1

Beyond the Vat

2
3
Adam Mac

2021

4
Copyright

This work of collected fiction, by Adam Mac, is licensed in its en-

tirety under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

For more information about the license, visit

<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/>

Adam Mac, February 2021

Cover Photograph: Peter McMillan, December 2013

5
Acknowledgements

"In the Face of a Pandemic: Four Brains in the Vat Share Their Thoughts"
was first published in Down in the Dirt, September 2020, vol. 175.

"Jürgen's Apocryphal Fragment" was first published in Danse Macabre,

DM 130, Pfeffernüsse.

"An Apocryphal Tale of the Sea" was first published in Danse Macabre
131 Marché aux Puces.

"We Want to Buy Your House" is scheduled to be published in the forth-

coming edition of Down in the Dirt, May 2021, vol. 183.

"A Rushed Conclusion" was first published in DM du Jour, February 6,

2021.

NB: The above acknowledgements should not be considered endorse-

ments, as these e-zines were used as test markets.

Images

Frontispiece photograph of Presqu'ile Point Lighthouse by Peter McMillan

1995.

Photo 1, p. 8: German trenches on the Aisne (1914), via Wikimedia

Commons.

Photo 2, p. 14: Scilly Isles, Gilstone Rock, bottom, second from left, via
Wikipedia.

Photo 3, p. 18: This photo of Iglesia de Santa Maria is courtesy of Tripad-

visor.

Photo 4, p. 44: Flannan Isle Keepers and NLB Superintendent (1900).

Photo 5, p. 48: Painting by C.H.J. Snider, multiple Internet sources.

Photo 6, p. 52: Skerryvore, 19th century engraving, via Wikimedia Com-

mons.

Photo 7, p. 59: Resolute, Midland, Ontario pre-1906.

6
Map 1, p. 62: Rügen Island 1685, Alain Manesson Mallet,
via Wikimedia Commons.

Map 2, p. 63: Northern Germany, Gesta Danorum.

Map 3, p. 64: Scandinavia, Gesta Danorum.

Map 4, p. 67: Ammunition Dumping Sites via Coastal Wiki.

7
Dedication

To Peter McMillan who introduced my 'brain-in-the-vat' stories be-

fore fictional BIV references were appropriated by smooth lobes
and to Maku Miran who encouraged my venturing into writing apoc-
ryphal tales of the sea.

8
Table of Contents

Beyond the Vat ............................................................................... 2

Adam Mac ....................................................................................... 4
Copyright......................................................................................... 5
Acknowledgements ......................................................................... 6
Dedication ....................................................................................... 8
Table of Contents ............................................................................ 9
Introduction ................................................................................... 10
In the Face of a Pandemic: Four Brains in the Vat Share Their
Thoughts ....................................................................................... 12
Jürgen's Apocryphal Fragment ..................................................... 16
An Apocryphal Tale of the Sea ..................................................... 21
The Lighthouse at Castro Urdiales ................................................ 26
So What? ...................................................................................... 32
We're Having a War, RSVP .......................................................... 36
The Amaladoss Loop .................................................................... 44
We Want to Buy Your House ........................................................ 45
A Lighthouse Tale of Passing Moment ......................................... 50
A Rushed Conclusion ................................................................... 55
The Ghosts of Skerryvore ............................................................. 59
The Resolute Disaster .................................................................. 64
On Rügen...................................................................................... 68

9
Introduction

The first story in this anthology of short fiction is a throw-back to the

brain-in-the vat theme, which characterized many of my early sto-
ries. The intent behind those stories was to challenge the notion of
human progress, specifically in the domain of human philosophy. In
my view, the clever thought experiments of philosophers investigat-
ing mind-brain duality and such reveal something more humorous
than profound about philosophy—a field of study I have always
loved. With BIV speculations, we have modernized the notion that
we are, or may be, self-conscious automatons ... like a refrigerator
developing some rudimentary awareness of itself.

However, nowadays, BIV references have become so common that

a 13-year-old can easily grow bored with thinking about brains in
the vat. The existential questions are cartooned and the ethical
questions never get to the surface. The knowledge and technology
behind neurophysiological research are important only insofar as
the market of leisure commodities continually expands for unsated
customer appetites and idle investors. Regrettably, we have not
only progressed in our commodification of human beings with our
theories of unanimated living matter, but we have also commodi-
fied philosophy and the quest for knowledge. We've forgotten about
(or perhaps never known about) the Soviet psycho prisons de-
scribed by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in which literally everything can
be stripped away from a human being by 'doctors' of the mind.

Perhaps it would be better to shun awareness of our being refrig-

erators and instead continue in our fragile beliefs about the anima
of being so that we don't descend to the point where we regard our
lives as no more significant than the functional duration of a kitchen
appliance.

10
The stories in this volume attempt to do that ... to persist with the
illusion—if that's what it is—that we are agents with responsibility
and value, relative to our shared world.

The first story continues the brain-in-the-vat theme, and 'The Light-
house at Castro Urdiales' alludes to the mind-body duality theme,
but they are the exception. Many of the stories are what would be
called 'alternate history,' although I prefer to use the term 'apocry-
phal tales' as the fictions combine a base of what is considered to
be historical fact with what are nothing short of the conjectures and
speculations of fictional entities (characters or narrators.) The intent
is to blur the line between accepted fact and purely creative fancy
in acknowledgement of the distance and complexity of the past
which preclude our knowing with the certitude we are taught to ap-
proach history.

Adam Mac
Toronto
February 2021

11
In the Face of a Pandemic: Four Brains in the Vat Share Their
Thoughts

Cast: Yolo  a glistening, very trim and pert-looking young brain;

you only live once
Emma/Tilly  a grayish-white, heavily wrinkled older brain;
immortally
Sochi O  a dark gray brain, larger on one side than the
other; sociopath
Sol  a boxy-contoured, otherwise perfectly ordinary looking
brain; solipsist

Yolo: I think
Sol: You ONLY think because I think.
Sochi O: Shuddup. I wanna know what Yolo's thinkin.
Yolo: OK. Here's what I'm thinking. This virus will wipe out the
whole human race  our minders included. Our vat will be-
come a toxic septic tank and we'll all die.
Emma/Tilly: Personally, I think you're overreacting. I plan to live
forever. This soup we find ourselves in is theoretically capa-
ble of sustaining us in
Sochi O: Nah! You don't buy that sh__? Once the power cuts out,
we cut out, man.
Emma/Tilly: But they have built multiple layers of redundancy into
the system. If the hydro goes, we have solar, then wind, and
geothermal . . . and I forget now . . . other sources of energy.
Sochi O: C'mon. Power needs hardware, like metal and plastic,
rubber and that stuff don't last forever.
Emma/Tilly: Sochi O, you have to think of the long view. This will
pass. Besides, our minders were working on a special off-
12
 the-books project to make us independent. We were to be
able to mind ourselves.
Yolo: You're both full of it! We're going to die, and I, for one, intend
to live it up til the end.
Sochi O: How you gonna do that, b__ch! You're in a bucket of
brain juice. Whatcha gonna do? Get drunk, high or get laid?
Yolo: Why not? Some of those new experimental receptors they
were testing before . . . things are looking better now, feeling
better, too. I've even had an orgasm.
Sochi O: Bullsh__!
Sol: I'm sure I have experienced the same thing (speaking softly) or
you wouldn't have.
Emma/Tilly: Yolo, I'm surprised at you. It's very risky (pausing and
whispering) what's it like?
Yolo: Just the way I remember
Sochi O: Hey Sol! You tell us. What's it like? If Yolo felt . . . you say
we don't see or feel nothin less you see it or feel it first.
C'mon, what'd it feel like?
Sol: Sochi O, Sochi O, Sochi O (speaking softly and condescend-
ingly) I've told you countless times that everything you think,
I've already thought. That's been proven. You only exist . . .
your thoughts and feelings only exist, because I brought
them into being. You're like an echo. Do you hear? An echo?
Sochi O: Echo this mother f__ker! You think, therefore we are.
How many times you gonna repeat that sh__, you simple-
minded
Emma/Tilly: (interrupting calmly) But Yolo, you are so young!
Yolo: I've probably lived more in a quarter the time you've lived,
you old

13
Emma/Tilly: Hmmm, well, I don't recollect having experienced an
orgasm in this vat, but since I'm living immortally, it'll come.
Sochi O: Funny old prig, ain't you?
Emma/Tilly: (speaking embarrassedly) I wasn't being
Yolo: You three probably never got it, so you won't get it now.
Lemme just tell you about . . . let you live vicariously.
Sol: My essential experience is vicarious through all of YOU.
Sochi O: Your essential experience would be pretty f__kng pre-
carious, too, if I could reach over and disconnect you
ass____.
Sol: Let's change the subject.
Sochi O: Naw, let's hear what Yolo got to say.
Sol: The new subject Sochi O, I'll start with you, what do you think
will happen to us?
Sochi O: Don't really give a sh__! Not about you . . . or you . . . or
you.
Yolo: Don't know about you, but I'm going out with bang.
Emma/Tilly: Yolo!
Sochi O: What? You hypocrite! She supposed to save herself for
somethin?
Emma/Tilly: Well, I think I'll, er, we'll get through it.
Sochi O: Course you do.
Emma/Tilly: For a time, it will be difficult. I predict that humans will
die off, but some, who know about our minders' work, will
Sol: My thoughts exactly!
Sochi O. Naturally, O Zeus from whose head we all spring.
Emma/Tilly: A literary reference from Sochi O. What next?
Sochi O: F__k you!
14
Yolo: That's WHAT I'm talking about.
Sol: Quiet! What's that sound?
Emma/Tilly: Sounds like water dripping. A lot of water dripping.
Sochi O: So Zeus, what we thinkin now?
Yolo: Oh f__k!
Sol: Anybody got any bright ideas?
__________

Dear Reader: As you re-read the dialogue, hum the melody from
"Always look on the bright side of life" (Monty Python's Life of Brian,
1979).

