in his stone vault at R ’lyeh, and I felt deeply moved despite
my rational beliefs. Wilcox, I was sure, had heard of the cult
in some casual way, and had soon forgotten it amidst the
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mass of his equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by
virtue of its sheer impressiveness, it had found subconscious
expression in dreams, in the bas-relief, and in the terrible
statue I now beheld; so that his imposture upon my uncle
had been a very innocent one. The youth was of a type, at
once slightly affected and slightly ill-mannered, which I could
never like; but I was willing enough now to admit both his
genius and his honesty. I took leave of him amicably, and
wish him all the success his talent promises.
The matter of the cult still remained to fascinate me, and
at times I had visions of personal fame from researches into
its origin and connexions. I visited New Orleans, talked with
Legrasse and others of that old-time raiding-party, saw the
frightful image, and even questioned such of the mongrel
prisoners as still survived. Old Castro, unfortunately, had
been dead for some years. What I now heard so graphically
at first-hand, though it was really no more than a detailed
confirmation of what my uncle had written, excited me afresh;
for I felt sure that I was on the track of a very real, very
secret, and very ancient religion whose discovery would make
me an anthropologist of note. My attitude was still one of
absolute materialism, as I wish it still were, and I discounted
with almost inexplicable perversity the coincidence of the
dream notes and odd cuttings collected by Professor Angell.
One thing I began to suspect, and which I now fear I know,
is that my uncle’s death was far from natural. He fell on a
narrow hill street leading up from an ancient waterfront
swarming with foreign mongrels, after a careless push from
a negro sailor. I did not forget the mixed blood and marine
pursuits of the cult-members in Louisiana, and would not be
surprised to learn of secret methods and poison needles as
ruthless and as anciently known as the cryptic rites and beliefs. Legrasse and his men, it is true, have been let alone; but in Norway a certain seaman who saw things is dead.
Might not the deeper inquiries of my uncle after encountering
the sculptor’s data have come to sinister ears? I think Professor Angell died because he knew too much, or because he
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149
was likely to learn too much. Whether I shall go as he did
remains to be seen, for I have learned much now.
Ill The Madness from the Sea
If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total
effacing of the results of a mere chance which fixed my eye
on a certain stray piece of shelf-paper. It was nothing on
which I would naturally have stumbled in the course of my
daily round, for it was an old number of an Australian journal, the Sydney Bulletin for April 18, 1925. It had escaped even the cutting bureau which had at the time of its issuance
been avidly collecting material for my uncle’s research.
I had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor
Angell called the “ Cthulhu cult,” and was visiting a learned
friend in Paterson, New Jersey; the curator of a local museum
and a mineralogist of note. Examining one day the reserve
specimens roughly set on the storage shelves in a rear room
of the museum, my eye was caught by an odd picture in one
of the old papers spread beneath the stones. It was the Sydney
Bulletin I have mentioned, for my friend has wide affiliations
in all conceivable foreign parts; and the picture was a halftone cut of a hideous stone image almost identical with that which Legrasse had found in the swamp.
Eagerly clearing the sheet of its precious contents, I
scanned the item in detail; and was disappointed to find it of
only moderate length. What it suggested, however, was of
portentous significance to my flagging quest; and I carefully
tore it out for immediate action. It read as follows:
MYSTERY DERELICT FOUND AT SEA
Vigilant Arrives With Helpless Armed
New Zealand Yacht in Tow.
One Survivor and Dead Man Found Aboard. Tale of
Desperate Battle and Deaths at Sea.
ISO
H. P. Lovecraft
Rescued Seaman Refuses
Particulars of Strange Experience.
Odd Idol Found in His Possession. Inquiry
to Follow.
The Morrison Co.’s freighter Vigilant, bound from
Valparaiso, arrived this morning at its wharf in Darling
Harbour, having in tow the battled and disabled but
heavily armed steam yacht Alert of Dunedin, N. Z.,
which was sighted April 12th in S. Latitude 34° 21’,
W. Longitude 152° 17’ with one living and one dead
man aboard.
The Vigilant left Valparaiso March 25th, and on April
2nd was driven considerably south of her course by exceptionally heavy storms and monster waves. On April 12th the derelict was sighted; and though apparently
deserted, was found upon boarding to contain one survivor in a half-delirious condition and one man who had evidently been dead for more than a week. The
living man was clutching a horrible stone idol of unknown origin, about a foot in height, regarding whose nature authorities at Sydney University, the Royal Society, and the Museum in College Street all profess complete bafflement, and which the survivor says he
found in the cabin of the yacht, in a small carved shrine
of common pattern.
