Ripped from the Headlines: Ghost Boat Cocaine

Inspired by this Guardian article about an 18-foot fiberglass boat that washed up on the Marshall Islands, stuffed to the gunwales with cocaine, an $80 million haul. The Maritime Executive has a slightly longer version, with photographs.

Sourced from CNN via jonastur68

I've talked about ghost ships before. From North Korea's fishing boats to the Mary Celeste, pausing briefly to admire cruise ships stuffed with cannibal rats, derelicts infest the ocean blue. This one's a bit of a head-scratcher. You just don't take an 18-foot putt-putt far from shore. Not if you value your life and cargo, and someone must have valued this cargo if not the life of whichever shmuck was paid to pilot. Presumably it wasn't piracy, or the cargo would have vanished. 

So it was probably a coastal storm of some description, bad enough to wash the pilot overboard but not bad enough to sink the boat. Fiberglass is difficult to sink, but every other year here in Bermuda hurricanes prove that difficult is not the same thing as impossible. You regularly see boats sunk at their anchorage, perhaps a bit of the bimini sticking above the surface. The pilot almost certainly drowned, and if he didn't he must have wished he had. Explaining that sort of thing to the bosses is not an easy task.

The bit I like is at the end of the Guardian article:

University of Hawaii researchers conducted 16 computer simulations of drift patterns from the Mexico coast and found nearly all eventually arrived in the Marshall Islands.

The Maritime Executive has an interesting addition:

Some of these lost-and-found narcotics re-enter the supply chain: earlier this year, a resident of  remote Ailuk was caught and arrested after trying to board an airplane with three kilos of cocaine in his possession. The source, he told investigators, was from a different batch of lost "bricks." 

The Marshalls have been independent since 1986; before that it was part of the American-administered Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, and before that it bounced from pillar to post in the usual that-colony's-mine-until-I-don't-want-it way that was so popular from the 1500s onwards. Before that it was one of the many islands settled by Micronesians, well before the birth of Christ. These days it's a parliamentary republic with an interest in fishing, selling flags of convenience to shipping companies, and bitcoin, not necessarily in that order. There's not a lot of ways to make money if you're the Marshall Islands. 

A little under 78,000 people live there, the vast majority being Marshallese. The islanders have their own language, but English is widely spoken. Median age is (roughly) 23, and the population mostly lives on the atolls of Majuro and Ebeye. The US takes care of defense and the Marshallese police take care of internal issues.

Past nuclear tests nearby have left a toxic legacy. While compensation has been granted it has not been paid, and some of the atolls are completely uninhabitable due to radiation poisoning. 

According to the CIA, no TV broadcast station; a cable network is available on Majuro with programming via videotape replay and satellite relays; 4 radio broadcast stations; American Armed Forces Radio and Television Service (AFRTS) provides satellite radio and television service to Kwajalein Atoll (2019). 

Roughly 40% of the island has internet access.

With all that in mind:

Lost and Gone (Fear Itself, Esoterrorists)

It ought to have been simple. When the boat drifted ashore with its load of cocaine at Ailuk, a remote and lightly-inhabited coral atoll about 200 nautical miles to the north of Majuro, the plan was to burn most of it and turn over a few bricks for the DEA to analyze. A couple agents were given the onerous task of flying over to collect - never let a chance for a visit to a semi-tropical paradise pass you by, must be the company motto. The bricks were supposed to be kept secure at the air base at Bucholtz, on  Kwajalein Island. 

Nobody knows where those bricks are. As for the ones that were supposed to be destroyed ... rumor has it that not all of those found their way into the incinerator. Each one's practically a pension for whoever has them. Bucholtz is being torn apart in the search for the two that were supposed to be there, and the cops who had possession of the rest are under intense scrutiny.

Meanwhile rumors are flying, strange lights are seen out at sea, and some fishermen say a new boat's been seen out on the water at night - one without a pilot, yet it seems to be getting about just fine.