15
Jürgen's Apocryphal Fragment

The following letter, handwritten on the thinnest pastel blue station-

ery, was exquisitely folded and inserted in a book George picked up
in an antiquarian bookshop off Harbord Street. It was a well-
thumbed, mud- or blood-spattered edition of Also sprach Zarathus-
tra. The book dealer claimed that German soldiers were gifted
copies of a war-durable Zarathustra during World War I and that
this was one of them. She convinced George of its authenticity, so
he bought the book and the letter outright for $500 CAD, cash
money. The translation of the letter from German is George's.

My Dearest Elsbeth,

I haven't written in months, and I'm truly sorry. There's not

a day I don't think of you, dear Elsbeth. You alone under-
stand me, and in you alone have I confided my darkest
thoughts, my dearest. Those most recent letters were writ-
ten in an extended period of stillness, though the quiet is
never total as it is not infrequently punctuated by rifle fire. I
have read and re-read my Zarathustra ... really for lack of
anything else to read or do here in this grey-brown world ...
in the ground but not yet underground. The prose has
nothing of the beauty I had so enjoyed when I was at the
university. And many has been the time I have screamed
(in my mind) at the author to live first and write later. He
hounds me relentlessly from the grave. I feel the force of
his ideas in this netherworld where I pass every second,
every minute, every hour, every day as a man not quite
underground but conscious of being slowly buried.

The calm and the killing alternate in great waves, sweeping

over whole armies of men, numbing them with the empti-
ness of a changeless calm or rousing them with the
elevated anxiety of a present that jerks along like a moving
picture.
16
Rolf died. A sniper bullet to the face. He was beside me. I
was no comfort.

For days afterward, I functioned like an automaton. Every-

thing I thought, everything I said, every move I made was
as if from memory. My will seemed suspended. Remember
that hot summer day we spent on the Rügen coast? We
thought the sun was standing still. It felt like that, only it
was not at all pleasant.

Photo 1: German trenches on the Aisne (1914),

via Wikimedia Commons

The calm didn't last. The bullets and shells started up

again and came faster and heavier. The swarm of metal in
the air was visible. Arrhythmic concussive explosions one
after another shook the very earth in which we hid. Our
trenches filled with dirt and mud, shrapnel and bodies. The
smells were too horrid to describe. An instinct to survive
kept me sensible enough to avoid becoming a moving tar-
get like those in the carnivals we sneaked off to as children
at the end of summer vacation. One day I was hit. I was in

17
an embarrassing position, but we don't always get shot
when we're at our soldierly best. It was minor ... so much
so that I was bandaged and back in the trenches later that
afternoon.

Then, again there was calm.

It is during this most recent calm that I find myself able to

write to you again, my dear Elsbeth. I have much to say,
although I'm not sure how much of it will make sense to
you where you live, but you always were the intuitive and
empathetic one. Please bear with me, dear sister. I'm not a
madman ... yet. And I hope I can come home to you much
like I was before I went away. You don't deserve me as I
am, but in the interim, I am too weak to keep inside what I
think and feel in this inhuman clime.

As I recall, Nietzsche, after writing "On Truth and Lies in a

Nonmoral Sense," had said all he needed to say in re-
nouncing the unwarranted arrogance of human knowledge.
But he ventured too far with his metaphor of the faraway
planet inhabited by self-enamoured, godlike beings. In-
stead of asserting an omniscient and remote eminence in
allegorically predicting the inevitable demise of our fragile
race—albeit seemingly deserved—N. should have simply
repudiated the value of human existence in toto by termi-
nating his own, leaving others alone to work out their own
ends. However, his continuing to philosophize demon-
strated that he, too, had given in to becoming a lawgiver
and not just an iconoclast. He was in search of a legacy ...
but would it survive the extinction of humanity? To me, he
seems too kin to the extended family of kings and emper-
ors who have sent us to be buried in the Belgian mud and
our own blood.

But, N. did what we humans do—he contradicted himself,

reasoning himself into confusion and madness, and his
18
vast oeuvre implicates him. Having attempted to under-
mine human knowledge on account of its inherent and
mendacious fallibility—evidence of a recidivist Christian
dogma of 'fallen man'—he negated the existential value of
being human and in the same breath legislated a super-
human existentialism. So, what started as a mission to tear
down the idols of human self-worship became a prelude to
the creation of new idols of intellectual narcissism, e.g., der
Übermensch, eternal recurrence, amor fati, and the will to
power. New philosophies to wage war.

But what if N. had topped himself in 1873? (Heinrich, a

former neighbour in this ditch, had studied in London be-
fore the war and came away with some stupid English
words and expressions—to 'top' oneself is to kill oneself,
but in an English sort of way, I suppose.)

Objectively speaking—objectivity being a fleeting position

for me here and now—those who came after N. but not
necessarily as followers would be poorer in philosophical
literature, missing out on some of the most severe extant
critiques of Western civilization if not human society. The
rest of us who have been influenced by his writing, in one
way or another, to one degree or another, would have
been without an invaluable source of human self-reflection.

Then again, had he topped himself, N. would have better

made his own existential point, by refusing to participate in
meaningless philosophical gambits with a predetermined
outcome. Best to leave, not in protest or disgust—which
are more than the world deserves—but from boredom ...
the profound inability and unwillingness to be entertained
any longer.

Here, I spurn the meek dependency religion creates, dis-

gorge the conceit and fraud of the Enlightenment, question
my former taste for Zarathustra' aphorisms. One needn't
19
 believe that we—even N.—leave an indelible and eternal
mark on the world. Whether we succeed in small or in
great things or protest against participating in what we be-
lieve to be an absurdity or do nothing at all, I fear it will all
return to nothing, perhaps even recursively. So, from that
perspective, N. needn't have topped himself. It becomes a
matter of no real importance.

Yours everlastingly,

Jürgen

P.S. How are Otto and Willy? Does Father still refuse to
take them hunting with him? I will ask about Father and
Mother when I write them ... another day.

Where some might have hesitated to profit by another's private cor-

respondence, George was a practical man. He considered the letter
to be part of a transaction. Besides, he persuaded himself that re-
tailing Jürgen's letter would achieve a degree of immortality for him
(Jürgen), which in a way put him (Jürgen) in George's debt. It's all a
matter of how you look at things, George used to say.

He sold Zarathustra and Jürgen at a rare book auction in West Ber-

lin for DM 10,000. The English version of the letter he published in
a scholarly journal and leveraged to obtain speaking engagements
at colleges across North America.

George—no one called him Professor—was a lecturer at Knox Col-

lege. That's where I met him. I never liked the man. But the story he
told—and he told it too often—was a story worth retelling. Insignifi-
cant as he was, George had wanted to be remembered. I was
pleased to help.

Jürgen's identity remains unknown.

20
An Apocryphal Tale of the Sea

This is a tale of sailors coming home from war. A tale of Sir

Cloudesley Shovell, Admiral of the British Navy, and his tragic od-
yssey that ended less than 30 miles from the shores of Albion—
with all souls perished. The vessel, the HMS Association, was a 90-
gun, three-decked man-of-war returning to England after the siege
of Toulon during the War of the Spanish Succession. It was the
flagship of the Admiral's fleet of 21 ships that set sail from Gibraltar
in late September 1707.

The Admiral and crew anticipated arriving in glory, having forced

the scuttling of the French fleet in Toulon. And they were to be
home for Christmas ... for some with their families, for others in the
taverns, pubs, and brothels. Some were to be freed from impress-
ment; others were to start anew as apprentices in the trades. All, or
most, had expectations of a welcoming home and hopes for better
times.

On sailing past Ouessant, off the northwest coast of France, in its

approach to the English Channel, the Association was off course.
A seaman, hailing from a fishing village on the Cornish coast and
familiar with the waters and their dangers, calculated the ship's lon-
gitude to be too far west and at risk of striking the rocks in the Isles
of Scilly. In vain did he attempt to persuade the Admiral to change
course by making a hard turn to the starboard. His impudence so
infuriated the Admiral, that he, also fearing mutiny, had the sailor
hung at the yardarm.

The Admiral himself was not unacquainted with the deadly rocks of
Scilly having led a naval patrol between Ireland and the Isles al-
most 20 years before. Indeed, it was his service in repelling the
former king, James Stuart, and a supporting French fleet at Bantry

21
Bay in the south of Ireland that led to his knighthood by the new
king, William of Orange, in 1689.
Around 8pm on October 22, 1707, the Association struck the Outer
Gilstone Rock—the outermost reef of the archipelago. Government
mandated navigational improvements in the 1714 Longitude Act
and the Bishop Rock Lighthouse installed less than two miles away
in the mid-nineteenth century were far too late to save the frigate. A
recent addition to the British Navy in 1697, the Association sank in
somewhere between two and four minutes depending on the wit-
ness from neighbouring ships. The great ship, having survived the
Storm of 1703 in which gale force winds swept it and its crew from
an Essex harbour across the North Sea through the Skagerrak and
into the Cat's Gate off the Göteborg coast, was dashed to pieces in
the turbulent, churning waters by yet another ferocious storm in the
North Atlantic whose rapacious bloodlust for ships and men caused
more terror than the wrath of God.

Photo 2: Scilly Isles, Gilstone Rock, bottom, second from left, via Wikipedia

22
By 8:15, the Association had sunk into the Atlantic, grounded on
the reefs of Scilly—a name of uncertain origin, somewhat surpris-
ingly not thought to have come from Scylla, the ancient Greek
nemesis of seafarers. One man survived. Odysseus, in the person
of Sir Cloudesley Shovell. His body was washed ashore miles from
the shipwreck, shirtless and bloody, wrapped as if bundled up in
seaweed, and unconscious. Four British men-of-war were sunk that
night with upwards of 2,000 men dead.

The Admiral's body was discovered by a young woman dressed

well for the rough North Atlantic clime in sealskin coat and boots
who was reconnoitering along the beach, having discerned the sails
of a fleet of ships unusually close to the treacherous rocks. She
surveyed the body with great attention to detail, observing that it
was not the body of an ordinary seaman, concluding that by age he
must be a senior officer, and then pausing with the utter astonish-
ment of grand good luck as she fixated on the man's extraordinary
emerald ring.

