Codes of Survival - a series of combination Photographs/photograms on the Subantarctic Islands of New Zealand - 1993 - © Lloyd Godman

Codes of Survival -Scripts - a series of short factionalized stories based on historical events in the Subantarctic Islands written by Lloyd Godman to accompany the exhibition and installation - 1993 - © Lloyd Godman

Codes of Survival - Scripts

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1460  - Off the Edge of the World

Further they wafted on the ocean. Astray with no real sense of accurate bearing other  than the fact they were sluggishly moving on the slip  stream of a current, away from their wish and  towards the mystery of the unknown.  The craft was fit to sail, and ever sail was set; by the wind it moved at all not, just gently bobbed in the slightest of swells,  like a tightly corked leather shoe on  a useless oily surface. For some weeks now the ocean was flat; flat as a mill pond, for not a breath fell upon the oiled surface to stir the stifling heat.  And this lay heavy, like a ballast stone, sapping their strength, binding the sailors down, frustrating them with an impossible quandary.  Above, the sails that had taken the strain  of many an earnest wind offered little more than colour to the sky. 

A contrast of yellow  and red, the cloth hung limp against a dominating vibration of blue that penetrated their every sense. The Caravel was off course, this they knew, but how far into uncharted waters was vague even to imagine. Food supplies had dwindled all too fast and they all now wished for the morsel of some long since disposed of meal, while the remaining water that  seemed fit to drink, was rationed  to the smallest of measures. Weeks before the horses had died under the alarming conditions, and though some food was obtained from their thin carcases, they soon decomposed to a state of uselessness and had to be flung over the side. It seemed an incongruous act to dispose of them this way when they were short of food, but they knew of  greater dangers in eating rotten meat.

Now, they were all reduced by this lack of proper sustenance and  almost unrecognizable, slim shadows of themselves they had become. But worse, they
dared guess at the gaunt ghosts they would wane to if there was no reprieve from this fatal plight.  Their worst fears and apprehension of an ocean voyage were now tangible,  they could all feel this in their  stomachs and hearts.  With a glance at each others faces they sensed a  vision of themselves, a frightful vision, for few were now stouthearted enough  to gaze upon the mirror and the grimace of a comrade told all. Famish, they had  known and survived before, but this was different, it stretched them physically  to the limit, it scared the most dauntless among them, it seemed even to the strongest of mind that a harrowing  death was not far away.

Though they had searched with every eye of every man, that could raise a head, there was no  land to sight, not a speck.  Not a sign of earth, plant, bird or beast in any direction across this watery expanse, though all the time the heat haze as a  shimmer on the water played tricks with their tearful eyes, and their eyes to their minds. For the mind can be a trickster of the most amazing imagery when in this state of half dead.  The confusion of the real, meshes as one with the wanderings of the mind. So often land had floated  low on the horizon and as they approached the lushness of a country enriched with luxuriant green growth and a promise of cool fresh water running in a rush to the sea. It would never arrive! In a flash it would inevitably vanish from their course, their grasp and vision or bound further off into the distance as a dog that will not head a masters call.  Only the salty blue of seawater that laughed at their them and their dilemma, lay in every direction. It permeated their every sense as if a claim on all their souls it had already made. Eventually, despair overcame any hope of return and  as the hull was pushed unmercifully on the currents  further into the unknown; all aboard expected the  worst. Somehow, the best attainable prospect with out doubt could be that of a new land, unfamiliar, uncharted, and even inhospitable, but dry land,  perhaps  even Terra Incognita the fabulous super continent of the south. They could concede the fate of living with a new and foreign people, perhaps for the rest of their days.  In a culture primitive and barbaric populace away from their companions, away from their kin, they could concede that over  death.

Or as some believed from the stories of years gone by, would the Caravel just simply fall off  the edge of the world into an unknown abyss where they presumed this ocean of water would fall with them forever cascading downward to hell?  Then there was the certainty of hideous sea monsters that writhed repugnant awaiting in the depths of the uncharted to attack and devour them in one gigantic swallow, ship and all.  With cavernous throats that could engulf the world if they so desired, they lay in wait for men such as them.  For  they had all listened to these stories from the old salts of the fabulous creatures that manifested themselves from the conundrum of the deep. 'Ghouls of the ocean lurked in the depths',  some would say.

