The Gray Ghost

When Captain McCall started out his morning, the dawn came out of the east with a bank of crimson clouds that made him cringe. For sailors, information was valuable, and the superstition and wisdom of sailing ship limericks was not something a mariner should ever ignore.

As McCall crossed the pilothouse to check the barometer and the hydrometer, which was measuring the relative humidity with springs and horsehair, one of the most famous seafarer rhymes became a refrain he could not stop repeating. “Red sky at night is a sailor’s delight. A red sky in the morning, sailor take warning.”

The barometric pressure had been down since midnight, and the humidity was up substantially, but the lack of any breeze or breath of air was another alarm that was quietly screaming, “The calm before the storm!”

McCall tried to hide his shudder from the crewmember who was the pilot at the wheel, but the age-old warning from the sea was not something anyone could set aside lightly. Especially if you were hauling cattle from Tampa to Cuba in a paddlewheel riverboat that was never meant to be out in the open gulf—with no safe harbor to shelter a storm, let alone a hurricane.

Below the windows of the wheelhouse and on the corral deck where the cattle were crowded up to the railings, the steady movement of the little steamer was hard to judge. An uneasy groundswell had come up overnight and the slow roll pushing up from the south was another omen that was making everyone uneasy.

The cook was all about the weather signals and superstations and was already squawking his complaints like a pirate’s parrot, but the engineer and his oilers were oblivious to the signs of the sea, unless the wind began to drive the waves into a motion they could not ignore below decks.

As McCall looked over the shoulder of the pilot at the wheel and then to the herd of cows who were beginning to stumble with the rising swell, he began to consider that the crew in the boiler room was better off not knowing what was coming.

Anyone on the topsides who was worth their salt could taste the air, gauge the motion of the sea, and know that “Trouble is a headwind which no pilot can outmaneuver.”

The tropical storm force wind began at the forenoon watch. The flags above the wheelhouse began to snap and stream with a suddenness that signaled another warning, and when the breath of the tempest came aboard cold and deep, the siren’s song became another verse to make the captain shiver.

“The wind howled a song of doom as the mermaids gathered at Neptune’s Gate.”

Before the clouds could cover the laboring steamer and her crew, who were halfway to Cuba, a rainbow was circling the sun, and McCall announced the rhyme aloud: “A ring around the moon or the sun, and rain is coming on the run.”

When the first of the cattle began to falter with the movement of the deck and the timbers that could not withstand the twist and strain of a vessel in a storm at sea, McCall and his helmsman both made the sign of the cross with the Holy Trinity. Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. Everyone who has ever been a sailor knew: “There are no shipboard atheists in a storm at sea.”

After the sun became a glowing orb behind a low stream of clouds that were racing, and the cattle were down in a huddle on the deck and bellowing loudly with their own prayers, the first of the big waves broke and sent a hundred gallons of saltwater streaming over the wheelhouse.

After the wind began tearing the tops off the waves, the greed of the hurricane was apparent to every soul aboard the little ship. The paddlewheel was still turning and the engineer and his crew were still stoking the boiler below the deck that was awash with the waves, but the cook and the other topsiders were crowding McCall as they stood to watch the Gulf gone wild in an ocean of desolation.

When the lightning began, McCall and his crew had forgotten that could happen, but when the thunderbolt struck the mast and yardarm, the fire that began burning in the rain cast shadows in the afternoon that were as dark as night.

After the lightning cracked, and the broken mast and the fire washed away, ahead in the distance and over the crashing waves, was the image of a shoreline. On the beach amid the flashes from the lightning was a gray figure standing in the rain. The specter in the hurricane was bigger than a man could be, but he had the stature of a mariner in the way he held his back to the wind.

McCall and his crew knew the gray figure was not a mortal being, but they suddenly found comfort in the lore of another seafaring rhyme: “When The Gray Ghost is a specter, in weather most severe, rescue is at hand, and a new day will appear.”

The paddle wheelers that carried cattle from Tampa to Cuba were indeed a reality in the era of steamship vessels in the Gulf. Paddlewheel riverboats were also the workhorses employed to supply the 16 million red bricks that are now standing in the battlements of Fort Jefferson, Dry Tortugas. Flat-bottomed vessels with paddle wheels and steam engines were not seaworthy vessels for open ocean crossings, and although The Grey Ghost is a work of fiction, the shipwreck of a paddlewheel steamer will forever rest on the seafloor near the shores of Marco Island.