Tales of the Talking Picture

by Tom Slemen

  ‘Captain, there’s a man – a professor – on the wharf who says he wishes to see you.’ Richardson nodded and smiled to Mrs Briggs, who was seated at a rosewood table, sewing. At her mother’s feet on the floor, sat little Sophia, playing with a small wheeled wooden horse.

  ‘A professor wishes to see me?’ Captain Briggs placed a red satin ribbon in the Bible to mark the page and closed the well-read book gently.

  ‘Aye, a Professor Orme I believe he said sir.’ Richardson wiped his hanging rain-slicked fringe backwards over his head.

  ‘I know of no Professor Orme,’ Briggs said with bafflement, and got up off his comfortable chair to place the Bible among the six volumes of maritime law on the shelf. He donned his leather cap and followed Richardson up onto the deck. By now the showers had ended and a shaft of harsh November sunlight shined obliquely from the cumulus over New York.

  Orme watched Briggs and Richardson approach the ship’s rail.

  ‘I’m the captain. Why do you wish to see me?’ Briggs said to the wiry man in black.

  ‘I was informed by your friend Jabez Wilson, that you would be able to provide me with a passage to Genoa,’ said Professor Orme.

  Briggs returned a stern look. ‘It’s unlawful to take unrecorded passengers on board, and why on earth would Jabez Wilson refer you to me sir?’ Briggs was rather suspicious of the unknown man’s claims.

  ‘Brother Wilson assured me you would grant me this favour sir,’ Orme replied, and he entered into a seemingly mundane discourse about the layout of the ship and its navigational instruments, but hidden within the conversation were certain key words which Brother Briggs recognised and interpreted as only a Freemason could. Alby Richardson looked on with puzzled eyes, ignorant of the esoteric proceedings, and he was very taken aback by the captain’s complete change of heart, for the professor was quickly welcomed onto the ship. The Lorenzen brothers, who had come on deck to see what all the conversation was about, were ordered to lower the gantry and bring Professor Orme aboard.

  Captain Brigg’s went into his cabin and had a short conversation with his wife, who abandoned her needlework, put a heavy slate-grey coat on, and dressed Sophia in a little green pelisse before wrapping her in a carrying cloak. Mrs Briggs then took the child up onto the deck to take a last look at New York before the ship headed across the ocean, bound for Italy. The low sun breaking through the clouds projected a rainbow over the city, and little Sophia grinned at its multicoloured arc, which had a magical fascination for the two-year-old.

  During the absence of the mother and child, Briggs talked to Brother Orme in the cabin. ‘What is your business in Genoa?’ Briggs asked his new passenger.

  ‘I have no business there at all,’ Orme calmly admitted, ‘but I believe this ship will pass within six miles of Santa Maria Island in the Azores during the journey to Genoa.’

  ‘That is true,’ Briggs confirmed, and leaned forward in his chair, intrigued by Orme’s intentions.

  ‘Tell me captain, would it at all be possible for you to drop me off at Santa Maria for just a day?’ the learned man queried as he wiped the speckle of raindrops from his spectacles with a handkerchief.

  Briggs grimaced. ‘It’s possible, but probably out of the question professor. It is unlawful to use the ship’s longboat for any use beyond one of life preservation, and besides, I intend to run to a tight timetable in consequence of the two days lost to the storms.’

  ‘I accept your decision captain,’ Orme said, and he put his golden wire-frame spectacles back on, then picked up his damp fedora from his lap and fidgeted with it. Then he suddenly asked, ‘May I join you on this trip all the same?’

  ‘Whatever for?’ Briggs eyed the professor’s large trunk on the floor besides his guest’s chair. ‘What on earth do you want to visit an uninhabited island for anyway?’

  ‘To establish once and for all the true origins of mankind,’ Orme replied, and he opened the trunk.

  ‘What is all that paraphernalia?’ Briggs looked down at the unfamiliar jumble of shiny brass and chrome tubes, black boxes and gleaming lenses cosseted in folds of maroon velvet.

  ‘This is an invention of mine,’ Orme took a wooden box with faces the size of his hand. ‘This is a box camera, but when you attached this tubular arrangement of lenses to it, it allows me to photograph objects from a considerable distance.’