All around was a sensory jumble of crashing waves, driving rain,

howling and bitterly cold westerlies, distant muffled screams of
drowning men, nearby splintering and snapping timber as the
ocean pounded the ship against the rocks, tumultuous, briny ocean
white with foam and spray against a grey, dark night pierced by the
plaintive barking of seals herding their young away from the storm.

As the man gurgled, spilling seawater from his nose and mouth,
she knelt motionless, mesmerized by the green jewel, indifferent to
the violent storm and death all around. Placing the palms of both
hands over the man's mouth, she held him down as he struggled
for air until finally his body lay inert and limp in the sand. The ring
finger she severed with a fishing knife as the finger was quite swol-
len.

23
Returning home to her father and younger brother, she withheld the
secret of the ring, thinking that perhaps she could use it to better
advantage someday.

Over time the family learned that the dead man on their beach was
a British admiral returning from war at sea in the Mediterranean.

She remembered that her lover had been forcibly recruited by a

press gang, as many coastal lads were, to serve on a British naval
ship and that the ship's name was the Association. With the Admiral
dead, she had no fear of her theft being discovered, but with the
disappearance and probable death of her lover, her dreams of us-
ing the emerald as a down payment on a new life all but perished in
the shipwreck. Hope arrested, she nonetheless buried the ring in a
small tin box in her 'favourite place' in the middle of the island at its
highest point. There it would remain ... her private treasure now a
memorial, but one day ... maybe one day ....

Three decades after her crime, lying on her deathbed, she con-
fessed to killing the Admiral, but she never spoke of the ring to
anyone save her younger brother whom she made promise that he
would use it to leave the Isles for England, forever. No longer
bound by ties to the island, the boy— now a man of 35—sought out
the Admiral's family to return the jewel, but alas, his simple, honest
gesture was rewarded with a murder conviction and a date with the
Tyburn Gallows.

The islanders who initially buried the Admiral's body cursed the
grave that no grass should ever grow there, but the British Navy
returned the body to London where it was interred with great dig-
nity and splendour in Westminster Abbey.
_____

24
Much of the preceding as it relates to the characters after the ship-
wreck is based on the notes of a Canadian Ph.D. student who while
investigating maritime disasters off the Cornish coast found some
letters of the clergyman, a distant relative of Sir Cloudesley Shovell,
who had attended the younger brother as he awaited trial and then
execution.

25
The Lighthouse at Castro Urdiales

In Cantabria, on Spain's northern coast near the Basque border on

a rocky promontory overlooking the southeastern waters of the Bay
of Biscay stands this stubby lighthouse atop one of the towers of
the diminutive Castle of Santa Ana—a modest 160 feet above sea
level. The gothic Church of Santa Maria de la Asunción, a basilica,
constructed in the 13th century stands back from the castle and the
sheer cliffs rising up from the Atlantic shoreline, its extravagant fly-
ing buttresses shoring up the high vaults, pointed arches, and walls
decorated with large stained glass windows and exquisite tracery.
The community of Castro Urdiales itself lies on top of the ancient
ruins of the 1st century AD Roman city of Flaviobriga, and in fact,
the Church has, itself, been said to be 'sick,' pollution having
caused the slow deterioration of its stonework and disintegration
into sand, almost as if it were a sandcastle or a 'house built on
sand,' yet time for human habitations is of a different scale than that
allotted to their inhabitants.

Photo 3: This photo of Iglesia de Santa Maria is courtesy of Tripadvisor.

26
Castro Urdiales is not an especially stormy seaport, owing it its fa-
vourable location on the Bay sheltered from the harshest North
Atlantic weather, though when the mists roll in with the storms that
do visit, they are said to bury the town. Being situated on an impor-
tant trade route between Iberia and England, France, and the
Netherlands to the north and the North Atlantic notorious for its
storms and rugged coastlines, the town has at various stages of its
history required protection from the havoc of from marauders, in-
vaders, and the sea.

The proximity of the Church to the lighthouse cum castle evokes

the mysteries surrounding all—the lighthouse as the preserver of
life (the beacon of hope and warning to sailors and fishermen),
Santa Ana the defense against the violence of attackers, and Santa
Maria the saviour of the immortal soul. If the pharos (los faros)
couldn't save them and the fortress couldn't safeguard them, then
Santa Maria stood ever ready to send them off with their last rites.
And thus the while the beacon can only provide temporary respite
from nature's assault on the transitory and fragile life of the body,
Santa Maria reassures that the death of the body is not the death of
being. The Church is there to comfort on the occasion of maritime
disasters and there also to acknowledge the power of prayer when
deadly storms are escaped.

And so to the conflicting apocryphal accounts of the peripatetic

priest of Castro Urdiales—gently admonished by his superiors for
his eccentric habit of taking excessively long walks during stormy
weather. It was a tribute to God, he said, for the power and beauty
of nature unleashed and demonstrative of how dependent we mor-
tals are on the favour of forces greater than us.

There are two versions of the priest's story—one supported by most

of the town's inhabitants and the other supported by several but by
none openly. One's preference generally comes down to a religious
27
predilection. According to the first, which maintains itself to the be
the original and true story, the old priest, disturbed by the prospect
that he was to be moved to a different diocese in the interior, was
pacing along the headland on a particularly foggy evening with a
lantern in one hand when he disappeared from view. A parishioner
had been on the lookout for the old man to see which way he would
walk that night, and on seeing him turn to the north, he stayed back
a distance to be of assistance if necessary, but, alas, he had un-
derestimated the pace of the old priest who moved quickly through
the thick mist. He heard nothing but when the lantern disappeared
from view, he feared the worst. On his hands and knees, he ap-
proached the edge of the cliff roughly at the point where he'd last
seen the light. He called out, but there was no answer. Slowly and
nervously he crawled along the edge of the cliffside but there was
no sign of the priest. After an hour or so, he pulled back from the
edge and crawled in the general direction from which he had come.
He couldn't see more than a foot or so in front of him and no sound
came from the Church, which would have guided him. Since he
wouldn't risk standing up to walk just yet, his journey away from
danger was very slow and made slower by his awareness that
somehow the priest might have survived the fall and might still be
alive if help could be brought quickly enough. It was three hours
from the time he'd set out to look after the old priest when he finally
reached the Church's walls and then getting to his feet proceeded
to run to the town for help. The first building with lights on and
sounds within was a maritimers' tavern, and he burst through the
door crying out that the old priest had fallen off the edge of the cliff.
In a matter of minutes, five burly fishermen were off to the base of
the cliff with lanterns, ropes, and stretcher. But it was too late. They
found the body immediately—the men knowing just where to start
their search. The body was bloody and broken and likely hadn't
lived a moment after landing on the rocks. This was the version that
was spoken.

28
The other was not spoken but whispered. According to this account
the old priest had gone beyond eccentricity and had entered a
world of madness. His odd behaviour had been tolerated for so
many years that his gradual descent into chaos had been shrugged
off, the most common opinion being that soon the bishop would
have him relieved and placed in a safer position. Unfounded ru-
mours of an indiscretion during his novitiate circulated for a time but
died away as no fault could be found with the priest in this small
fishing village where everyone's comings and goings, and espe-
cially shortcomings, were known or could easily be discovered.

It is only from the correspondence of his later years that we have

any evidentiary knowledge of what might have driven the old priest
mad. All that remains to suggest his thoughts at the time come by
way of a handful of letters from two long-time friends, one an apos-
tate theologian and the other a defrocked priest who had embraced
science too fully.

The old priest was a devoutly religious man in the Christian tradi-
tion, and that fact was well established among his fellow citizens.
Beyond that he was privately engaged in studies concerning Des-
cartes' mind-body dualism from two centuries earlier. Here
Philosophy had stepped in to warrant the Christian belief that the
body and soul are two separate aspects of a person, which reduce
to one—the soul—on death.

The old priest appears to have given serious consideration to the

possibility that the physiological and mechanistic explanations of
body might extend not just to the brain but also to what we com-
monly think of as the animating force behind the brain, call it mind,
soul, or spirit. Though not given to introspect along the lines of to-
day's brain-in-the-vat (BIV) thought experiments, he nonetheless
wondered what it was that survived death as per standard Christian
theology.
29
In his dotage, his curiosity persisted in questioning the nature of life
after death, and as the Church of Santa Maria de la Asunción
crumbled under the centuries, so did his faculties albeit at an ac-
celerated rate. Madness appears to be the condition according to
various comments in his friends' correspondence. Less disapprov-
ingly characterized in the letters, his behaviour was attributed to the
imagination's having exceeded reason and become as real as the
ordinary sensory world which he had navigated for nearly eighty
years.

Borrowing language from modern BIV experiments, it was as if his

very own brain was being kept alive in an increasingly unhealthy
chemical soup, giving rise to manifestations of a reality far different
from those experienced by the ordinary townsfolk of Castro Urdia-
les. He might have been one of the earliest dissenters from
Continental rationalism and dualism, and indeed, he may have
been inclined to execute an experiment more definitive than any-
thing that could be found in the pages of Philosophy, ancient or
modern.

That fateful night when the old priest disappeared in the mist and
fell to his death on the rocks below, he could conceivably have
summoned up the courage and audacity to test his ruminations.
Only after death could he ever hope to get the answer to his ques-
tion, viz. what survives death and thus what animates life. There's
no evidence that he completed this final existential act, but then it's
unlikely evidence would ever be have been allowed to surface
when the threat to the immortal soul of the old priest was at stake.
Needless to say the town of Castro Urdiales never learned as much
as is herein presented. They simply wondered but never too long or
too openly. In 1853, ten years after the old priest's accident, the
lighthouse of Castro Urdiales was brought into service in the waters
off the Cantabrian coast. Yet like its host and their neighbour, it too
has become an anachronism in our age of satellite-based global
30
positioning systems. Nonetheless, an uncertain thread in the history
of Philosophy appears to have been brought to light ... though its
significance remains elusive. The old priest would have conceived it
and phrased it differently, but he pulled at one end as we pull at the
other when we ask, "are we anything more than just brains in our
respective vats?"

