By Ed Staskus

   Kieran Foyle, Jr. was 21 years old the day the Marco Polo was run aground by its captain at Cavendish. She was a three-deck three-mast clipper ship built at Marsh Creek in Saint John, New Brunswick 32 years earlier. During its construction the frame got loose in a storm and was blown all over the shipyard. The skeleton had to be reassembled. After the shipbuilding was done the launch didn’t go well. The ship grazed the bank of the creek while sliding down the slipway, got stuck in a mudflat, and went over on her side. A week later a high tide lifted her up, but she got stuck in the mud again. Two weeks later she finally floated free and was fitted with rigging.

   The ship carried emigrant men and women from England to Australia for many years. She set the world’s record for the fastest voyage from Liverpool to Melbourne, doing it in 76 days. More than fifty children died of measles on her maiden voyage and were buried at sea. Coming back, she carried a king’s ransom in gold dust and a 340-ounce gold nugget. The nugget was a gift to Queen Victoria from the colonial government, although she wasn’t able to pull rank and keep it under her mattress. Gliding into its home port, the ship unfurled a banner claiming it was the “Fastest Ship in the World.” Cannons boomed black powder discharges on her arrival.

   The gold dust and the big nugget were delivered to London by a fast coach guarded by a company of the King’s Men. There wasn’t going to be any Great Coach Robbery. They unloaded it at the Bank of England. One man after another carried the loot inside and stashed it in the vault. When they were done they locked it up tight and posted a sign saying, “Keep Out.”

   During the many gold rushes Down Under the ship carried boatloads of standing room only men to Australia. Nobody died of measles, although some of them died of moonshine. Fire is the test of gold. Many of the men died of typhus, what they called ship fever, burning up in their hammocks in the South Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, and Tasman Sea. Many of the original settlers laying claim to aboriginal land, the oldest, flattest, and driest inhabited continent with the least fertile soil anywhere, got there on the Marco Polo. 

   When she was retired from the passenger trade, she was refitted for the coal, timber, and bat shit trade. It was rough going. The hull was rotting and wasting away. Chains were wrapped around it and drawn tight trying to keep it together. A windmill-driven pump was installed to send leaks back where they were coming from.

   It was a late July morning, clear and sunny after the storm that had driven the ship to Cavendish. Kieran Jr. was in the dunes watching the crew wade ashore. They had been on the way from Montreal to England loaded with pine planks when they got caught in a gale. They plowed ahead but started to take on water. Two days later wind and waves were still pummeling them and they were still taking on water. The ship was flooding and the hands couldn’t plug the leaks fast enough. The windmill fell over and the pumps gave a last gasp. Captain P. A. Bull decided to save the crew and cargo. He put the clipper into full sail and wheeled it straight at Cavendish’s sandy beaches.

   The closer they got the better their chances looked until, three hundred feet from shore, he ordered the rigging cut. The masts groaned ,wanting to snap, and the bottom of the ship scraped the bottom. Everybody stayed where they were, staying awake all night, until dawn when the storm finally wore itself out and they rowed ashore. 

      Lucy Maud Montgomery was a pale 8-year-old girl, her long crimson hair in braids with choppy bangs, when she and everybody else in Cavendish watched the crew abandon the ship. She wore a white flower hairpiece on one side of her head and took notes on scraps of paper. Nine years later her short story “The Wreck of the Marco Polo” was published. 

   She wrote, “The crew, consisting of 25 men, found boarding places among the settlement and contrived to keep the neighborhood in perpetual uproar They were lively times for Cavendish The crew consisted of Norwegians, Swedes, Spaniards, Germans, and one Tahitian.” They were tough men. It was the beginning of the Tahitian’s second sea voyage. He was barely half-tough but looked more red-blooded than he was. He was speckled with tattoos and wore his hair in long braids tied up at their ends with small fishhooks.

   Kieran Jr. was hired by the salvage company stripping the ship. It was welcome work coming before harvest time. As soon as they started on the grounded vessel, another storm rolled in. Kieran Jr. was on the ship and had to stay where he was. Trying for the shore was too dangerous. They battened whatever hatches were still left and spent the night being battered. Captain Macleod and a rescue party from French River showed up the next morning. The wind beat him back the first time he tried to reach the Marco Polo, but he made it the second time, saving all the men except one. He and his crew got gold watches for their efforts. Kieran Jr. went home wet as a wet dog.

   He didn’t go home empty-handed, though. There were twin figureheads of Marco Polo adorning the ship. A man from Long River hauled one of them away and hung it in his barn. Kieran Jr. hauled the other one away and hung it in his barn. It was the end of the road for the many parts of the far-ranging ship.

   He was back on the ship two days later as the salvage work went apace. He was taking a break on the poop deck, leaning against a gunwale above the captain’s cabin, when a young dark-skinned man joined him.

   “I am Teva the Tahitian,” he said. “We are dead in the water.”

   “I am Kieran the Foyle,” Kieran Jr. said. “We are alive on the shore of the water.”

   Teva was the only one of the crew who signed on to help salvage the ship. The rest of them stayed in Cavendish drinking and chasing farmgirls. The Tahitian and the Irishman worked together for the rest of the week and into August. Teva told Kieran Jr. he was putting his purse together to get to Maine and sign on as a whaler.

   “My grandfather Queequeg was a harpooner,” he said. “He was the best in the world. You could spit on the water, and he could split your floating spit from the deck with one throw. He shaved with his harpoon and smoked from a tomahawk. He was a cannibal, but his favorite food was clam chowder.”

   “He was a cannibal?” Kieran Jr. asked, taken aback. 