This man, after recovering his senses, told an exceedingly strange story of piracy and slaughter. He is Gustaf Johansen, a Norwegian of some intelligence, and
had been second mate of the two-masted schooner
Emma of Auckland, which sailed for Callao February
20th with a complement of eleven men. The Emma, he
says, was delayed and thrown widely south of her course
by the great storm of March 1st, and on March 22nd,
in S. Latitude 49° 51’, W. Longitude 128° 34’, encountered Hie Alert, manned by a queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes. Being ordered per-
The Call o f Cthulhu
151
emptorily to turn back, Capt. Collins refused; whereupon the strange crew began to lire savagely and without warning upon the schooner with a pecularily heavy
battery of brass cannon forming part of the yacht’s
equipment. The Emma’s men shewed fight, says the
survivor, and though the schooner began to sink from
shots beneath the waterline they managed to heave
alongside their enemy and board her, grappling with
the savage crew on the yacht’s deck, and being forced
to kill them all, the number being slightly superior,
because of their particularly abhorrent and desperate
though rather clumsy mode of fighting.
Three of the Emma's men, including Capt. Collins
and First Mate Green, were killed; and the remaining
eight under Second Mate Johansen proceeded to navigate the captured yacht, going ahead in their original direction to see if any reason for their ordering back
had existed. The next day, it appears, they raised and
landed on a small island, although none is known to
exist in that part of the ocean; and six of the men somehow died ashore, though Johansen is queerly reticent about this part of his story, and speaks only of their
falling into a rock chasm. Later, it seems, he and one
companion boarded the yacht and tried to manage her,
but were beaten about by the storm of April 2nd. From
that time till his rescue on the 12th the man remembers
little, and he does not even recall when William Briden,
his companion, died. Briden’s death reveals no apparent cause, and was probably due to excitement or exposure. Cable advices from Dunedin report that the Alert was well known there as an island trader, and
bore an evil reputation along the waterfront. It was
owned by a curious group of half-castes whose frequent
meetings and night trips to the woods attracted no little
curiosity; and it had set sail in great haste just after the
storm and earth tremors of March 1st. Our Auckland
correspondent gives the Emma and her crew an excel-
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H. P. Lovecraft
lent reputation, and Johansen is described as a sober
and worthy man. The admiralty will institute an inquiry
on the whole matter beginning tomorrow, at which
every effort will be made to induce Johansen to speak
more freely than he has done hitherto.
This was all, together with the picture of the hellish image;
but what a train of ideas it started in my mind! Here were
new treasuries of data on the Cthulhu Cult, and evidence that
it had strange interests at sea as well as on land. What motive
prompted the hybrid crew to order back the Emma as they
sailed about with their hideous idol? What was the unknown
island on which six of the Emma's crew had died, and about
which the mate Johansen was so secretive? What had the
vice-admiralty’s investigation brought out, and what was
known of the noxious cult in Dunedin? And most marvellous
of all, what deep and more than natural linkage of dates was
this which gave a malign and now undeniable significance to
the various turns of events so carefully noted by my uncle?
March 1st—our February 28th according to the International Date Line—the earthquake and storm had come. From Dunedin the Alert and her noisome crew had darted eagerly
forth as if imperiously summoned, and on the other side of
the earth poets and artists had begun to dream of a strange,
dank Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had moulded in
his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu. March 23d the
crew of the Emma landed on an unknown island and left six
men dead; and on that date the dreams of sensitive men assumed a heightened vividness and darkened with dread of a giant monster’s malign pursuit, whilst an architect had gone
mad and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And
what of this storm of April 2nd—the date on which all dreams
of the dank city ceased, and Wilcox emerged unharmed from
the bondage of strange fever? What of all this—and of those
hints of old Castro about the sunken, star-bom Old Ones and
their coming reign; their faithful cult and their mastery of
dreams'? Was I tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors be
The Call o f Cthulhu
153
yond man’s power to bear? If so, they must be horrors of the
mind alone, for in some way the second of April had put a
stop to whatever monstrous menace had begun its siege of
mankind’s soul.