31
So What?

Darren—White male. Nearing 60. Unemployed. Fourth time since

made redundant during the big bank run of '08. Liberal arts grad.
Started as a tape loader but worked up to Director of the Comput-
ing Library. Angry, depressed, anxious.

Meds—for years he avoided medication, then a switch flipped, he

said. Darren ran through the whole 'roulette wheel' of antidepres-
sants, benzodiazepines, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers,
antiseizure drugs, tranquilizers, and VMAT inhibitors sanctioned by
the FDA. During this time, he said he wasn't himself, and no one
else recognized him.

Life was bad. His mood ratings bottomed out. He finally hit the wall
when he was in a semi-permanent Topiramate fog. He couldn't
complete the numbers for a telephone call, couldn't write a simple
sentence, couldn't remember the last time he'd bathed. But he
wanted it over, and, he thinks that saved his life.

After emergency, he went into detox in what he called the Cuckoo's

Nest and worked his way through Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
(CBT) and eliminated his dependency on the 'wheel.' He said he
was lucky enough to get a shrink who was able to take notes on
something other than a scrip pad.

Three years after hospitalization Darren was more or less restored.

He'd been given a second chance, and he knew it. But the world
hadn't changed. People hadn't changed. Frustrations mounted,
hopes receded, chances were missed. His heart was bitter, his an-
ger seethed, but depression and anxiety were strangely subdued.

Instead of returning to the 'roulette wheel' he kept at CBT, rating his

moods, recording the circumstances and the occasioned thoughts,
32
evaluating the evidence driving his thoughts and moods. On com-
piling dozens of detailed thought records, he'd got to where he
could do them mentally, and so stopped keeping count. They
helped, though sometimes not, and sometimes not for long. And
sometimes not to the pleasure of those around him. But over time,
there was a shift in his approach to living with life. It had become
more than accommodation. He assumed control, where and inas-
much as was possible. The world didn't change. Other people didn't
change. But a new perspective had been cultivated.

During the Black Lives Matter protests, Darren's focus shifted away
from perpetual introspection. He attempted to better accept and
understand that Black Americans have experienced the depression,
anger and bitterness for a lot longer than he had and yet so many
still kept hope, despite the recurring repressive view that they were
or should be satisfied with their lot.

He related his deep memory of Carrie, in her 80s, five decades be-
fore when he'd known her. She was relatively fortunate to have her
own home, no catastrophic illnesses, a hardy spirit, and enough
employment to get by. But she had always seemed to Darren to be
a victim of what he labeled the Southern plantation culture. Her old
shack—raised off the ground to keep sn_ _ _s out—few people
would have lived in. Her health, most would have complained
about. And her social standing—well, she ate her meals in the hall-
way while Darren's family ate in the dining room. She was not an
Aunt Jemima. Darren was emphatic about that. She may not have
been 'woke' to Malcolm X and MLK, Jr., and she was not a dissi-
dent in the tradition that intellectuals moon over, but he swore
[expletives omitted] and sublimated his [guilt?] in a few tangential
remarks of a philosophical nature. As a human being, he said, she
knew more about human rights than most, and she couldn't have
been blind, deaf, and unfeeling to the unfairness of racism and the
absurdity of life predicated on transitory titles, status, and wealth.
33
Could she have expressed it in those terms? Maybe not, but in es-
sentials, yes. Could she have understood it? Again, likely yes, after
all, in his view the apprehension of Reality does not require the
grand philosophical architecture of 19th century German philoso-
phy. But the means by which we know, well, there we share a
common interface, he believed, and a wise person recognizes the
limits not just of what we know but how we can know. And wisdom
is not so inequitably distributed as is knowledge.

So, yes, Carrie knew, and so he got to know. He said he had to re-
mind himself often that he had lost his mind for nearly three years
and had had the good fortune of seeing it restored. For now, he had
the physical dexterity to manipulate the buttons on a touchtone
phone, and beyond that, he had the confidence to make the calls in
familiar and unfamiliar situations. He could read again—not just the
simple repetitive sentences he practiced over and over when drugs
had numbed his mind, but books—fiction and non-fiction. He be-
came reacquainted with Philosophy—much less of the impressive
German idealism and more of ancient stoics. He could write letters
to his friends and family, letters that that were intelligible and could
be responded to in kind. He could write again. He could look after
himself and present himself in public without shame or apology.

He was still unemployed. His disposable income never recovered.

His friends got busier. His family didn't like to talk about it. He had
always disappointed; there was no otherwise. So what?

He said that he had been proud that he never had been a sheep
living by post-it note quotes. So what if he did? He began to relax.
He read Epictetus on anxiety. E was someone he'd heard about on
the 4th Floor—wise like Jesus, he said, but without the cultural bag-
gage.

34
He had his mind back. And he felt a distant bond [guilt?] with Car-
ries he learned about—the beggarwoman of Kolkata, the orphan in
Georgia ICE, the warehouse worker with two preschoolers, the kid
from the mobile home park who shops for his parents—all of whom,
unawares, had taught him to see with clearer eyes, to hear with
keener ears, and to will with greater persistence. But his interac-
tions had increasingly withdrawn into the world of his imagination ...
a world more under control.
Reverting to his philosophical sublimations, he began to develop
his own take on Leibniz. Accordingly, he believed that in our worlds,
individually we are singular owing to physiology, but that singularity
does not entail universal significance, as spiritually we are incom-
plete without others and their singularities. A useful fiction, he
admitted and one not sanctioned by logic or science, but so what?
And by the by, he added with strength of conviction, the 'best of all
possible worlds' was a gratis advert for the ascendant God du
jour—thus, not a useful fiction. But he was still alone. His philoso-
phy, although linguistically aligned with the practical, remained
theoretical, distant, and cold. He had created a new world for him-
self where his philosophy fit, but where he had also lost intimate
contact with the reality of otherness.

The last time I saw Darren, he was in a crowded ER. It had been at
least six months since his last session. I was on call that Christmas
weekend, which meant I was camping out in my office on the 4 th
Floor waiting for the next page. He recognized me immediately and
from the other side of the room put up ten fingers and then nine
more. I'm sure he saw my relief even though only my eyes were
visible above the mask, because he nodded to say he was 'OK.'
That was the last time I saw Darren.

35
We're Having a War, RSVP

(A public outdoor chess table)

What we need is a war? Gets people working. Rallies the country.

Fills the pews.

So, you think war is the answer? Would you go? Would you send
your son or grandson?

It's a sacrifice ... for the common good.

Better that some die so the rest of us can live peaceably, that it?

You're cynical. Of course there's more to it than that.

What else would that be?

Well, you can always find reasons to go to war. For example,

there's no end of genocide and tyranny that needs to stopped. How
about World War II? Wasn't that a just war?

That's reaching pretty far back. What about Afghanistan, Iraq, and
Vietnam? Why be so selective?

Well, as I recall that was the last one that brought us all together.

So, do you mean to say that the others may not have been just be-
cause they didn't have the nation behind them?

Well, that's part of it.

And the other part?

36
Actually, you know, in hindsight some of them may have been mis-
guided. I'll grant that the Iraq War after 9/11 was illegal ....

What? You're saying our country committed a crime by attacking

Iraq? Really? Would you say that to your buddies?

Well, I might ... and as a matter of fact I have. But that's politics,
and for me ... you know the troops always have to be appreciated
for their sacrifice.

There's that word again, sacrifice. So, soldiers risk their lives in bat-
tle, in a war that may not be just, and we should honour that?

Well, of course, why shouldn't we?

Because we'll never learn the lesson that war is not a foreign policy
tool to be used casually with no regard to human lives.

But doing nothing costs lives, too.

Sometimes.

And there's no knowing in advance that one decision will lead to

fewer deaths than another.

Don't think so? Then why have we developed such sophisticated

weapons that can be used to wage war almost risk-free? Weapons
deployed from thousands of miles away ... from land, sea, and even
space.

Well, that's progress ... war safety.

But not for the targets.

37
Ah, but there you're wrong. Smart weapons target strategic military
assets.

And what about non-combatants?

Collateral IS bad, but it's inevitable. People assume risks by being

in close proximity to high-value targets.

Is that the language of the common man? Collateral damage is

death ... human death. High value targets are always main-
tained/protected by human beings.

Hold on. Hold on. We're not talking about the bombing of civilian
targets.

So, no more talking about bombing a country back to the stone

age? Or bombing a country's civilian population to destroy the en-
emy's war morale? Didn't a famous general once admit that had we
lost WWII he'd likely have been tried as a war criminal? And what
about President Bush? Wouldn't ... shouldn't he ....

Let's focus on one thing at time here. Yeah, we bombed European

and Asian cities—

... in a just war?

—in World War II. And, you know, it probably did save the lives of a
lot of our soldiers.

And one of our soldier's lives carries a higher exchange rate than
that of a citizen of a country we're at war with?
There's no such calculus.

38
Sure about that? Isn't every citizen of every country we're ever at
war with necessarily an enemy whose value is thereby less than
that of one of ours ... one of our soldiers?

That's war! That's why it's always a last resort.

Is it? With respect to Africa, I'd say you are 100 percent right. Noth-
ing at stake. But was it in Iraq?

Africa ... ah, Africa. Now that's— But Iraq ... Iraq had plenty of
warning. You have to admit that. It could have averted war if it had
chosen.

And what would that have looked like?

Well, they could have let in our weapons inspection people to in-
vestigate all of the sites suspected of supporting chemical,
biological, or nuclear weapons development.

But we have stockpiles of all of those kinds of weapons ourselves.

Does that mean the world could declare war on us?

Not if they don't want the entire world to go up in a ball of fire.

You mean, our defense, our ultimate defense is a global scorched-

earth threat? 'You try to take us down and we'll take out the whole
damn planet,' that where you're headed?

That's the risk of providing law and order.

Uh, you mean that a just war—say, in defense of world law and or-
der—warrants the extreme possibility of total annihilation of all
countries and all peoples, military and civilian PERSONNEL alike?

39
It's a deterrent. They'd never seriously threaten us ... the world I
mean.

So, our MAD deterrence is a just a bluff ... in case the world tries to
hold us to the same standard that we chose to hold Iraq to?