While for others it was giant squid like monsters as  large as one thousand Caravels, with razor teeth,  a breath of fire and green with anger. These creatures  were as the drawings that swam the unknown edge of the maps they used, and all this all played hell on  their minds.  Would they too learn the fate of ships that never return; would they all become ghosts of the oceans lost in the boiling  mass of time? Gobbled up by the
unseen Leviathans of the unknown billows  of this endless  brine.

Within the week, a sight no eye should see, the  weaker lay in death below, and it was no revelation  when the first past away during the night. This man  had been sick for a large part of the voyage with a ship's sickness which all else on board had  managed to elude, and his ill health with the effect of the pitiful rations hastened his last breath. But from then on, the hurt was real, the pain was true, when one by one the rest began to end the struggle and perish.  Till the rate of their deaths was so fast, the living had not in their limbs the strength or in their minds the will, to bury at sea the corpses now dead on the decks.  Delirious they just living lay about the carnage amid the stench of the  deceased as the Caravel speed along now in a fresh breeze, the  water slapping the planking and the blocks banging  uncontrolled on the decks.

But now the minds of the few still left as living,  cared not for the speed or the direction, of  this lumbering hull, for they were too far from logic and too close to a final demise to fathom their condition or salvation. The breeze sharpened to  a strong wind with the creaking timbers and strain of rope as the death cries echoed  the agony of those delirious few still alive, for this was the wind they had needed all too long ago and now none had mind or strength to steer a chosen course. About the decks lay only skeletons, ghosts of  bleached bone. Souvenirs of the flesh and blood that had walked the decks in months before. Bones that had fragmented across the deck as  a tale of the storms  at sea this vessel had self-navigated. 

There were the roundness of skulls, the long, straight branch like bones and the grace of the rib bones curve, all piled together in evidence of their rolling across the decks with the pitch of the sea. In confused heaps they now lay, lodged with other debris,  tight in the  corners of the deck structure fused in an illogical, abstract weld. Devoid of flesh and the substance of life, these macabre remains rode the waves of the mighty  southern storms, where the vessel had now found her way, on a craft with no mind or logic other than the will and currents of the ocean that held her afloat. Up the swells, down the troughs, through the foam across the chop, forever onward. The sails now in rips, tears and tatters; the ropes broken, snapped or rotted, the timbers below the ocean's lap, grew green with weed, this vessel persisted upon her way in an infinite sea through times of night and day, storm and calm, rain and  calm, forever on.  

For it  was years and more than a thousand of leagues of open ocean before this wooden vessel  approached any land fall at all;  not off the edge of the world,  not the serpent monsters of the deep, not a super continent, but a small group of islands in an as yet unknown southern ocean.

Ahead, great black vertical cliffs  through the rainy  winds and sights no human eye had seen. This ship now on a collision course  with the solidness of land they once prayed for just misses the black teeth of basalt cliffs and in astonishing speed is carried through a narrow gut into a passage between islands of human isolation on a tidal torrent of flowing sea currents. It turns and twists in a wild bobbing dance. But this miss with such hard black rocks is to no avail, as inside the gut, a submerged, jaggered reef catches the tender oak planks and tears with a crack and a shudder, a fatal line through the failing timber right to her heart. With a rush of water to her cavities, quickly she sinks and with the time of  tide and storm smashes into ever smaller  fragments, that sink or float in a carnage of  shipwreck debris that scatter far and wide.

In 200 years little is left but a few remains washed high by the violent storms. Perhaps some of the  iron fittings that had been attached to the broken timbers, rough with layers of rust biting to their core. A quadrans vetus reduced by the fury of the waves to a shabby incomprehendable board with all the necessary fittings torn off. An astrolabio, a small misshapen part of an oil lamp from the bita'cora, the twisted remains of the nautical quadrant, the ballestilla, the aupolleta, the clay fragments of an old urn, an ink stand, maybe a silver coin or two; who  could tell? The last metal braids of a cord used to tie up the lavishness of a forgotten cape. The bent remains of a small universal equinoctial dial, the brass, rotten but rich with a green patina and the intricate lines of the engravings now unrecognizable.

Perhaps some small items of personal possessions of the men who once graced her decks. Small blue glass beads wearing down smooth, with the gravel of the beach. A tiny bell once fastened to a  leather belt. All precious and each with its own use.  Now buried from view under the rocks and sands of the coast line lie the only evidence of the ghost ship that sailed off the edge of the world. Or perhaps they all lie at  the bottom, submerged beside the heavy  ballast stones that dropped straight down once free  from the disintegrating hull.