  With a sneer of condescension, Briggs watched the professor screw a brass cylinder into the box camera. ‘Pray, tell me how this camera of yours can unravel the origins of the human race.’

  ‘Have you read ever read a book called The Origin of the Species, by Charles Darwin?’ Briggs enquired, dismantling the early telephoto camera.

  ‘No sir I have not and never will, for that man is the Devil incarnate!’ Briggs announced in a thunderous voice. His eyes were protruding and they glared at Orme with seething detestation. ‘We did not spring forth from apes!’ Briggs shouted.

  Mrs Briggs and the Lorenzen brothers could hear the captain’s raised voice from up on deck.

  ‘Hear me out sir,’ Orme said, ‘for I too believe in the Great Architect, and I know in my heart and mind that we, and all things, spring from Him. I know we did not descend from primates, but I have evidence that man evolved from a fish-like creature.’

  ‘Enough! That sir, is blasphemy, and I will not tolerate sacrilegious liars on my ship!’ Briggs roared at the professor.

  Professor Orme smirked falsely, but shook from the anger welling up inside that was fuelled by the Bible-bashing mariner. ‘Have you ever read of the theory of recapitulation? I would hazard a guess and declare that you haven’t captain. In the womb, the embryo child develops gills like a fish at one point, but they disappear before birth.’

  Briggs quoted Ecclesiastes 11:5. ‘As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother’s womb, so you cannot understand the work of God, the maker of all things!’

  There followed a tense pause between the diametrically-opposed men, and the professor seized the hiatus to drive his theory home. ‘Captain, I have no intention of dissuading you from your faith, but I beseech you to take a look at something.’ Orme opened his trunk and took out a large Manila envelope. From the envelope he pulled out a photographic print of a very strange creature and held it up to the captain’s face.

  In all of his years at sea, Briggs had never seen such a marine monstrosity. ‘What, in the name of the Lord is that?’ he asked, gazing uneasily at the monochrome image of a grotesque tailed creature, standing on a beach. It resembled a great white shark, but it had the legs of a human, and delicate arms that ended in small four-fingered claws. Briggs turned his eyes from the ‘walking shark’ to Orme, thinking the photograph was some hoax.

  ‘It is, as you can see captain, a creature that obviously belongs to an hitherto undiscovered species of amphibian, a missing link, I believe, between man and the sea. I took that photograph with a special long-range telescope camera last year. I was returning from Europe on a barque. As the ship passed Santa Maria island I decided to take a few experimental photographs of the coastline, and I could not believe my senses when I caught sight of the strange animal. The captain, crew and many of the passengers saw the oddity as well, but the captain, a superstitious Spaniard, was too frightened to send a boat ashore to get a closer look at the animal, and, he actually believed the thing was a sea demon. That idiotic captain said a prayer and sailed on.’

  ‘It’s an abomination,’ Briggs decided, with a look of disgust.

  ‘If you believe in God as you say you do, then it follows that your God must have made that creature,’ quipped Orme, ‘for does it not say in the Book of Genesis that the Lord made the sea and everything in it?’

  Aware of the rhetorical trap Orme was laying, the captain turned away, picked up his pipe, and began to fill its bowl with tobacco as he thought quickly for a response. ‘The Lord works in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform. It’s not for us to question what He does.’
r />   ‘Then if that thing was made by God, how can you call it an abomination?’ Orme asked the captain.

  ‘You’re twisting my words,’ Briggs tried to wriggle off the semantic hook. 'As one of the Brethren I will allow you to stay on this ship until we reach our destination, but I cannot and will not “drop you off” on Santa Maria Island; is that clear?'

  Professor Orme nodded with excitement in his eyes. 'Yes Brother Briggs – thank you.'

  The captain's wife, Sarah, and her little daughter Sophia entered the cabin. Briggs introduced the professor to his spouse, calling him an 'old associate'. Orme shook Sarah's hand and smiled at Sophia, but the child recoiled from the smile and ran to her mother, crying.

  'Now now Sophia!' Mrs Briggs tried to prise her clinging daughter from her dress. Briggs left the cabin and gave the order to raise anchor. He then told Arian Martens to fetch the professor a bowl of barley soup from the gallery.

  At one o'clock on the Thursday morning of November 7, 1872, the Mary Celeste ventured out into the calm but icy Atlantic waters and pointed her bow towards the Azores.