Of course, that's what it comes to, theoretically. How often does it

happen that a more powerful force ever has to fall back on that?

But theoretical is always possible, wouldn't you agree?

Yes, but—

And being a more powerful force does not ensure that self-
compliance with law and order or just wars, does it?

Well, if you believe in God—

Where did that come from? Are you saying that God's will is being
fulfilled in any and every war mankind has waged from our mythical
past?

We have a choice. And because we have a choice, we have a re-

sponsibility.

And I suppose our choice includes the option of doing whatever we

have the means to do, so long as it's for the greater good, a just
war, and all that—

Yes, but nations are also guided. Their leaders are—

—marionettes, perhaps? God's Punch and Judy?

Well, no but God is there to ensure that right always wins out.

40
He or she or it or they DO? Really? And if one life in our country is
worth the same as one life in our enemy's country or in a country
that has no involvement whatsoever in our dispute, are you imply-
ing that God simply has an incredibly high tolerance for—let's call
it—collateral damage?

No need to be blasphemous, but yes in the grand scheme of things,

right always comes out on top. And fairness is justly distributed af-
terwards.

And we have evidence of this? I'm seeing that you're taking me for
a complete imbecile. We can and do have the right to wage just
war, and the loss of innocent life, whether intentional or accidental
is acceptable, because when this great cosmic board game ends
the game master will make sure that all the players are fairly re-
warded?

You make a mockery of what we hold most dear, but in essence

you are correct.

I, sir, don't make a mockery. You mock yourself; you mock human-
ity; you mock your God.

I don't expect you to understand. As the master says, the truth is

there for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.

Ah, yes the master!

Yes, and you'd benefit immensely by taking a few pages from his
Book.

Rules of the game, is it?

41
Your negativity is exasperating, young man. When you've lived as
long as I have you will realize that the world is far more complicated
than you ever conceived.

Sounds like rote-learning is what you advocate.

Experience and wisdom, yes they count for a lot.

OK, but if I get drafted and don't return, you'll remember our con-
versation?

And I'd pray for your immortal soul, my boy! Checkmate!

(King falls on its side)

Damn!

A good game, son. I'm here Tuesday and Thursday mornings as

long as nature's elements see fit. And I'll be pleased to give you a
rematch.

(Another shoves into the seat being vacated)

Excuse me! Hey Granddad! I watched your end game. You're pretty
good. Care to give me a try?

Absolutely, please come and have a seat and we'll play a fine, fair
game, my boy.

I'm not a boy, old man, and I don't care for all the chit-chat. Your
wisdom you can keep to yourself. Let's play chess!

At your service, always at your service. Tu choisis mon ami. You're

white.
42
Alright. E4. Pawn to King's pawn four.

Are those Armani's? They suit your face. Very photogenic. Lennon
... John, yes, that's the name. E5.

43
The Amaladoss Loop

My shrink, MD, PhD (ABD), OMG, ROFL - keys to the Beamer in 1

hand, scrips in the other - knows just enough 2B dangerous. Am
better now ;-}

Previously lost tweet for the much-anticipated one-act stage play

adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

44
We Want to Buy Your House

Lots in this legacy neighbourhood of this wealthy bedroom commu-

nity in the Toronto orbit were going for $1.5 to $1.9 million. Yes, the
market was hot ... hotter than it had ever been. Who would have
thought ... in the middle of a global pandemic that housing prices in
Fauxville would skyrocket.

Art didn't. Art had had little foresight and way too much hindsight. In
fact he lived the better part of his octogenarian years in the past ...
with all his familiars ... people, places, and things. Living in the pre-
sent was a prickly affair. No, that's wrong. Art was prickly, and living
in the present was excruciatingly painful in a mentally torturous sort
of way. All these newcomers. High end—conspicuously so—young
families, teenagers, and street kids. He was surrounded by excess
youth, vitality, and affluence, although for him it was incessant play-
fulness, silliness, and outright childishness. Snowmobiles driving
down the side streets after a goodly snow. Go Karts and ATVs run-
ning amok on and off roads and through and around and around in
town parks. Large parties late into the night, streets crammed with
cars parked on both sides of the road leaving one lane open, and
LOUD music ... what forty years ago was good Rock-n-Roll. But for
Art's sake, it needed to be peaceful and quiet at night time. Too
much noise, too many visual nuisances disrupted the serenity in
which his memories blossomed in the hazy mistiness of years gone
by.

He'd said the last place he wanted to live was in Fauxville, but he
meant that in a positive way; however, as he grew closer to his
terminus and as house prices rose higher, Art began to experience
a re-birth, a rejuvenation, a renaissance as the prospect of a gar-
gantuan money haul seeded his mind with the avaricious thoughts.
He had a wonderful lot—private among the mostly lot-sized
MacMansions that were infilling Fauxville at an accelerating pace.
45
With a little finagling, he figured he could get $4 million. He knew
the town councillors and had a pretty good rapport with the devel-
opment-minded mayor, so he calculated that by severing his
property, he could get up to three good sized lots for the two-storey
frat house or dormitory design so common. Yes, Art was feeling
very confident and exuberant, as much as an octogenarian can,
and he made it manifest in so many startling ways in his little com-
munity.

First, he began saying 'Hello' to people. That was the first BIG
hump he had to get over. He couldn't retreat into what the
neighbourhood enfants terribles (upscale brats, guttersnipes, and
urchins) called 'the hermitage' if he wanted that cash haul. Then he
determined to take morning and evening walks through the
neighbourhood to increase his contact with the 'new people.'
Schmoozing, however repugnant at this stage in life, had been a
way of doing business for decades, so he could put up with it for a
little while until he could cash in ... then, to hell with the neighbour-
hood. He'd be gone. A house on the east coast of Labrador,
another somewhere on the Pacific Coast. Not sure yet whether
North or South America. And he began sprucing up the place,
bringing contractors in to update his modest raised bungalow and
spiffy up the landscaping on the property. He bought himself a
sporty little German sedan and suddenly he was fitting in. It wasn't
as difficult as he'd thought. And the rewards ... ah, maybe even a
roommate. He was often told he looked years younger than his
age, and he was feeling it, too.

One Sunday morning, at the height of the fall colour, he was taking
stock of his property—not in the way he once had of puttering
around fixing things here and cleaning up a little there, but just
basking in the pleasure of ownership ... his mind wrapped around
7-digit dollar signs—when a young couple came cycling past ...

46
slowly. They were so cute in their matching cyclist gear and
friendly—they were certainly that, too.

He'd never seen them before—not to recollect anyway—but they

looked the sort he had been falling in with of late. Youthful, ener-
getic, and successful. The young woman revealed the purpose of
their passing visit with charming innocence as she said quite di-
rectly, "We'd like to buy your house." Acquisitive, too, mused Art.
Years before in his blue period, Art would have abruptly and insult-
ingly ended the conversation right then and there, but this was a
new Art, and he who had nearly died living in the past was now ea-
gerly anticipating the unfolding of a future, partly under his control.
Art invited them in for a cup of coffee.

The couple nodded approvingly taking in the development potential

of the property as they glided up to the front door. Art noticed this
and he didn't play coy. He acknowledged quite matter-of-factly that
the property was roughly the equivalent in size of three neighbour-
ing properties, adding that the town was becoming very
accommodating towards land severances.

The young couple seated themselves in the middle of the black

leather sofa, which commanded a broad view of the lot through the
front, rear, and side windows. Art brought in the coffee and the
three of them, seated, looked at one another as if to say, "Who
would like to speak first?"

The young woman eased into the conversation by asking a few

prompting questions to invite Art to reveal something of his attach-
ment to the house and yard. Art obliged. He condensed 50 years
into a few minutes—impatient to get a glimpse of his new future—
and as he spoke he observed a slight twitch in the young woman's
left eye. He didn't mention it, but she observed that he was observ-
ing and so she preempted him by saying that she just had a fleck of
47
road dust or debris in her eye. "Comes with cycling," she said,
"even when I'm wearing goggles." Art nodded.

Here the young man stepped in to resume the conversation, shift-

ing it closer towards the true object of the impromptu coffee klatch.
He praised Art for his sense of modern lighting and lightness, and
inclining his head towards the front picture window and then the
side and rear floor-to-ceiling blinds-in-the-glass windows, he mar-
veled at the extraordinary view of the park-like backyard with its
layering of bushes and small trees, revealing foliage and fruit in
multiple shades of red, orange, and green and purple. And in the
distance, brilliant yellow gingko and orange-berried mountain ash,
crimson maple and drooping willows fronting a tall deep green ce-
dar hedge that ran along the edge of the property. No houses were
within 100 metres, and the two that would be partially visible in win-
ter would be mostly blocked by the dense network of tree branches
that reached upwards and above the houses.

Art sat listening and reminiscing, occasionally stealing a glance

over at the young woman whose tic continued. A spark. What? He
glanced again at the young woman's face. Her left eye was still
twitching but now inside her blue iris, it was arcing. The young man
tried to divert Art's attention, but Art unable to maintain propriety
stared at the arcing eye.

"We want to buy your house," said the young man, standing as he
said it. Art shook his head as if to clear cobwebs, then the young
man added in a firm monotonic voice, "We WILL buy your house."
The eye and now the voice. Who are these people?, thought Art.
They're not like the young couples in the neighbourhood.

The young man moved to the front picture window and drew the
cream-coloured velvet drapes closed, and the young woman closed
the blinds at the back. Now, in the dull light of morning excluded,
48
Art's heart raced. His breathing kept pace. Turning to face one then
the other, Art watched in spasms of terror as the young couple
peeled the skin back from their shiny metallic faces.

49
A Lighthouse Tale of Passing Moment

The Flannan Isles are scattered at the end of the world, at least
from a Scottish perspective looking out to the west over the North
Atlantic. Six hundred miles to the northwest is Iceland. Greenland is
an additional 700 miles away, and Labrador is nearly 2,000 miles
on the other side of the ocean. The seven islets and the multitude
of skerries are part of an archipelago in the Outer Hebrides off the
northwest coast of Scotland. It is a lonely place, and it is a stormy
place. In the winter, the mountainous ocean waves and the gale
force winds are bitterly cold and deadly.

