tale about something like a mammoth sea serpent is refreshing. The thing pretty much owns the ship and methodically eats the helpless crew alive, one by one, until the MC hacks part of its enormous tongue off. It’s first-person present tense, which adds some immediacy.

“The Silent Ship”

This story is both an alternative ending and its own sort of account of the finale of The Ghost Pirates. The primary difference is that Jessop does not survive and instead falls prey to the same sort of listless death that consumed…Jacobs?…in the story, rather than be able to give his own account of the doom that followed the crew.

“The Ghost Pirates”

Idk. I like the ending. The way that Jessop tells the story, you almost believe in his sci-fi, parallel dimension explanation of what’s going on. This doesn’t entirely square away with the end, though. It feels like the ship took a portal to some sort of afterlife where they’re beset upon by the spirits of drowned sailors, specifically pirates.

The ship is now sort of flirting between the dimensions, like it’s become ethereal itself, and it appears to be visible to the outside world but incapable of seeing others most of the time based on the “mist”, a shimmering veil like King’s thinnies from The Dark Tower. There is sort of a proto-Philadelphia Experiment feel about the whole thing, except with an otherworldly element.