  For a fortnight the voyage had been largely without incident, with the exception of a minor fight that had broken out between Boz Lorenzen and the cook during a poker game, when Boz was found to be marking the cards. The punch-up was prevented from becoming serious when the ox-bodied Arian Martens stepped in and separated the combatants. Then the mind-numbing ennui returned – the wall to wall boredom of routines, the tired sight of the all-encompassing sea that stretched from horizon to horizon. Then suddenly, in the late grey afternoon of November 22nd, Mrs Briggs was busy making a little frock for Sophia on the sewing machine in her husband's cabin when she heard a high-pitched howl outside. She went up on deck and asked the Lorenzen brothers and Arian Martens if they had heard the unusual sound and the three shiphands said they hadn't. Down in the ship's hold Professor Orme and little Sophia were now the best of friends, and they both watched the captain as he lowered a sounding rod into the pump to check the ship's water-intake level. Mrs Briggs came down to tell her husband about the strange noise she had heard, but he said she had most probably heard the song of a whale. Boz Lorenzen suddenly came bounding down the wooden steps into the hold and was so excited, he almost lost his footing and bumped into Mrs Briggs. He apologised to her and the captain fumed, 'What in damnation is going on here? I'm trying to take a reading!'

  'Captain, come and see this thing sir!' a wide-eyed Boz panted.

  'What thing?' Briggs asked.

  'Come up and take a look captain, I can't describe it!' Boz replied, and then the sprightly young man turned and leapt up the steps three at a time.

  Captain Briggs picked up the oil lamp and followed the excited seaman up the steps, followed by his wife, child and Professor Orme.

  Up on deck at the stern, Arian Martens and Volkert Lorenzen were leaning precariously over the ship's rail. Martens was squinting through the small brass folding telescope at a white speck of foam in the distant sea, and throughout the observation, he kept fighting off Volkert's attempts to grab the spyglass from his hands.

  'What is it you're looking at, Martens?' said Captain Briggs.

  Martens usually jumped to attention when the captain addressed him, but he was so mesmerised by the extraordinary spectacle through the telescope, he didn't react at all to the captain's question.

  'Martens!' the captain yelled, and little Sophia, being a frail and nervous child, jumped at the exclamation, and began to cry.

  'Sorry captain,' Martens said, and he handed the telescope to Briggs. 'Take a look captain, I have never in all my life seen anything like this. It looks like a devil.'

  Briggs took the telescope from Martens, aimed it at the moving white spot in the distance seascape and turned the focus wheel on the eyepiece. All he could see was a dolphin cavorting through the waters.

  'What do you reckon it is captain?' Volkert Lorenzen asked.

  'A dolphin, nothing more,'Briggs replied, perplexed by all the fuss over such a common sight at sea. He handed the telescope back to Martens, who eagerly scanned the dolphin with it again.

  'It's gone now,' Martens sighed, and he offered the telescope to the impatient Volkert Lorenzen.

  'What did you see? Please describe it!' Professor Orme asked Martens with a growing suspicion that the seaman had seen one of the amphibian sharks he himself had seen and photographed off the coast of Santa Maria in the Azores.

  'It was very queer,' Martens replied with a grimace as he recollected the spectacle. 'It looked like a man, but it wasn't a man, or anything human. It had fins on its back and a tail, just like a shark.'

  'Yes? Go on!' the professor pressed the German to continue with an air of manic urgency in his eyes and voice.

  'Well,' Maretens recalled, 'it was riding on the back of a dolphin. Volkert saw it too – I haven't been drinking and I'd swear on a stack of Bibles - '

  'No, I believe you, tell me more please!' Orme was ecstatic.

  'It let out this mighty howl as it rode by us, about three hundred yards distant.' Martens said, and he pointed his forefinger to the dolphin, which was now vanishing back into the deep.

  'A howl you say?' Mrs Briggs noted, rocking a tearful thumb-sucking Sophia in her arms. The captain's wife recalled the strange sound she had heard earlier.

  'Aye ma'm, a howl,' Martens told the captain's wife. 'There are many strange beasts on land, but many stranger ones in the sea, my old father used to say.'