   “Him, not me,” Teva said. “I don’t eat my own kind. I never met him, but my father told me about him before he went whaling. He never came back, either.”

   “They both went to sea and never came back?”

   “Both, never. A friend of my grandfather’s stopped on our island when I was a boy and told us about what happened to him. The man who stopped was a white man. His name was Ishmael. He and grandfather sailed and slept together.”

   “Slept together?”

   “In the morning his arm was thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner,” is what Ishmael said. “You had almost thought I had been his wife. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian, I always say.”

   Teva asked Ishmael what his grandfather had been like.

   “There was no hair on his head, nothing but a small scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead, large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold. He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had a creditor. His bald purplish head looked for all the world like a mildewed skull. His body was checkered with tattoo squares. He seemed to have been in a war and just escaped from it with a sticking-plaster shirt. Still more, his legs were marked, as if dark green frogs were running up the trunks of young palms.”

   Teva lapped up water with his hands from a barrel, gulped, and spat on the deck.

   “Grandfather saved Ishmael’s life when their ship was head-butted by a white whale they were hunting. The coffin they had built for him when he was dying during the hunt was thrown overboard and Ishmael hung on to it like a buoy. He was the only sailor who survived when Captain Ahab, the crew, my grandfather, and the Pequod all sank to the bottom.”

   “I must ask, since your father and grandfather both went whaling and never came back, why are you going the south way to take up whaling?” Kieran Jr. asked.

   “It’s in my blood,” Teva said. 

   Every day when the day was fair and the sun shining, families picnicked on the beach at Cavendish, watching launches with two-masted ketch rigs go back and forth, taking what they could to Alexander MacNeill’s for auction. It was a Sunday when Sinbad the Sailor walked up to Kieran Jr., looked him up and down, and meowed. “They say our boat had no rats the whole last year,” Teva said. “This cat drove them off and those who thought they could stand up to him, they disappeared.” Teva tossed a piece of salt pork at Sinbad, who snagged it midair and gulped it down.

   Sinbad was a two-tone Norwegian Forest cat. “One of the Vikings brought him aboard,” Teva said. He was a twenty-pound bruiser with long legs and a bushy tail. His coat was a thick and glossy with a water-repellent top layer and a woolly undercoat. It was thickest at the legs, chest, and head. His ears were large, tufted, wide at the base, and high set.

   “He’s a good climber, very strong,” Teva said. “He can climb rocks and cliffs.” When he leaned on Kieran Jr. and reached up while stretching, flexing his front legs, his claws extended themselves slightly. They were sharp as razors. Kieran Jr. rubbed Sinbad’s head. 

   “He’s big enough to be a man-eater,” he said. “What’s going to happen to him when our work is finished?”

   “I don’t know,” Teva said. “The Viking left him behind.”

   That evening, when Kieran Jr. was walking back to the rude shelter he had thrown up for himself behind the dunes, Sinbad followed him. He put a bowl of fresh water out for the cat but left breakfast, lunch, and dinner up to him. He was sure Sinbad was not going to starve. The cat was a vole, shrew, deer mouse, snowshoe hare, and red-bellied snake widow maker. Even racoons, foxes ,and coyotes gave him a wide berth.

   Sinbad went back and forth to the ship with Kieran Jr. the rest of the month and the next month while the vessel fell apart piece by piece until a thunderstorm barreled up from the United States and finally finished it. The ship broke up along the coast, going down to the bottom of the sea. It was the end of the Marco Polo. 

   When Kieran Jr. packed up his bedroll and shelter and walked home, Sinbad walked beside him the five miles back to Foyle’s Cove. Kuloo watched them from on high. He sized the cat up. The cat was like him in many ways. Biddy and Kate were shucking oysters on the porch overlooking the cove, a pot at their feet. The oysters were from Malpeque Bay. Hundreds of boats big and small were in the fishery there and at St. Peter’s Bay. Until the 1830s oysters were plentiful but few people ate them. They were often spread over land as fertilizer. The shells were burned, too, for the lime they produced.

   After the Intercolonial Railway got rolling in 1876 new markets for Prince Edward Island oysters opened in Quebec and Ontario. But oyster stocks started to fall and kept falling as more boats joined the harvesting. Oysters fled for their lives. They didn’t like being eaten alive. Biddy and Kate didn’t give much thought to overfishing or the deep-seated fears of shellfish, so long as they got their fair share.

   “Oh my gosh, what a beauty!” Kate exclaimed when Kieran Jr. walked up to the porch with Sinbad beside him. 

   “He came here on the Marco Polo,” he explained. “The ship broke up yesterday in the storm and he needed a new home, so here he is.” Sinbad walked straight past the girls to the pot and started pulling oysters out, gulping them down without a single word of thanks.

   “Hey, stop that,” Biddy scolded, covering the pot. “You’ll ruin your appetite, silly goose.”

   Sinbad’s ears pricked up. He had taken a goose for dinner last Christmas. It had been delicious. He shot a look in all directions. He didn’t see any birds, but had no doubt there had to be one or two nearby somewhere. He was by nature a nomad, but as there was a pot full of oysters and slow geese to eat, he thought, I’ll stay for the time being.

   He was a back door man, but when the front door was wide open, that was the door he always went through. God might or might not believe in destiny, but he was only a cat and didn’t know anything about divine inspiration. He didn’t believe in the garden path, but when the living was easy in the summertime, that was the way he went.

Excerpted from the book “Ebb Tide.”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

A Prince Edward Island Thriller

“A stem-winder in the Maritimes.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CVDP8B58

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Two hired guns from Montreal. One RCMP constable stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication