The Widow

The Widow was born in Baltimore when the 19th Century was beginning. She came into the world during the cold and snowy months of winter and grew into her form during the spring and summer of 1833. The same year that the British Empire abolished slavery.

The Widow was over 250 feet in length and made from the heartiest oak, mahogany, and cypress that tainted money could buy. She was ship-rigged with fore, main, and mizzen masts and she was clothed with more sail area than any captain thought wise. Her design was all about speed because time was money and the cargo she was carrying was easily perishable after too many days at sea.

The Widow first splashed into saltwater on the very last day of October and her namesake became a carving on her transom the same day. The artisan who was the carver began at sunrise and finished at sunset. On her first night of floating at the shipyard pier, a full moon rose over the harbor and she was awash in an unearthly light. The copper sheets nailed to her undersides were gleaming in the reflection of the moonlight and the night watchman who was supposed to spend the night aboard walked away when he saw her and never came back. All of the carpenters and the shipwrights that gave her nine months of their lives to give her life believed she was under a curse. Not only because of the name her owners had given her, and her figurehead that appeared more as a witch than a Widow, but because 13 men died during her construction. A shipyard was a lucrative but dangerous place to earn a living, and for an average ship, one man would fall victim to the hazards of height and heavy machinery, but no ship ever had claimed 13 souls and made thirteen widows.

Several captains considered the job as her master and pilot, but superstition was the prevailing wind of the day. The Widow rode the tides alone for a month until a train from the south brought an infamous captain with a wicked crew. The captain was a hard man with a cruel streak for a keel and his surly crew were all running from prison, the gallows, or worse.

When the Widow broke free of the harbor and found the Atlantic for the first time, a Nor-Easter began building the wind and the waves behind her and drove her across the ocean at a break-neck pace. The youngest of the crew disappeared during the crossing, but no one saw him fall from the masts and no one truly believed he went overboard by accident.

The Ivory Coast of Africa appeared after 19 days at sea, but before the pitiful cargo of five hundred souls could be loaded like lumber and shackled below, swarms of biting flies became clouds of torture for the captain and the mob that drove the Widow. The hordes of relentless insects ignored the natives that were the newly found slaves, but after the land fell away and the ship of suffering became a prowling witch before the wind, every member of the crew was under the jinx of painful and swelling bites.

Before the Widow could find Florida and round up to New Orleans and the largest slave market in the United States, the wind became calm and the ship was befouled and captured in the clutches of the Sargasso Sea. With the witch’s face of the Widow facing west, and her sails hanging slack in her rigging, an endless vista of Sargasso weed arrested the ship and her every movement. After two days locked in the floating prison, two more of the crew disappeared. No one saw them fall from the rigging and no one saw them go overboard. After the fourth day of blistering heat with not a breeze to lift the sails, the anguished cries from the humanity below became a haunting chorus that began to drive the crew into madness.

When the sun of the sixth day broke over the horizon almost all of the crew were burning with fever, crying out for water, and praying for salvation. The captain had fallen during a drunken rampage on deck and his broken leg rendered him useless, alone, and suffering in his cabin.

On the night of the seventh day in the clutching fingers of seaweed, a breeze began flowing over the Widow and her sails filled with wind that no crewmember would ever notice. The ship’s wheel, however, was set on a course and as the wind began to dive the waves and free the tentacles of Sargasso, a timber broke loose below decks and unbound the slaves who had been working their chains against the wood for the last three weeks.

When the people that were no longer slaves gained the topsides and began searching the ship that was sailing, they found none of the evil creatures that had confined them in the prison below.

After two days of riding the wind, the Widow ran aground on a sandbar where the mountains of an island fell to a beach and where a gushing waterfall was pouring a river into the sea. The people of the Ivory Coast left the ship, swam to the shore, and found the island and the land to be plentiful with fruit and game.

The following day the Widow was at sea and she remains there to this day. She is devoid of a wicked captain and crew, and as the maritime legends continue the tale, the Widow haunts the seas in the part of the ocean that we now know to be the Bermuda Triangle.

On dark nights when there is no light over the wind and the waves, the Widow is forever making a glowing wake and casting the ghostly warning of a haunted ship’s lantern for all the mariners who misuse the sea.