God of the Sea

“September 6th—We have seen the sea in its calmest and in its fury, and we must acknowledge the wonderful works of God, for what man can set a boundary to this expanse of water?”

Excerpt from the 1809 diary of John King, one of the first Christian missionaries to New Zealand.

 

         You come from over the waters like a new and living promise. You are the word made flesh—you are the mouth made man. Gulls squall their rubbery language and the ocean glitters like rippling scales. You think back to being five, acting out Moses parting the waters to a cohort of ruddy relatives. Your mother, buckled and bristling in her new sage-green dress, pulling out a swathe of blue silk and billowing it in the air, letting it catch and bulge like liquid. This will do for the water, she had said. This will part nicely.

         A silver fish flickers beneath the waves and you picture it multiplying, becoming a school, a bestiary—a moving feast. You will feed every strange mouth in this new land, you think—you will bring the words that will make them clean: Lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor. Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

         This will do for his staff, said your Mother, and dislodged an axe from the shed. She put it into your hands and your memory is faulty, it was so long ago, but you swear the wood writhed, serpentine, between your palms.

 

On the tenth day at sea the cook dies and is given a water burial: we therefore commit his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body. Your voice wraps around the deck like a thick black snake and the cook drops like a stone or a man in a noose. The sky overhead is blue and heavy with charging lightening, backlight-glowing. In your diary you have started counting the numbers of dead among the sheep and pigs. On the back page now you make a slow, black mark for the numbers of dead men. You could hope that the mark remains solitary. You could hope that no one else will die. You could.

You stay awake long after the others have retreated into the darkness below deck. You watch the sky shake out like shining foil, glittering like the sea if all the salt turned into light. If the cook is resurrected in his body you picture him shaking back to life like some pale deep-sea creature, blind-eyed and albino from the darkness, lungs full of salt so he glows from within.

 

On the twenty-seventh day a plague of locusts descends upon the ship. They are thick-bodied, thudding into the wooden mast like a head beaten again and again upon dry earth. A day of clouds and blackness, you think. There is a crack in the boards above you—you look up and the sky is bristling with bodies like shrunken angels. They are four-winged—shelled and skeletal, terrible with eyes. In the heat’s delirium you hear them saying in their voice of many voices a mighty army comes, such as never was in ancient times nor ever will be in ages to come.

Someone brings a dead locust below deck and its iridescence seems to take light like a black nebula, like a hole or a pit in the sky. You hold out your hand for it. You are struck by the sickening thought that you could touch it to your lips like a burning ember, leave your mouth a nest of singing scabs, melodising repentance. The thought makes you laugh. The laugh makes you hurt.

These will do for the Egyptians, says the voice of your Mother, and in your mind she raises her arms to the sky as above her it blackens with thousands of shivering bodies.

 

Some weeks after this you cross the line of the equator, and one of the sailors dresses up as Old Neptune, the God of the sea. He glints in the sunlight, and in the years to come your memory will colour him in swathes of cardinal and purple, whirling around the passengers like a frenzied dervish. He laughs belly-deep and the long shadows of seabirds flicker his face in and out of sunlight.

The sailors he heals with his hands. The emigrants—dirty, weary, teeth aching—he christens with salt water. He glitters in the sun like Egyptian chariots swallowed by the Red Sea, still drifting in the black deep in all their finery, bejewelled and perfectly preserved. You wonder if their white eyes look up to the shapes of circling sharks and mistake them for descending angels.

Later that night you stand in the darkness watching Saint Elmo’s Fire flicker in the sky above you. You are an educated man—you know that colour and glory are themselves children of science, which is a creation of God. You know something explicable happens in the air above; something measurable.

But still—you feel salt crusting dry on your forehead like a mirror of the stars overhead, and you think what man, small as a toy on black water and dwarfed infinitely, would not look to the cosmic brain above and forget where it ends and he begins?

 

You are nearing the end of your journey. You know this means you are nearing the beginning of your journey. A great white cloud like a cotton curtain coils along the skin of the sea, Mount Egmont tipping above it like a crystalline promise. You are put in mind of speaking pillars, rippling columns, impossible vastness. From this cloud comes not a sublime voice, but the rubbery twanging of new birds: a Babel of their songs.

You are standing at the prow and you feel the insistent press of children at the backs of your knees as they flock to see their new land. You rest your hands on their heads and see again your mother, smiling down at you from her green height, a yellow bowl like a concave sun held between her hands.

This will do for God, she had said, balancing it on the windowsill where it pooled with sunlight like a bowl full of fire.