That evening, after a day of hurried cabling and arranging,
I bade my host adieu and took a train for San Francisco. In
less than a month I was in Dunedin; where, however, I found
that little was known of the strange cult-members who had
lingered in the old sea-taverns. Waterfront scum was far too
common for special mention; though there was vague talk
about one inland trip these mongrels had made, during which
faint drumming and red flame were noted on the distant hills.
In Auckland I learned that Johansen had returned with yellow
hair turned white after a perfunctory and inconclusive questioning at Sydney, and had thereafter sold his cottage in West Street and sailed with his wife to his old home in Oslo. Of
his stirring experience he would tell his friends no more than
he had told the admiralty officials, and all they could do was
to give me his Oslo address.
After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with
seamen and members of the vice-admiralty court. I saw the
Alert, now sold and in commercial use, at Circular Quay in
Sydney Cove, but gained nothing from its non-committal
bulk. The crouching image with its cuttleflsh head, dragon
body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal, was preserved
in the Museum at Hyde Park; and I studied it long and well,
finding it a thing of balefully exquisite workmanship, and
with the same utter mystery, terrible antiquity, and unearthly
strangeness of material which I had noted in Legrasse’s
smaller specimen. Geologists, the curator told me, had found
it a monstrous puzzle; for they vowed that the world held no
rock like it. Then I thought with a shudder of what old Castro
had told Legrasse about the primal Great Ones: “ They had
come from the stars, and had brought Their images with
Them.”
Shaken with such a mental revolution as I had never before
known, I now resolved to visit Mate Johansen in Olso. Sail
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H. P. Lovecraft
ing for London, I reembarked at once for the Norwegian
capital; and one autumn day landed at the trim wharves in
the shadow of the Egeberg. Johansen’s address, I discovered,
lay in the Old Town of King Harold Haardrada, which kept
alive the name of Oslo during all the centuries that the greater
city masqueraded as “ Christiana.” I made the brief trip by
taxicab, and knocked with palpitant heart at the door of a
neat and ancient building with plastered front. A sad-faced
woman in black answered my summons, and I was stung with
disappointment when she told me in halting English that Gus-
taf Johansen was no more.
He had not long survived his return, said his wife, for the
doings at sea in 1925 had broken him. He had told her no
more than he had told the public, but had left a long manuscript—of “ technical matters” as he said—written in English, evidently in order to safeguard her from the peril of casual perusal. During a walk through a narrow lane near the
Gothenburg dock, a bundle of papers falling from an attic
window had knocked him down. Two Lascar sailors at once
helped him to his feet, but before the ambulance could reach
him he was dead. Physicians found no adequate cause for the
end, and laid it to heart trouble and a weakened constitution.
I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will
never leave me till I, too, am at rest; “ accidentally” or otherwise. Persuading the widow that my connexion with her husband’s “ technical matters” was sufficient to entitle me to
his manuscript, I bore the document away and began to read
it on the London boat. It was a simple, rambling thing�
��a
naive sailor’s effort at a post-facto diary—and strove to recall
day by day that last awful voyage. I cannot attempt to transcribe it verbatim in all its cloudiness and redundance, but I will tell its gist enough to shew why the sound of the water
against the vessel’s sides became so unendurable to me that
I stopped my ears with cotton.
Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though
he saw the city and the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly
again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind
The Call o f Cthulhu
155
life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose
them on the world whenever another earthquake shall heave
their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.
Johansen’s voyage had begun just as he told it to the viceadmiralty. The Emma, in ballast, had cleared Auckland on February 20th, and had felt the full force of that earthquake-bom tempest which must have heaved up from the sea-bottom
the horrors that filled men’s dreams. Once more under control, the ship was making good progress when held up by the Alert on March 22nd, and I could feel the mate’s regret as
he wrote of her bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy
cult-fiends on the Alert he speaks with significant horror.
There was some peculiarly abominable quality about them
which made their destruction seem almost a duty, and Johansen shews ingenuous wonder at the charge of ruthlessness brought against his party during the proceedings of the court
of inquiry. Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured
yacht under Johansen’s command, the men sight a great stone
pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47° 9’, W.
Longitude 126° 43’ come upon a coast-line of mingled mud,
ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing
less than the tangible substance of earth’s supreme terror—
the nightmare corpse-city of R ’lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu
and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out
at last, after cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear
The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991) Page 19
