Sea Leviathan

Vast, finned and toothed, it rises alongside a ship on the long routes, higher than her mast. In the reports it is a great sea creature, for want of any better name.

Sailors in every port of the long routes tell it, and no two the same. The ones to listen to say only that in a blow it came up out of the swell alongside, higher than the mainmast and broader than the boat, then sank again, and that it had not wanted their ship. The ones not to listen to have it striking, rolling, snatching boats off the davits; the trouble being that the Admiralty keeps logs which say little different. They record merchantmen rolled over or broken, warships thrown down far enough to lose men and guns, and, in three outer lanes, fins or limbs entered that were big enough to heave a boat clear of the water.

Every effort at a more exact name has foundered on accounts that cannot be made to agree, and so the reports say great sea creature. A heavy broadside will turn one, sometimes. Sometimes, the gunners say, it does no more than anger it; and from the far water past the southern continent come two accounts of a creature that returned upon a hull after taking shot. The standing instruction is therefore to avoid, while there is still time to. A sighting, by convoy doctrine, is a hazard to navigation and not an enemy, unless it is attacking already; and merchant masters and naval officers, who agree on little, agree on that without dispute. On the Inner Sea, say the Black Banner pilots, a creature that followed one convoy will turn away from another; and that they call passage granted under conditions, and never mastery.

The Dover room where the sea lanes are rated sets a price on the creature without ever naming it. A lane with a bad record bears it in a higher rate, and the room does not explain a rate, since what it sells is its opinion. Masters who have been out on the far water require no explanation. They victual past the advertised passage and keep a second geography in their heads: where the depth alters, where a colour in the sea means turn away, where a calm has gone on too long. A steamer is never left lying becalmed, and so steam has taken some of the danger from a calm. From a creature big enough to roll a warship it has taken none, and there is no engineer aboard who does not know it.

As witnesses describe it

Beside a small sailing ship in a night storm, near enough that rain streams from it onto her deck, rises a gigantic spined thing with a broad, fanged mouth. Witnesses concur on its size and on little more: fins, say some; arms, say others; a back like a reef, say the rest.