• Free Meal. The original pilot was attacked by a Skitch (Unremitting Horror) and killed, but that left the insect-like meat eater with a problem. Once the boat was out at sea, there were no ways to spread its eggs. The Skitch was at the very end of its life cycle when the boat drifted up to Ailuk, its carcass smeared across the deck. Some of it was snatched up by birds, some by rats and crabs, before the boat was discovered. These have slowly found their way back into the human food chain, through cats (who eat the rats and birds) or other means. The bit about the missing cocaine is a red herring; the real problem is the skitch eggs which are now spreading rapidly through the local population. 
• Bad Trip. That wasn't cocaine. Perhaps it was Liao, perhaps something else, but whatever occult substance is in those bricks someone at Bucholtz knows what it really is. That person isn't a cultist nor yet trained in mystic arts but they know just enough to know how insanely valuable the stuff is. Far too valuable to go up in an incinerator. So this person arranged for the cops to hand over their supply and made sure the two bricks kept for the DEA went missing. Meanwhile they sent out feelers to people they knew in Hong Kong and Macau: does anyone want to take this stuff off my hands? Now the problem is how to keep everyone bribed and compliant long enough for someone who actually knows how to handle the drug to show up and take it away.
• Bright Lights. The boat was targeted off the coast of Mexico by Something - say, Greys from Delta Green. Those same Greys tracked the boat all the way across the ocean, wanting to carry out an ocean drift patterns experiment of their own. Where would it end up? Now the Greys know, but evidently that wasn't the end of the experiment. Whatever it is, it's still hanging around in the skies above the Marshalls, dogging whoever came into contact with the boat or its cargo. The cops who stole a pension, the army guys who 'lost' a couple bricks of cocaine, they're all being tracked, abducted, experimented on, and returned to their ordinary lives - perhaps a little traumatized, otherwise fine. The question is, what do the Greys really want - and what will it take to persuade them to go away?

Enjoy, and Happy Holidays! I'm going to take a break for one week, so no Ephemera next Sunday. After that, we'll kick off the New Year - and may it be better than 2020! 

Ireland's Ghost Tanker (NBA, Esoterrorists)

This week's post is inspired by the recent discovery of derelict MV Alta, recently breached on the coast of Ireland.

MV Alta, a merchant vessel over 2000 tons and originally known as Tanager when she was launched in 1976, got into difficulties near Bermuda in September 2018. A power outage brought her to a halt, and Tropical Storm Leslie was bearing down on her. Her 10-man crew were recovered safely, and the ship towed to Guyana where it was subsequently stolen. It was next spotted in August 2019, abandoned and adrift in the mid-Atlantic. From that moment to this her exact whereabouts were unknown, until she washed ashore near Ballycotton, a fishing village in County Cork.

For those of you unfamiliar with Guyana, I present these unedited excerpts from the CIA World Factbook:

Trafficking In Persons

Current situation: Guyana is a source and destination country for men, women, and children subjected to sex trafficking and forced labor – children are particularly vulnerable; women and girls from Guyana, Venezuela, Suriname, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic are forced into prostitution in Guyana’s interior mining communities and urban areas; forced labor is reported in mining, agriculture, forestry, domestic service, and shops; Guyanese nationals are also trafficked to Suriname, Jamaica, and other Caribbean countries for sexual exploitation and forced labor. 

Tier rating: Tier 2 Watch List – Guyana does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking; however, it is making significant efforts to do so; in 2014, Guyana was granted a waiver from an otherwise required downgrade to Tier 3 because its government has a written plan that, if implemented would constitute making significant efforts to bring itself into compliance with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking; the government released its anti-trafficking action plan in June 2014 but made uneven efforts to implement it; law enforcement was weak, investigating seven trafficking cases, prosecuting four alleged traffickers, and convicting one trafficker – a police officer – who was released on bail pending appeal; in 2014, as in previous years, Guyanese courts dismissed the majority of ongoing trafficking prosecutions; the government referred some victims to care services, which were provided by NGOs with little or no government support (2015).

Illicit Drugs

Transshipment point for narcotics from South America - primarily Venezuela - to Europe and the US; producer of cannabis; rising money laundering related to drug trafficking and human smuggling.

In short, whatever MV Alta was up to after she was stolen, it most likely involved people smuggling or drug smuggling. Or both.

Stealing ships from port for drug smuggling was, and to an extent still is, a problem in the Caribbean. It's the easiest thing in the world to take a ship while it's in port, or at anchor close to shore. Either you get one of your own put aboard her as crew - "I'm a student working my was across the Caribbean" - or sneak aboard at night, butcher anyone you find, and fill the yacht with whatever narcotic you're selling this week. Generally speaking a yacht might make one or two trips this way before becoming too well known to the US Coast Guard, at which point you scuttle her or set her adrift.

