Mayken listens to the nighttime noises of the ship. Nearest to her: Imke’s snores. Farther away: feasting in the Great Cabin, muffled roars and shouts. It’s the skipper’s night. And the constant rhythmic creak of the ship. It’s a plain, easy-sailing night. The night ship rocks everyone in her round wooden belly.
I find Jess Kidd’s writing incredibly engaging — the imaginative situations, the savoury characters, the plausibility of ghosts — and with The Night Ship, she brings her familiar sensibilities to bear on a fictionalised account of actual events. In 1629, the merchant ship The Batavia set sail for the Dutch East Indies (laden with riches, wealthy and poor passengers, and apparently, at least one monster), but never reached its destination. Foundering on a coral reef, the ship’s crew was able to ferry some two hundred souls to safety on nearby atolls; but between mutiny, mismanagement, megalomania, and murder, not many of those shipwrecked would live to tell their tale. In alternating storylines, Kidd tells the story of two children — a poor little rich girl who set sail on the fateful ship in the seventeenth century and a sad little boy who is brought to live with his fisherman Grandpa in 1989 — and beyond sharing time across the centuries on the same lonely spit of shingle and scrub, the experiences of these two children chime together in surprising and meaningful ways. Perhaps not quite as creatively dazzling as Kidd’s last (Things in Jars, which I simply adored), I was, nevertheless, more emotionally affected by The Night Ship (maybe because it’s about sad children, maybe because it is — at least in part — based on true and horrifying events) and I would give it 4.5 stars if I could but am happily rounding up. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
The child sails in a crowded boat to the end of the Zuyder Zee. Past the foreshores of shipyards and warehouses, past new stone houses and the occasional steeple, on this day of dull weather, persistent drizzle and sneaking cold. There are many layers to this child: undergarments, middle garments, and top garments. Mayken is made of pale skin and small white teeth and fine fair hair and linen and lace and wool and leather. There are treasures sewn into the seams of her clothing, small and valuable, like her.
Mayken van der Heuvel — who has recently lost her mother and is being sent across the world to the rich father she has never met; a great man, though perhaps not a nice man — is nine years old and considered a “fine lady”; to be treated with the respect of her station so long as she keeps to her place aft-the-mast. But being nine and out in the world for the first time, Mayken can’t help but explore belowdecks, where she makes friends with everyone from the kitchenboy to the barber-surgeon to an English soldier who tells her the legends of sea monsters. The stink and stars and superstitions of these sections were wondrously wrought.
The child sails in the carrier boat to Beacon Island. The boat left Geraldton at first light. Now, late morning, they are nearing their destination and sea and sky are dazzling blue. Gil is made of pale skin and red hair and thrifted clothes. His shoes, worn down on the outsides, lend an awkward camber to his walk. Old ladies like him, they think he’s old-fashioned. Truck drivers like him because he takes an interest in their rigs. Everyone else finds him weird.
Gil Hurley — who has recently lost his mother and is being sent to the middle of nowhere to live with the grandfather he’s rarely met; a gruff loner and unlikely guardian — is also nine years old; sensitive and undersized, Gil is warned to stick to his grandfather’s camp as the old man isn’t well-liked among the island’s small community. But being nine and on his own for the first time, Gil can’t help but gingerly explore his surroundings when the loud men are out at sea, and he makes tentative friends with a local woman, a scientist (who tells him stories of the famous Batavia shipwreck), and a friendly deckhand (who fills the boy in on local legends through story and song). Perhaps because it’s closer in time, Gil’s losses and struggles felt more tragic to me, and these sections tugged at my heart.
In each section, the children learn the tales of slippery shadow monsters — call it an enormous eel, Bunyip, the Bullebak — and I was repeatedly enchanted by stories that began like: There was once this village, just like any Dutch village, only unluckier. Vegetables grew spindly, the animals were sickly, and the people were ugly. Being nine, both Mayken and Gil absolutely believe in the possibility of supernatural monsters, but as the scientist in the 1980’s warns the boy:
“The greatest shame of humankind is the failure of the strong to protect the weak. We don’t need monsters, Gil, we are the monsters.”
There are many chimes and echoes between the children’s stories — which sometimes charmed me and sometimes felt a bit forced — but it did feel organic to witness the historical events in real time and then reconsider them through a modern child’s sensibilities:
Gil imagines the survivors. Everyday people who probably moaned about the weather and having to eat bony fish. Then they battered one another to death as the water ran out. In Birgit’s book there’s a picture of a skull with a piece knocked out. He was killed running away, they reckoned. If you listened to that skull, held it up to your ear like a seashell, you might hear the clashing of swords and gurgling, then three hundred and sixty years of nothing. Why wouldn’t the dead Dutch be pissed off when the fishermen arrived, and the scientists, stirring up their old bones, trying to tell their story?
Historical fiction overlaid with Jess Kidd’s knack for a spooky campfire tale; I lapped it all up.
