...The Singing Fish of
Monomoy Point
In a small, musty, canvas bound book, unopened for years, was found a story of such beauty and wonder that it escapes the imagination. Each whisper of the turning pages which sent puffs of memory-filled dust into the air, spoke of a day long ago, when a young man found an island Paradise. The story in the ancient journal was dedicated to the writer’s wife, Jessie, and is presented as a possible solution to the strange humming sounds heard now and again off Monomoy Point in Chatham on Cape Cod.
It was long ago, when I was young and adventurous, and on one of my first important sailings, that this amazing thing occurred. We were bound for the Indies, and while rounding Cape Horn, ran full into a swift and violent storm that was unexplainable. For one moment, the waters were as calmly blue as those of Scargo Lake in Dennis on a clear summer day, and the next, they were scowling, angry, and black. The sky shook its fist at our ship and sent down to us such winds and fierce rains as I have never seen before. All about us was billowing, unpenetrable gray, and all hands felt the atmosphere alive with some strange force. Our navigation equipment seemed frozen, and our rudder was cracked by the mountainous waves that crashed against our ship. We lived in darkness, and floundered around in that sea of gray for five terrible days. At the end of the fifth day, a calm, a stillness came, as suddenly as the attacking storm, and this silence seemed the more terrible because of its contrast with the wild gray days through which we had just passed.
All hands came above, and though none spoke a word, I knew that a strange fear gripped the heart of each of my shipmates. I am not a poet or a man of letters, and my words, however carefully written here, could not adequately describe the scene which met our eyes.
We found ourselves floating in the midst of a strange, dead sea from which we could not escape. I thought at first that it might be Sargaso Sea, for the waters were filled with weird strands of sea plant life, with roots as big as boulders, but common sense and knowledge of the map made that impossible. The sea on which we drifted was a sea of powerful currents, each eddying in opposite directions. The water, so clear we could see the smooth white bottom 50 fathoms below, was a curious turquoise, streaked with brightest greens and pinks. All around us were the listing, vacant skeletons of ships that had found their unexplainable way here before us. Monstrous fish, and fish no larger than a hair, swam through the waters. These fish were gold, green, blue, and red; striped, streaked, and dotted with the most amazing panorama of colors. Strange hued birds with weird calls flew overhead, and over all this amazing scene there was an intense, stifling silence.
We drifted about under the hand of the changing currents for six weeks, and lived from the waters around us. Some of the sea vegetation, when pulled up, proved to be clean and sweetly edible, and the strange, bright colored fish were easily caught. During this period, although we were well fed, and temporarily safe, we grew restless, and conflictions sprang up at every turn. For however well fed and kept a man may be, the fear of the unknown, and a wondering about when he will see familiar land and beloved faces, keeps him forever unhappy and discontent. Moreover, we were all consumed with the most intense curiosity about our strange surroundings. And always in our minds and before our eyes were the bare hulks of the other ships, caught in the sea, which we all hoped would not prove to be prophetic to us.
We had, at the end of our six weeks of drifting, sunk so low in our spirits, and become so apathetic about our situation, that we became lax in our shipboard duties. As the days dragged by, we assigned one watch for the long nights, and another for the daylight hours. I am sure that if these men had been watched, they would have been observed dozing at their posts, for none of us expected anything unusual to happen, and by this time moved in that aimless lethargy of men without aim or purpose.
It was on the morning of what I presumed to be the 42nd day of our drifting, that a frenzied shout from the night watch jolted us from our bunks. Land had been sighted, and all hands, laughing and shouting like men freed from long imprisonment, sprang to work, long neglected, to reach this land. But each time we came close enough to use the small landing boats, the land seemed to move away from us, until at last we found that the land sighted was a cluster of many sized and shaped floating islands, the largest of which became our goal. These islands moved on the conflicting currents, and seemed forever out of our reach. Finally, at the close of four days of chasing the island, we were caught up on a current that crossed with that of the largest, and it was there, on a strange, disjointed piece of land, on a strange, cut-off sea, that we found what seemed to all of us to be our dream of Paradise.
The island was verdantly green, overflowing with exotic flowers, and huge graceful trees which bore sweet succulent fruit. A heavy, jasmine-sweet scent was in the gentle winds. Here was a land of such incredible beauty and serenity that I knew somehow no men had ever been there before. Small, spring-fed streams veined over the island, and the water from these streams was like the coolest nectar. The days were always full of sunshine, and the sky a shimmering blue, but for all that sun, the days were never more than comfortably warm. The island nights were nights of incredible beauty. The waters shone with a thousand, a million diamonds of phosphorus, the night air was cool and sweet, and the stars above seemed close enough to pluck from the sky. Day and night, the peace and serenity none of us had ever experienced before was over all, and I yearn for that serenity to this day. There is always, I believe now, that feeling over those wonders of Nature untouched by Man.