However, that was the 1980s. These days it's considered much easier to smuggle your narcotics in a merchant vessel; you can carry more, and are unlikely to be stopped or searched. Given the timeline it's likely MV Alta made at least one trip to the East Coast of the US, or possibly more than one trip to Venezuela. That she was abandoned suggests one of two things happened: she became too well known to the authorities, or she was never properly repaired after being stolen, and became too much of a liability for her hijackers.

I should note that some sources allege the ship was never towed anywhere, but left to drift after her crew was rescued in 2018. This seems odd. The US Coast Guard, which rescued the crew, isn't in the habit of letting abandoned ships drift where they please. The South China News alleges it was hijacked in Guyana not once, but twice. According to Fleetmon, someone alleging to be the owner claimed that in 2018 they hired salvagers to tow her who turned out to be smugglers, but that MV Alta was stolen from the smugglers when it reached Guyana.

Incidentally those of you wondering if this is going to involve bodies in the fridge unit, anything is possible but if that was going to happen I think we'd all know about it by now. The Irish have many fine qualities, but reticence is not among them.

Ballycotton sounds like one of those More Irish Than The Irish destinations, where you can comfortably expect all your clichés to come true. No doubt like many another tourist destination there's an underclass of locals who can't afford to live there any more, but who barely rate a mention in the council meetings. In fact it reminds me not a little of a film called Grabbers, which I highly recommend:

So with all that in mind, a one-shot:

The Movie Pilot

The characters are all teens and would-be YouTubers living in the Quaint-with-a-capital-Q village of [Insert Name Here], where, for the first time in living memory, something exciting has happened. A derelict merchant ship has run aground on one of the nearby beaches, thoroughly bolloxing the tourist trade with threat of oil leaks (or worse)! It'd make a real change from Fortnite live streaming if you could get aboard her and take some first-hand footage of the ghost ship. Of course, the Gardaí have put her off limits, with a few coppers on patrol, but they're all local lads and you're pretty confident you can get past them no problem.

In fact, you've a financial inducement for so doing (pick one):

• The ship's owners have contacted you by email and asked you to recover something from the captain's cabin. They've offered you a small fortune in Bitcoin for the work.  
• Your mate Mick who hangs round the pool tables at the Moby Dick's pub swears blind there's a small fortune in narcotics aboard, and is willing to shell out the readies if you can recover some of it for him to sell.
• A fella who says he's a biologist from Oxford wants samples of whatever's in the hold, and is prepared to pay big time if you'll fill his test tubes for him.

Naturally the cargo ship isn't completely abandoned. That would be far too easy. Pick one:

• Alien space vampires who drained the crew's blood and are now looking for somewhere quiet and dark to hide out.
• Ghosts of hijack victims who were left to suffocate in the refrigeration unit, and who possess anyone unwary enough to come aboard.
• Strange and exceptionally dangerous chemicals have brewed a quasi-Shoggoth which lives in the cargo hold and oozes out for victims whenever it gets a hankering for fresh protein.

Enjoy!

North Korea's Ghost Ships (NBA)

Once again North Korea hit the news this week, but not because of any Christmas Gift it's supposed to be dropping on … well, whoever North Korea doesn't like this week. No, this time it's because one of its Ghost Ships washed up on Sado Island, Japanese territory. All aboard were dead, two so badly decomposed that the authorities were unable to easily determine whether they were male or female.

This happens every so often, and sometimes hits the news. North Korea needs fish. Sometimes this is interpreted as 'North Korea is starving,' but whether it is or is not, fish is not to be had in quantity off the coast of North Korea. Though North Korea's fishing fleet isn't anything like robust enough for deep-sea fishing, in desperation its boats are forced further and further away from the coast. Often this means they can't get back again, and one more small tragedy is found, weeks or months later, by the Japanese. In 2019 alone at least 156 fishing boats were found adrift, or wrecked on the Japanese coast.

Sado is a remote, populated island, part of Niigata Prefecture, but far from Japan. In days gone by, it was a convenient place to send people nobody ever wanted to see again. Emperor Juntoku was one such; he was effectively puppeted by his predecessor, Emperor Go-Toba, who was forced to 'abdicate' by his shogun. Go-Toba spent the next few decades operating behind the scenes. Juntoku was one of three puppeted Emperors acting for Go-Toba, and when Juntoku failed to bring victory in war, Juntoku vanished.  The unfortunate puppet Emperor lived on Sado for twenty years after his disgrace, and is buried there, at Mano Goryo.

