Page 7 - Three Adventures

Voyage of the Pomeranian

secondhand reports are now considered laughable. Are we to be
humbled by the presence of giants among us? And yet such creatures
may be exposed as the stuff of legend or hoax. Narwhals have
replaced unicorns as the source of spiral fluted ivory tusks. Cyclops,
the men of Mu and the entire panoply of human prodigies, no matter
what animal bones are presented as their relics, can be nothing but
objectifications of our worst desires and fears. But the kraken: is the
account in Cruise of the Cachalot to be discounted as fiction, the clearly-
described remnants of giant cephalopods washed ashore dismissed as
whale fragments?

Today as I met with the crew I was given a theological argument
against any scientific search for previously unknown creatures. Oleg
Lamb, curiously, is also a medical man who treats broken bodies
according to well-accepted scientific procedures. Yet he is a keen
student of the Bible: I should not be surprised that he challenges me
to justify prying into a corner of nature forbidden, so he says, by
Holy Scripture. Leave the Leviathan alone, he says. I reply that such a
shadowy figure cannot with certainty be identified with the animal I
seek. I dare not suggest that the Old Testament is not God’s literal
word, nor even that one man’s interpretation of its contents may be
as good as another’s. Oleg already has a level of respect among the
crew rivaling mine, given his power to heal and his air of religious
authority. Privately after the meeting I complained to Casimir about
him, pointing out that every man Jack willingly put his name to the
ship’s manifest knowing my mission—including Doctor Lamb. He
merely shrugged and said a man can have a change of heart. I replied
hotly that he can also have a change of vessel. If the opportunity
arises, I will see to it that he is replaced at the next port.

All I could do following the good doctor’s diatribe was attempt to
defuse the distress of our easily-swayed deckhands and engine room
toilers by presenting the kraken stories of Jules Verne and Olaus
Magnus in a jocular fashion, inviting the men to laugh at such
outlandish stories as fit merely for the undeveloped minds of children
and country bumpkins. Indeed, humankind has been attacked and
devoured by carnivores on every continent, but not until the sea runs
out of fish and mollusks would any large marine creature show the
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