  After nightfall, the misted seascape took on a strange calm flatness as the winds dropped. Professor Orme came onto the deck and looked out into the vast ocean as he listened to the subdued sounds of the captain's harmonium and the slurp of the ship's bows through the waters. The deck creaked behind the professor, making him jump.

  It was Boz Lorenzen. The athletic-looking seaman stood there with a lopsided smile, and seemed to be stuck for words.

  'Good evening – Boz, isn't it?'Professor Orme said. In the two weeks he had been on board, Orme had never spoken to the ship-hand.

  'Aye sir, good evening. Professor, what, er - ' Boz struggled to communicate. It wasn't a linguistic block; the German merely lacked the confidence to enter into conversation with someone who was in a higher intellectual league.

  'Yes Boz?' Orme queried, smiling to make himself seem more approachable.

  'What do you study?' Boz asked him, 'You are a professor, no?'

  'Yes,' Orme nodded. I am a jack of all trades really though. I'm a zoologist, biologist, anatomist, photographer, and astronomer, but at heart I am also a detective.'

  'A detective?' Boz asked, with a bemused look.

  'Yes, and the case I am working on is the origin of man. Have you ever heard about Darwin?' Orme asked the German sailor.

  Lorenzen shook his head.

  'Well, he is an English naturalist who said that man and the apes descended from the same ancestors, but Darwin's theory is full of holes. Your brain for example, Boz,' Orme stared at the sailor's forehead.

  Boz was most concerned by the educated man's remark. 'What about it?'

  'It has been over-endowed beyond the demands of its everyday needs,' Orme said, attempting to explain his theory.

  'Oh,' Boz Lorenzen didn't understand a word he had heard so far.

  'Your Brain, Boz, is one forty-fifth of your body weight, whereas a gorilla's brain is one two-hundredth of its weight. But there is one creature in this world with a brain quite similar to man's, and that creature is the dolphin. As a sailor, I am quite sure you have encountered many dolphins on your travels?'

  'Yes, I like them,' Boz smiled, and leaned with his elbow on the ship's rail, gazing into the moonlit waters. 'Dolphin's are friendly you know, and very playful.'

  'Exactly Boz, and have you ever wondered why they are so friendly towards man?' the professor asked Boz, and smiled as he watched the sailor cogitate and think for a reply.

  A self-conscious Boz shrugged.

  'Dolphins like us because they
are related to us,' Orme revealed.

  'I see,' Boz said, and he started to wonder if the professor was actually some lunatic. Mad people were the only kind of people who could scare the able-bodied mariner.

  'I can see that you think I have lost my senses Boz, but it's true. Man started life as a sea creature, and that is a scientific fact. The fossil record tells us that. Now, many years ago, you had gills.'

  A nervous tic played on Boz's face. He wanted to leave the balmy Mr Orme now but he couldn't think of an excuse to get away.

  'When you were a foetus in your mother's womb, Boz, when you were as big as my thumb, your embryo was almost identical to the embryo of a starfish, and at one stage, you developed gills. Now why do you think that was so Boz?'

  'I don't know professor,' Boz admitted, and felt two inches tall. The inferiority complex was making him nauseous.

  'Because, our ancestors swam in the oceans!' Professor Orme's eyes became animated with an inner light, as if he was conveying some divine truth to the dullard seaman. 'The whales and dolphins are our cousins, not the brainless apes. Apes don't venture near water, but doesn't man spend his holidays at the beach? Doesn't man go swimming for sport and recreation? And hasn't man the urge to set sail on the oceans to search for new lands?'

  Boz felt even more ill as he noticed the spot of foam at the corner of the professor's mouth as he spouted his nonsense.The educated man's face was red now, and he panted after saying so much without even taking a breath. Orme's flushed face had been sneeringly remarked upon by his contemporaries in the Royal Society back in London many times.

  'I have to go now professor,' Boz said in an apologetic tone, 'as I have work to do.' And the German went below deck with his head bowed.

  At first light on the following morning, First Mate Richardson sighted the Azores. He secured the helm with a rope, and went to the captain's cabin to rap on the door. Briggs had just finished shaving, and was swilling his face with luke-warm water. He opened the door, stripped to the waist, and Richardson informed him of the sighting of the sub-tropical islands.

  'Good,' Briggs replied, and dabbed his raw face with the linen towel. 'Has the professor risen yet?'