The island itself is two steep mountain ranges, north and south, clustered around a valley. Most of its 55,000-odd people live in that valley, Kuninaka. The island has been steadily depopulating; like much of Japan, it suffers from a lack of young people, as those with any ambition prefer to live in the big cities. The majority of Sado's grey-haired population hover around the 60+ mark. These days the island survives on tourism, attracting people with its geographic beauty, festivals, and historic shrines, memorials and landmarks.

It has a notorious connection with North Korea. US deserter Charles Jenkins lived there with his wife and daughters, after Jenkins was released by North Korea. His wife, Hitomi, was a 21-year-old abductee, one of several that North Korea snatched and kept imprisoned. The North Korean government 'gave' Hitomi to Jenkins, and they were later married. Her job was to teach North Korean agents Japanese language and customs, and Jenkins was meant to teach her English.

Hitomi was snatched from her home in Sado by North Korean agents, and Japan has always worried that the Ghost Ships are being used to transport spies to Japan, In 1999 there was an armed clash with one such 'fishing boat,' which resisted capture and fired on a Japanese coast guard ship with machine guns and rocket launchers. After it sank, it was recovered by the Japanese, and inspection showed it to be double-hulled with secret compartments capable of launching small speedboats. Presumably this was how it intended to deliver North Korean agents to Japan. The North Korean ship is now a star exhibit at the Coast Guard Museum, Yokohama.

So, to gamify:

The Cat Returns

In 1981, Japanese Vampirology expert Hotaka is taken by North Korean agents, and is never seen again. Most of his notes and research vanished with him, leaving only a few scraps behind for dedicated occultists and vampire hunters to fight over. However there have been persistent rumors since then that Hotaka-san was being forced to lead some kind of North Korean vampire program on a shoestring budget. There have also been rumors that he married, and had children - or possibly was forced to have children, depending on which version of the story you believe.

The agents have heard, through Network contacts, Tradecraft whispers, Traffic Analysis of Japanese SigInt, or similar, that Japanese authorities are particularly concerned North Korean agents of very uncertain, if not supernatural, provenance, may have infiltrated Sado. The Coast Guard recently intercepted a derelict fishing boat just off Sado's northern coast. The crew are dead, but what the Japenese government isn't saying is that the ghost ship wasn't an ordinary fishing smack. It was an armed spy ship, rigged in such a way that Vampirology experts can tell it was intended to transport blood-drinking cargo.

This coincides with an unusual radio broadcast from North Korea, evidently from a pirate station, unencrypted. It repeated the same Buson Haiku  three times, then went silent. The Haiku, Lighting One Candle, is known to be one of Hotaka-san's favorites. The broadcast went out the same day the ghost ship was recovered by the Japanese Coast Guard.

Has the 74-year-old famed Vampirology expert escaped, perhaps with the aid of one of the vampire program's experimental subjects? Or is this a defection by one of his children - and is that child human, or something else? If the agents want to find out, they'll have to evade Japanese and North Korean agents, who also want the same prize. Plus, there is that Haiku. If it was a secret message or signal, who was supposed to receive and understand it? The CIA? The Vatican? Someone else?

Bonus points to the Director if this race to uncover the defector - assuming it is a defector - takes place during one of Sado's many festivals. The Noh festivals in June, for example … imagine tracking a vampire through bonfire-lit Noh performances! Extra bonus points if the final scenes take place, at night, at Mano Goryo.

Enjoy!

Mystery of the Mary Celeste (Fear Itself, Trail of Cthulhu)

The story of the Mary Celeste is one of those useful spine tingling tales that ghost story writers have relied on for over a century, to add that extra chill to a mystery ship story. Imagine finding a derelict, adrift at sea, all sails set and a meal cooling on the table. There's no sign of captain or crew, and the ship's log indicates that the voyage was an uneventful as any captain could wish for, right up to the presumed moment when everyone vanished. What happened? Was it an ordinary, tragic disaster at sea, or did something otherwordly happen to this ship's crew?