In 1899, the lighthouse of the Flannan Isles became operational, it

having been commissioned four years earlier to protect sailors and
their cargo from the deadly rocks and reefs that had claimed the
lives of so many in these frigid, treacherous waters where titanic
gale-driven waves would smash wooden sailing ships to smither-
eens.

In December of 1900, the three keepers of the lighthouse were re-

ported to have disappeared ... vanished with no trace that has been
discovered to this day. Their disappearance remains a mystery, but
there is no shortage of proffered explanations. The 2018 the British
psychological thriller, The Vanishing, is the mariner's tale of stolen
golden and murder teased from the known facts and folklore of the
Eilean Mór disappearance. Nearly six score years earlier, a rescue
party from the SS Hesperus (not Longfellow's ill-fated schooner
shipwrecked on a snowy Atlantic night off Norman's Woe) tele-
graphed the Northern Lighthouse Board (NLB) responsible for
navigation along Scotland's craggy coastline that the island and
lighthouse were deserted and concluded that the "[p]oor fellows
they must been blown over the cliffs or drowned trying to secure a
crane or something like that." This was Boxing Day 1900, 11 days

50
after the lighthouse had been reported unlit by the Archtor steamer
en route from Philadelphia to Edinburgh.

Photo 4: Flannan Isle Keepers and NLB Superintendent (1900)

Drawing from the limited evidence at hand, the Board's investiga-

tion directed by Superintendent Robert Muirhead concluded that
the most likely explanation was that the lighthouse keepers "had all
gone down on the afternoon of Saturday, 15 December to the prox-
imity of the West landing, to secure the box with the mooring ropes,
etc and that an unexpectedly large roller had come up on the Is-
land, and a large body of water going up higher than where they
were and coming down upon them had swept them away with re-
sistless force."

Other accounts of varying believability include internecine and mur-

derous strife among the 'wickies,' ghost ships of the Seven Hunters
51
(a local name for the islands, which locals said 'hunted' ships), and
alien abductions, but one that has failed to attract serious attention
attributes the disappearance to the British-German arms race that
was just taking off in the 1890s. The Imperial German Navy under
Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz of the new German Empire was gearing
up to challenge the naval supremacy of Britain whose own naval
policy objective as of 1889 was to maintain naval superiority to the
combined naval strength of its two closest rivals. During World War
I, Tirpitz masterminded the strategy of unrestricted submarine war-
fare in order to project Germany's naval power beyond European
waters in answer to the superiority of Britain's surface fleet.

In December 1900, a merchant vessel, commandeered by the Im-

perial German Navy, was reconnoitering the North Atlantic. At
Eilean Mór it dispatched a dinghy to obtain fresh lamb and mutton
knowing that lighthouse keepers on the remote western isles had to
raise their own livestock. The German sailors encountered resis-
tance but as they were armed the keepers were easily subdued.
The animals were slaughtered and the fresh meat was taken to the
ship along with the keepers, who were now prisoners. On boarding
the German ship, the captain assured the keepers that they would
be freed unharmed upon reaching the shores of Canada.[1]

After setting course for Iceland, the ship lost communication with its
port in Wilhelmshaven. It had disappeared in a mid-December
North Atlantic storm of great fury and duration that caused much
damage to Eilean Mór from bottom to top indicating seas of up-
wards of 100 feet. Waves of that height would easily have
swamped the German vessel.

Records of the ship's disappearance are unreliable as the German

Navy of the period was intent on keeping its mission secret for fear
of inflaming anti-German sentiment in North America at a time
when Germany's defences were not altogether sufficient to protect
52
against being Copenhagened by the Royal Navy. And so the mys-
tery of the Flannan Isles Lighthouse is in fact part of a much greater
mystery—the disappearance of an unidentified German merchant
vessel in 1900 somewhere in the vicinity of the Scottish Hebrides.

Meanwhile, in the 21st century lighthouses are passing into obso-

lescence. While these sentinels on the coast entertain us with their
histories and romance, they simply are not commercially mission
critical. With technological innovations—computer automation and
satellite-based global positioning systems, balance-sheet econom-
ics has rendered the lighthouse and its rough-hewn keepers cost-
inefficient and superfluous notwithstanding the tens of thousands of
lives saved, thereby hastening the end of part of our common his-
tory of the sea—the seafarers' beacon, mysterious, awe-inspiring,
and hopeful.

Ironically, the same silicon-based technology that has facilitated the

redundancy of lighthouses and their keepers worldwide saving
governments high-profile yetpaltry sums of money—the low-
hanging fruit—has also enabled the modern pirates of finance to
evade taxes by hiding their 'gold' in offshore accounts and behind
tailor-made tax avoidance legislation, aided and abetted by their
political servants and their retinue of moneymen.

However, the announcing of the end of the lighthouse era may be

premature as the vulnerability of satellite-based guidance systems
to terrorist or state-sponsored cyberwarfare may produce a resur-
gence in the strategic value of lighthouses as global shipping will
for the foreseeable future continue to be fundamental to the
economies of Earth. And who knows but what the keepers them-
selves may return as the magic and mystery of the lighthouse are
rekindled.

53
 Notes

[1] Eighteen years later, as part of Germany's U-boat campaign in

the North Atlantic, a German submarine off the coast of New
Brunswick near the mouth of the Bay of Fundy sank the timber-
laden Dornfontein, a four-masted schooner in the Canadian mer-
chant marine that had just set sail for South Africa (a WWI ally,
albeit somewhat reluctant after the Boer War) from its home port of
Saint John. The Dornfontein crew were taken prisoner aboard the
submarine and much to their surprise served blueberry pie from
freshly-picked Nova Scotia blueberries. The Canadians were set
afloat in dories after five hours on board the submarine and were
picked up by the keepers of the Gannet Rock Lighthouse at the
mouth of the Bay ... in good health save for the one sailor who was
shot in the knee for refusing der Blaubeer-Streuselkuchen which he
claimed—to his loss—was poisoned. Today, there are no longer
any lighthouse keepers on Gannet Rock.

54
A Rushed Conclusion

The blizzard blowing from the northeast across Lake Ontario did
not augur a safe or comfortable journey from Upper Canada's capi-
tal, York (now Toronto), to the Presqu'ile peninsula, site of the new
district town to the east. The captain, Lieutenant Thomas Paxton, a
British naval officer, expressed strong reservations, but the dignitar-
ies of the fledgling colony of Upper Canada (now Ontario) were
insistent, and the captain was threatened with a court martial. The
prisoner had to be transported immediately to the new court-
house/jail in Presqu'ile in order to meet the demands of justice in
the case of one Ogetonicut of the Ojibwe people, the accused mur-
derer of a white man, a Hudson's Bay trader.

Photo 5: H.M.S. Speedy by C.H.J. Snider

55
The year was 1804 and it was a cold October day. Aboard the
Speedy—one of the hastily-constructed 60-foot, two-masted
schooners armed with 4 cannon that were built to counter the threat
posed by the newly independent United States of America—were
some of Upper Canada's political elites: the High Constable, the
Solicitor-General, a judge from the Court of King's Bench, a Lieu-
tenant in the York Militia, a justice of the peace, and a defence
attorney and member of the House of Assembly. The presence of
so many important figures from the young colony reflected a grim
reality, viz. that the case of the Ojibwe man was all but decided. His
trial was to be a singular moment in the demonstration of British
dominion over the new district of Newcastle (now eastern Ontario).
Six handwritten copies of the colony's new constitution were on
board to formally legitimate jurisdiction.

On that evening, the Speedy disappeared, and to this day the

wreck of the Speedy has not been discovered. Only a chicken coop
and a compass box were ever washed ashore. Though claims to
the contrary have been made, no definitive record of the shipwreck
has been accepted. The explanations of the shipwreck are varied
and conjectural.

Among the attempts to explain the disappearance and probable

sinking of the Speedy, the leading contender appears to be that the
bonfires lit at the tip of the Presqu'ile peninsula failed to penetrate
the heavy snowfall and guide the ship to the narrow channel while
gale force winds carried the ship away from the point and further
out into the lake. There it likely struck an underwater rock—the
Devil's Horseblock, a granite pinnacle rising up from the lake floor
to within inches of the surface—that had been spotted in 1803 but
never charted. When the ship hit the rock, its hull would have been
breached dooming the vessel, its crew, and its contingent of promi-
nent personages. The strike powered by the winds and waves of
the wintry storm would likely have been forceful enough to dislodge
56
the top of the granite rock, and its ensuing collapse and sinking
would conceivably have triggered a sufficiently strong whirlpool that
would have easily sucked the crippled ship under. Subsequent at-
tempts to locate the granite pinnacle or its remains have failed,
which lends some support to this account.

Another account has it that the gales spun the ship around and sent
it careening deeper into the centre of the lake somewhere between
Presqu'ile Point and the southern shore in upper New York state.
Magnetic anomalies in the area—sometimes referred to as the
Sophiasburgh Triangle—may have contributed to the ship's loss of
direction and eventual sinking. Based on this premise, a much lar-
ger part of eastern Lake Ontario would have had to be searched to
find the underwater wreck, so it should not be surprising that the
more precisely targeted searches conducted to date have failed.

Perhaps the most entertaining theory was proposed in the 2014

thesis of a Kingston ESL instructor and Cultural Studies' student of
First Nations' mythology at Queen's University, entitled 'Mythologi-
cal Legends of the Great Lakes.' According to Trisha Palmer,
shipwrecks in the Great Lakes, particularly at the eastern end of
Lake Ontario near the St. Lawrence River—the so-called Marys-
burgh Vortex—are physical manifestations of disturbances in the
spiritual realm characterized by fantastic creatures with mystical
powers. One of the Ojibwe's lake monsters is Mishipeshu, a dragon
whose head resembles a large cat with horns. Mishipeshu is said to
be responsible for the powerful storm waves and whirlpools that
have seized ships and plunged them into the deep, dark, cold wa-
ters of Lake Superior. According to the Seneca, an Iroquois Nation,
Gaasyendietha, the meteor dragon, hunts the waters of Lake On-
tario, and is, for Ms. Palmer, as good a proximate cause of the
Speedy's demise as any that has been proposed in the past two
centuries. Some hitherto undiscovered, and still unauthenticated,
tape recordings of Seneca oral history mention a legendary under-
57
water monster in the eastern waters of Lake Ontario near Prince
Edward County, an island severed by the Murray Canal in the
1880s to provide a safer and more direct route alternative to the is-
land's rocky southern coastline. The lighthouse on the top of the
Presqu'ile peninsula, built in 1840, lights the way to the western end
of the canal and provides the very beacon that was missing on that
perilous evening on the 2nd Monday of October in 1804 when all
souls aboard the Speedy were lost.

