Matt Willis

In the years ahead, this book will be reviewed by plenty of sailing and history-of-sailing buffs - and there will be lots, I reckon, because it's a fine novel - so for variety, as a former student of ecology and zoology myself, I thought I'd offer a naturalist's perspective instead.
   It's a pity there wasn't a trained naturalist on board HMS Daedalus. According to the log, on August 6th 1848, between the Cape of Good Hope and St. Helena in the South Atlantic, Captain Peter M'Quhae and a number of his crew saw a giant sea serpent swimming near the ship; it was in plain sight for a full twenty minutes and close enough for them to estimate that at least sixty feet or so of the animal was visible. Their detailed descriptions and drawings would later appear in both The Times and The Illustrated London News; quite what they saw has been debated ever since, but there's little doubt that they did see something. We know nothing, though, about what (if anything) happened next because if they did set off in pursuit (and who wouldn't?) they conveniently, and for a host of reasons, 'forgot' to mention that in the log.
   Matthew Willis fills in this blank for us. During the ensuing chase down into the Southern Ocean, we learn a lot about life - and death - aboard a nineteenth century Royal Navy corvette. The author has a website (http://www.airandseastories.com) which not only helped with all the nautical terminology, but also has photographs - and the one which caught my eye is of a boatswain's or carpenter's 'cabin': just a plank bed and a bucket crammed into a windowless space which looks uncannily like a prison cell, except much smaller. And, in a sense, the entire ship is like a mobile prison - a self-enclosed world, a pressure-cooker of discomfort, boredom and occasional brutality from which there's no escape, often for months on end. Daedalus And The Deep is a realistic portrayal of what was a hard life, with no room for sentimentality: minds bend, sometimes crack completely. And yet, at times it could be beautiful too; we see much of the action through the clear eye of Colyer, a young midshipman-with-a-secret on his maiden voyage, and Willis's description of the quiet before a storm with Daedalus becalmed on a gently rolling swell and a reflective Colyer on look-out duty high up in the rigging, is a lovely bit of writing.
   But of course, as a naturalist, it's the 'monster' which interests me the most. Someone else who I think would have thoroughly enjoyed this book was Charles Fort, the inexhaustible collector of all things anomalous - you could well describe Daedalus And The Deep as a classic 'Fortean' novel. In fact, I wish he could have actually been aboard, leaning goggle-eyed right out over the starboard rail; he would have theorised about what kind of beast he was seeing: if not the actual reptile it resembled, then some unknown one-hundred-foot abyssal fish which looks like one? Or even an appropriately gigantic eel from his Super-Sargasso Sea? He would definitely have liked, as I did, the glimpses we get in reverse-perspective of the ship, its crew (and perhaps ourselves) as seen through a sea serpent's eyes.
   And one final thought from me, which is this: although Willis's version of events is pure fantasy, it did inspire a pretty sizeable 'What if?' of my own. The original sighting itself was quite real - and took place in the self-same waters through which another young naturalist - my hero, Charles Darwin - had sailed aboard the Beagle just a few years earlier...… (mais)