In the case of the Mary Celeste, most of what people think they know is, in fact, false. There was no meal cooling on the table. Much of the ship's contents were soaked with sea water, indicating a sudden event, though what that event was remains a subject for debate. Waterspouts and seaquakes, as well as more ordinary incidents, have been cited as possible causes. Several items were missing, including the ship's papers and navigation equipment, and there's evidence that the ship's boat was launched. There was no indication of sudden violence, despite the best efforts of Frederick Solly Flood, attorney general of Gibraltar and one of the chief officers of the court of inquiry into the incident, to persuade the court otherwise. In all likelihood the crew of the Mary Celeste abandoned the ship in fear of their lives, only to perish on the open sea. The ship they abandoned went on drifting with the wind and currents, before being intercepted by the Dei Gratia and brought to Gibraltar.

The real mystery isn't so much what happened, as why. The captain, Benjamin Briggs, was a very experienced sailor from a family of experienced sailors. His wife and daughter were aboard, as well as a crew of seven; two mates, a steward and four seamen. All were veteran seamen, and had good characters; one, the first mate, had sailed with Briggs before. There seems to be no good reason why a captain and crew as well prepared and capable as they should decide to abandon an apparently seaworthy ship and risk their lives in a lifeboat.

This was Briggs' first voyage with the Mary Celeste, which he and his brother had bought as a joint investment.  Briggs took her down to New York to pick up cargo, a hold full of denatured alcohol, which he intended to ship to Genoa. He departed harbor on November 7, 1872. The Dei Gratia would later discover the abandoned Mary Celeste on December 4th. There's no clear indication of what happened to her between the 7th and the 4th; the ship's log was one of the things missing, though the daily slate - where notes would have been taken each day, later to be transferred to the log - was still aboard. The slate indicated nothing untoward.

The tragic Mary Celeste became a ghost story, rather than a maritime disaster story, thanks in part to the efforts of fiction writers like Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote and published one of his first stories, J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement, about the disaster. Much to his astonishment, people began repeating that story - involving murder on the high seas by a man intent on race war - as true, and soon others began inventing spook tales which, in turn, became accepted as the 'true account' of the tragedy of the Mary Celeste. Nothing was too outrageous or outre. Perhaps the crew were devoured by a giant octopus, perhaps aliens got them, perhaps the captain, in a burst of religious mania, murdered everyone aboard ... and so on.

The truth is probably more prosaic. It's possible that Briggs became convinced that his cargo was about to explode, or that the ship was about to sink. Both events would justify abandoning ship, and there's at least some evidence to support either theory. The sounding rod - a bit of iron with rope attached, used in the same way you'd use a dipstick in your car - was found on deck, as if dropped there in a hurry, and the hatches were open, possibly to air the hold out. The crew may not have intended to completely abandon the ship; they may have been attached to the Mary Celeste with a rope, which subsequently snapped.

Even so, it's surprising that Briggs left the Mary Celeste completely unmanned. After all, the ship contains what amounts to his life savings and hopes for the future; he'd have to be pretty convinced all was lost to abandon it completely. It would have been more in character to send most of the crew, and his wife and child, out in the boat, particularly if it were tied to the Mary Celeste, and stay aboard himself. Brigantines like the Mary Celeste aren't complicated to operate; the Dei Gratia got her to Gibraltar with a four man crew, and it would have been possible to keep her going with one man only. It would have been incredibly difficult and exhausting, but it could have been done. 'She was so sound and stout,' said Oliver Deveau, the Dei Gratia's first mate and the man who sailed Mary Celeste to Gibraltar, 'That I cannot think that if I had been on board I should have abandoned her. I should have considered her safer than an open boat unless she was on the rocks.'

It would make more sense if Briggs stayed aboard, yet clearly he did not. It makes me wonder if he was out of commission at this point, perhaps having taken a blow to the head during the same incident that put the Mary Celeste in peril. The crew, lacking leadership and faced with what seemed to them to be extreme danger, might have launched the boat with him in it. Or perhaps he did stay aboard, only to see the ship's boat come adrift, or even capsize, taking his wife and daughter to the bottom. That might have been enough to make him throw himself overboard. Or that event, whatever it may have been, which put the Mary Celeste in jeopardy might have been so severe as to make staying aboard an impossibility. Threat of an exploding cargo would do that.