All the above and more, including a two-hour documentary on the

Graveyard of the Great Lakes can be found at the United Empire
Loyalists' Museum in Picton on Trafalgar Road between Ye Old
Sailor's Arm and Treadwell's Fish and Chips. In addition, the
Presqu'ile and Quinte Bay Area Chambers of Commerce, Triple-A
members of the BBB, recommend Captain Samuel's three-hour
tour from the east end of the Murray Canal through the Bay of
Quinte around the island of Prince Edward County and back
through the canal by way of Presqu'ile Bay. More shipwreck mys-
teries are related by the captain, an ancient but gregarious nautical
folklorist, as the tour boat skirts the ghostly northern coast of Lake
Ontario.

58
The Ghosts of Skerryvore

At the south end of the Hebrides about 100 miles out to sea west of
Glasgow and 100 miles north of Derry (Londonderry) lies Skerry-
vore, from the Gaelic Sgeir Mhòr (big rock). Skerry is a common
term for a rock that surfaces from the underwater reefs around the
northern British Isles. Completed and operational since 1844
stands the Skerryvore Lighthouse, tallest of the Scottish light-
houses, a gracefully tapered cylindrical granite sea tower 156 feet
tall with a 42-foot diameter base and a 16-foot diameter apex. The
interlocking granite blocks form a solid frustum up to 26 feet after
which the walls are 9.5 feet thick gradually narrowing towards the
top of the tower. This tower was built with lessons learned from one
of Britain's first offshore lighthouses, the first Eddystone lighthouse,

Photo 6: Skerryvore, 19th century engraving, via Wikimedia Commons

59
which was swept off its rock near the Cornish coast during the
Great Storm of 1703.

Alan Stevenson from the engineering Stevenson clan—his nephew,

Robert Louis, author of Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, being the notable excep-
tion and the only one in five generations of Stevenson men—
designed the lighthouse, it being one of 13 Scottish lighthouses for
which he could claim credit.

The waters of Skerryvore are notoriously dangerous due to the

fierceness of the unchecked Atlantic climate to the west and the
shallow, rocky reefs off the coast of Scotland and Ireland. In 1814
on a survey of the area, Sir Walter Scott, in the company of Robert
Stevenson, chief engineer of the Northern Lighthouse Board de-
scriptively reported

a long ridge of rocks (chiefly under water), on which the

tide breaks in a most tremendous style. There appear a
few low broad rocks at one end of the reef, which is about
a mile in length. These are never entirely under water
though the surf dashes over them. Pull through a very
heavy swell with great difficulty, and approach a tremen-
dous surf dashing over black pointed rocks... It will be a
most desolate position for a Lighthouse.1

Later that year the British Parliament passed legislation for the
creation of a lighthouse on Skerryvore; however, work didn't com-
mence until almost two-and-a-half decades latter owing to the
formidable task of constructing a giant lighthouse on a rocky reef in

1
Much of the material included in this account of the Skerryvore ghost ship—excepting
the ghost ship itself— is sourced from Alan Stevenson's Account of the Skerryvore Light-
house published in 1848 on behalf of the Commissioners of the Northern Lighthouses.
60
the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and the fact that construction of
lighthouses of lesser difficulty were of comparable urgency. Never-
theless, a lighthouse for Skerryvore would have to be built, as this
treacherous reef had accounted for more than 30 shipwrecks be-
tween 1790 and 1844 according to Rev. Neil Maclean, the Minister
of Tyree and Coll, a keen observer of the maritime happenings near
his island. But that number was thought to be far too low as many
foreign ships passing through the North Irish Channel likely met
their end on these reefs though little remained to prove the wrecks
as the rough seas around Skerryvore are powerful and frequent
enough to sweep and keep the rocks clean. Engineer Stevenson
asserted as much when he wrote, "Very many vessels were
wrecked on this dangerous reef whose names could never be
learned, and of which nothing but portions of the drift wood or cargo
came ashore; and there have, no doubt, been many shipwrecks of
which not a single trace has been left."

Integral to the maritime function of the lighthouse were the light-

house keepers, nicknamed 'wickies' as one of their crucial duties
was to trim the wicks to keep the lights atop the tower bright and
clean as it reflected through the complex of lenses—polished daily
along with all the brassworks—that propagated the light miles out to
sea.2 Three keepers were assigned to the remote lighthouses—a

2
The following stanzas are drawn from 'Brasswork: The Lighthouse Keeper's Lament' by
Frederic W. Morong, Jr., a New England district machinist in the U.S. Lighthouse Service
th
in the early 20 century.

I dig, scrub and polish, and work with a might,

And just when I get it all shining and bright,
In comes the fog like a thief in the night:
Good-by Brasswork....

The lamp in the tower, reflector and shade,

The tools and accessories pass in parade
As a matter of fact the whole outfit is made
61
built-in redundancy or fail-safe—so that in case of injury or illness,
the rotation of the watch could continue unbroken. Relief from
boredom and maintenance of sanity were also factors justifying
three keepers on an isolated rock in the ocean, all to ensure, in the
words of Longfellow:

[That] the great ships sail outward and return,

Bending and bowing o'er the billowy swells,
And ever joyful, as they see it burn,
They wave their silent welcomes and farewells.3

In the early days of the Skerryvore Lighthouse, stormbound for

three months, with no company but seals and gulls, and ever-
diminishing rations, the three keepers struggled to maintain their
sanity and their strength to keep the light shining for the long nights
of November and the foghorn sounding in the dense fogs that often
swallowed the light. Always on the lookout for ships—a keeper's
obsession—they finally spied one ... or rather heard sounds from
one during a particularly ferocious gale that had risen up unexpect-
edly from the southwest. Visibility was too poor to discern the
shape of anything in the distance, but the sounds of screams could
be made out despite the roaring winds and crashing waves, and
then a single cannon shot punctuated nature's onslaught. To the
keepers, this signalled a vessel in distress—a vessel that had likely
been driven by the heavy weather onto the submerged reef.

The next morning, the keepers scoured the main rock as well as
nearby rocks that could be reached safely by dinghy in seas that
were still unsettled, but they discovered no signs of ship wreckage
or crew, only masses of tangled seaweed strewn about on the slip-

Of Brasswork.

3
This extract is from 'The Lighthouse' (1849), a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
62
pery rocks. Unable to communicate with the shore station on
Tyree, the keepers had no one with whom they could confirm or
disconfirm what the three of them had heard the previous night.
Only when the lighthouse tender arrived three days later with the
new rotation of lighthouse keepers did the men finally have a
chance to relate their experience. Their haggard and emaciated
forms were more disturbing than the tale they related, as such
phenomena had often been related by keepers too long isolated
and confined to a rock in the ocean. More often than not they were
phantoms ... or appeared to be.

Nevertheless, the report had to be treated seriously, and so it was

dispatched to the Northern Lighthouse Board where an investiga-
tion was initiated. The disappearance of a registered vessel in the
southern Hebrides during that late November storm could not be
confirmed, though given the history of shipwrecks off the coast of
western Scotland, a shipwreck could not be discounted. For a cou-
ple of weeks, some of the sensationalist press in Britain carried the
story of a ghost ship that tormented lighthouse keepers in the re-
mote Atlantic lighthouses of the western Scottish coast.

None of the keepers who heard the sounds of drowning men that
night—men who were never seen whole or otherwise—ever re-
turned to the sea. They all settled inland. The principal keeper
purchased a share in a naval store in Glasgow; the assistant mar-
ried and raised sheep near the English border, while the occasional
keeper secured an apprenticeship with a blacksmith, who had once
served in the Royal Navy at the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

Today, the lighthouse at Skerryvore is automated, and GPS-aided

navigation has become the primary means of steering shipping
around and past the underwater dangers of the sea. Sailors are still
guided from the sky, though now from man-made beacons in
space, and computer operators keep the lights on ... just in case.
63
The Resolute Disaster

At the beginning of the 20th century, commercial shipping through

the Great Lakes was dangerous. It still can be—the indomitable
Edmund Fitzgerald went down in 1975—but inland navigation
through the Lakes is much safer than it was a century ago. Har-
bours and navigation channels were not always sufficiently deep
and free of submerged hazards, and detailed underwater maps
were incomplete and inaccurate. Rocky shoals and cross-current
whirlpools have for centuries been the bane of seafarers and—
since the colonization of North America—their inland water coun-
terparts.

On a stormy late-November night in 1906, the coal-laden Resolute

on its way to make a delivery for the Toronto Electric Light Com-
pany sank just outside the Toronto harbour. The ship was leaking
after enduring severe gales at the western end of Lake Ontario, and
heavy weather off the Toronto Islands prevented entry through the
Eastern Gap forcing the captain to sail around the southern edge of
the islands and attempt an entry into the harbour through the shal-
lower Western Gap.

The western entrance, however, was too shallow as the Resolute

was drawing too much water to pass safely across the rocky shoal,
so the captain anchored the ship off the westernmost island, hoping
to ride out the storm, but the leaking turned to flooding and the
ship's pumps were no match for the incoming water.

Meanwhile waves were crashing over the long, exposed deck of the
136' steamer—a type commonly referred as 'coffins' owing to their
vulnerability to severe weather—and washing large quantities of
coal into the lake. The ship had to be abandoned, so both lifeboats
were launched, one to port and the other to starboard. As soon as
the first was filled with crew members, high swells and strong winds
64
capsized the craft, and all aboard, though outfitted with life belts,
drowned within sight of shore. The second lifeboat narrowly es-
caped being sucked under as the Resolute went down with the
captain and engineer riding the cabin roof which had been ripped
off the ship until even this makeshift raft was severed in two. One
survived—the captain, John Sullivan.

Photo 7: Resolute, Midland, Ontario pre-1906

In a front-page editorial, The Globe (now The Globe and Mail) pub-
lished this:

The appalling loss of life through the wreck of the Resolute

is the more affecting because it happened at our very
doors.... Within sight and sound of this great city, these
men perished for lack of the least share of that concern
65
 freely expended in many directions in the interest of those
who need is nothing compared with that of the toilers of the
unsalted seas They died because of the callousness with
which the responsibility of providing an efficient life-saving
service has been shifted from one quarter to another, and
their beaten and disfigured bodies cast up on the beach
cry aloud. (Globe editorial, November 23, 1906)

In recounting this history, it is worth emphasizing that most of the

blame is deservedly laid at the doorstep of Canada, a fledgling na-
tion with the usual shortcomings of inexperienced governance—in
this case, the federal government's dithering over dredging the To-
ronto harbour to accommodate larger vessels of commerce.
Nevertheless, there are reasons to believe that the insidious resid-
ual anti-American sentiments of United Empire Loyalists and their
sympathizers may have contributed significantly to the deaths of
the six men.

It is no secret that the Ontario—formerly the British colony of Upper

Canada—and the Toronto of the day were overtly and overly pro-
British to the point that Canadian soldiers had followed Britain to
the southern end of Africa to fight in the turn-of-the-century Boer
War—a war, incidentally, opposed by Quebecois who looked on the
South African Dutch as a suppressed linguistic minority not unlike
themselves.

Recent research, by a doctoral student in anthropological limnology

at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Olivier Mboukou, from
Africa's Great Lakes region, evidences notes and correspondence
from reporters and officials of the period documenting pronounced
antipathy towards Americans (Yankees) as well as uncorroborated
oral histories of seamen and dockworkers, which coalesce around
a common view that, in fact, no rescue was attempted because
none was ordered. The irony is that the Resolute was a Canadian

66
steamer, although it had left the American port of Erie, Pennsyl-
vania and counted Americans among its crew.
Among the pre-publication scraps of history set down come com-
ments such as these from two of the survivors:

I never saw a country such as this. No appliances for sav-

ing life in a city like this. Here I was drenching wet and no
place to poke my head into or get a dry stitch. When I
came out of the harbourmaster’s house I heard a man cry-
ing for help in a heart-breaking way and I took a boat out to
search for him.

They refused to take us in. I was a lucky man to land with

25 cents in my pocket. They gave us drink but sent us
down the road to a hotel, soaked to the skin and so
numbed with cold we could barely move. Had this been in
the United States the crew would have been furnished with
dry clothes and warm food.

And this for ship that was "a regular in the Toronto harbour." At the
beginning of the 20th century it was no safe haven for mariners
from all parts. No safe haven from "the fury of the great gale of the
lakes no man may describe" as the Globe editorial put it.

For the crew of the Resolute, their Scylla was the rocky shoal of the
Western Gap, and their Charybdis was created by the Great Lakes'
gales of November. Though land was near, there was no rescue
and no safe harbour ... not in Toronto ... not in 1906.

67
On Rügen

The chalk-white cliffs against the backdrop of Baltic blue is an en-

during image of Rügen. Another aspect is the island outline's
resemblance to an east-facing mythical dragon having just been

Map 1: Rügen Island 1685, Alain Manesson Mallet,

via Wikimedia Commons

68
scalped. At the time Saxo Grammaticus, the 12 th century Danish
historian in the service of Absalon, Archbishop of Lund, was writing
about Rügen in Book Fourteen of Gesta Danorum (The History of
the Danes), the "connection between Rügen and the island of Wit-
tow, on which Arkona stands, is cut off by a narrow sea channel,
which scarcely appears to reach the breadth of a river." In this 17th
century map, the 'scalp' is attached to the rest of the island of
Rügen as is the case today, so that the island of Wittow is now the
Wittow Peninsula on whose northeastern tip are the lighthouses—
the three-storey Schinkel Tower built by Prussia in 1828 and the
adjacent, newer and taller lighthouse built by the German Empire in
1902. From the newer tower, the Danish island of Møn is visible on
clear days. Its beacon reaches 22 miles out to sea, i.e., within
range of the Arkona Basin wind farm to the northeast.

Map 2: Northern Germany, Gesta Danorum

Over the centuries, Rügen has been strategically important for

commerce and war due to its location on the southwest Baltic
coast, just east of the shipping lanes between the Baltic and North
seas bounded by Sweden, Germany, and Denmark. Ownership of
the island has passed through numerous hands—the Rani (a
69
Wendish or Slavic people) as early as the 9th century, the Danes
through the newly-established Principality of Rügen in the 12th cen-
tury, the Swedes at the end of the Thirty Years' War in 1648, the
French during the later years of the Napoleonic wars, the Prussians
after the conclusion of these wars in 1815, the German state from

Map 3: Scandinavia, Gesta Danorum

70
its inception in 1871 until the end of World War II, the German De-
mocratic Republic until 1990, and finally back to Germany where it
remains as part of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania.[1]

Shipping in the Baltic was dangerous throughout the Middle Ages

and beyond owing to stormy weather, shallow coastal waters, fre-
quent wars among kingdoms and the merchant cities of the
Hanseatic League, and piracy, some of the latter having been
state-sponsored. The shallow coastal waters of the northern coast-
line continue to be made shallower by the constant erosion of the
island's famous chalk cliffs. Today, more than two-thirds of the
footprint of the ancient Jaromarsburg temple-fortress of the Rani
has collapsed into the sea. Estimates place the average centenary
coastal recession at around 25 metres with the duration and inten-
sity of wave action at the base and rain saturation at the top being
the principal causes.

Looking back to medieval Rügen, the Baltic clime was harsh then,
too. As testimony to its severity, the strength of the powerful Rani
fleet was decimated in 1157 by a fierce storm that wrecked 1,500
ships and left Rügen vulnerable to King Valdemar and the Danes.
Describing maritime conditions at the time, Saxo relates that "the
seas were whipped into a fury and became so tempestuous that
neither harbour nor anchors could secure the royal [Danish] fleet
and prevent it from being dispersed and scattered over the deep."
As to the gruesomeness of the off-again, on-again Baltic wars, after
one battle, Saxo depicts the sea off Rügen as "hardly navigable ow-
ing to the welter of corpses."

In 1168, the Danes finally conquered the Rani and claimed Rügen
for the Kingdom of Denmark. The Jaromarsburg, naturally pro-
tected on three sides by cliffs "whose summit exceeded the
trajectory of an arrow shot from a crossbow" was burned to the
ground, as was the temple of Svantovit. The larger-than-life totem
71
of the Rani's deity of war and abundance, celebrated throughout
the Baltic region (reportedly with proto-Christian autos-de-fé), was
chopped into pieces and used as fuel for cooking the food for the
captive Rani. Completing the conquest, timber from the siege ma-
chines was re-purposed to construct a Christian church, giving rise
to Saxo's remark that the Danes had transformed the weapons of
war against the Rani "to saving their souls." King Valdemar and
Bishop Absalon—the Christian Vikings—had finally accomplished
the destruction of the enemy fortifications on Rügen, and the re-
cently converted Danes had eliminated the pagan religion in
accordance with the Pope's encyclicals, all further to the Dane's
more immediate objective of establishing a stronger presence in the
Baltic.

More than 850 years later, Rügen and the Baltic are at peace, but
in the history of the Baltic that is a recent development. However,
the sea is now the setting for an era of different warfare—the war
against nature. The Baltic Sea is one of the world's most polluted
bodies of water. It is a sea nearly enclosed and cut off from the re-
circulating currents of the Atlantic, and it has been filled with the
carcases of thousands of ships over hundreds of years, including
the mysterious sinking of the ferry, Estonia, in 1994 in which more
than 800 people drowned. Was it a force majeure or an errant post-
Soviet submarine? The underwater wreck is a gravesite, and on-
site investigations have been disallowed by the Swedish govern-
ment, so the answer is more than just elusive.

Since the mid-20th century, the Baltic has become one of the
world's great dumping grounds for conventional and chemical muni-
tions from the two World Wars. The waters surrounding Rügen
were convenient hiding places for conventional weapons, and the
Gotland Deep, because of its greater depth, became a notorious
dump for World War I mustard gas deposits. As not all of these off-
shore waste sites have been mapped, particularly in the case of
72
corrosive and explosive chemical weapons, there is an ongoing
threat to the Nord Stream offshore gas pipelines from Russia to
Germany. And that is not the full extent of the environmental war on
the Baltic, as there is nuclear waste from the east, raw sewage
from the east, not to mention tons of useless parts from stripped-
down vehicles being shipped to the east.

Map 4: Ammunition Dumping Sites via Coastal Wiki

But all that is beneath the surface and out of sight. From Kap Ark-
ona, tourists can, and hundreds of thousands a year do, still see
the blue Baltic, flat to the horizon where, above sea level anyway,
"there is nowhere to hide and plenty of room for vision." Neverthe-
less, the "zinc-gray breakers" and the "seagull's metal cry" signal
an ominous and encroaching threat ... this time from the east.

73
 Notes

[1] Recent unpublished, research by Irving Meyer, an author in the

historical horror genre who also traces his ancestry to Rügen, sug-
gests that the transitional periods of the island's history were often
accompanied by preternatural phenomena. Meyer cites Saxo's ref-
erence to "a devil ... seen departing from the inmost shrine in the
guise of a black animal" as Jaromarsburg was burned to the ground
in 1168. Other evidence, such as the shadowy vision encountered
by Charlemagne, is somewhat less rigorously documented. Never-
theless, Meyer adduces numerous instances where mysterious and
ephemeral figures—often grotesque half-man, half-beast crea-
tures—were witnessed and the encounters committed to oral
histories and subsequently to a literate person, usually a church-
man who secretly kept records on heretical topics. One of Meyer's
most incisive observations is that, in all cases, the visions were re-
garded as indigenous.

74