After the Mary Celeste was brought to Gibraltar, the inquiry into her abandonment very nearly became a one-man lynch mob. Flood, convinced that murder or mutiny was at the back of the mystery, was hell-bent on proving that the crew had met with foul play, and that the Dei Gratia's people were somehow behind it all. This theory met with a severe setback when scientific investigation proved beyond question that stains found on the ship, and on a sword discovered in Briggs' cabin, were not blood. Eventually the court decided to uphold the Dei Gratia's salvage claim, but awarded it a relative pittance of one-fifth the value of the Mary Celeste, including cargo. Probably this was because the court had made its own mind up and felt that there was still some merit in the piracy argument, though there was no evidence to support it. Just goes to show, when the judge hates you, you might as well stay as far away from the court as possible.

The Mary Celeste bounced from owner to owner for a while, before finally finding its way to Gilman C. Parker in 1884. She now had a reputation as an unlucky ship, and had regularly lost money on her cruises. Parker loaded her with a supposedly valuable cargo, insured that cargo with three different agencies, and took her down to Haiti, where she conveniently found her way onto a reef and went down. '[I] had no more intention of wrecking the vessel,' said Parker to a disbelieving New York court of inquiry, 'Than I did of cutting my own throat.'

Yet that valuable cargo proved, on inspection, to be dog collars, spoiled beer, and rotten fish, loaded by merchants who clearly expected a huge insurance payout. Parker was charged with barratry - damaging a vessel or its cargo through abandonment, illegal scuttling or theft - which carried the death penalty. In the end barratry was dropped, though other charges were brought against Parker and the merchants. In the one civil case that came to court the jury refused to deliver a verdict, as there were several counts pending against Parker and his accomplices, and it was unwilling to prejudice the case against Parker in those separate indictments by returning a guilty verdict, particularly since the barratry indictment might mean hanging. The insurers immediately requested a new trial, but the court, electing not to go through all that expensive mess again, persuaded all concerned to drop charges. The insurers wouldn't have to pay out, any money already paid would be returned with interest, and the accused would leave the court, free men.

In the aftermath, one of the accused went insane, another committed suicide, the rest went out of business, and Parker himself died within three months, destitute and with a ruined reputation. The Mary Celeste remains on that Haitian reef to this day.

If the aspiring Keeper wants to use this tale as a one-off, say for Fear Itself or Trail, and is looking for more information, I highly recommend Paul Begg's Mary Celeste: The Greatest Mystery of the Sea. If you already know Begg's name, then you're probably a Jack the Ripper fan.

Here's some potential treatments:

You're all members of the Mary Celeste crew. One of you becomes possessed by an unclean spirit, or perhaps just goes mad, and starts killing off crewmates one by one. Who's behind it? Is it some kind of shapeshifting demon? A ghost? Some invisible Cthulhuoid entity, running the crewman like a puppet?

Or alternatively, the Mary Celeste comes under attack by something otherwordly, or just overwhelmingly powerful; a giant octopus, say. Then it becomes a survival horror narrative, with crewmen trapped below decks or in cabins, trying to keep the monster at bay, while its questing tentacles probe at every weak spot. 

A Trail 1930s scenario could have the characters go to Haiti, perhaps to investigate something else, or even to shoot a film about the Mary Celeste. Maybe they're led there by evidence discovered in New York; perhaps one of the merchants, the insane one or the suicide, left some document behind that strongly hints at an occult angle to the Mary Celeste's wrecking. There they discover that whatever curse struck down the crew of the Mary Celeste is still very much active, and claiming more lives. Sorcerers ashore are trying to put a stop to it with their own magic, but whatever it is, it's far too powerful for them. Or perhaps those sorcerers have been salvaging bits from the Mary Celeste to use in their own spirit magic, only to discover that, whatever it is, it's much too dangerous to handle.

Once TimeWatch becomes available, there are other options. After all, the Mary Celeste story has already been the subject of at least one time traveler's adventures. Mysterious disappearances ought to be meat and drink to aspiring time agents.

That's it for the moment! I hope you find this useful. Enjoy!

Rats, Glorious Rats, and Derelicts: Trail of Cthulhu

If you've been paying attention to the internet this week, you probably came across this story about a ghost cruise liner crewed by cannibal rats that allegedly is about to disgorge its cargo on the coast of England. Alas for lovers of good stories, that version of events is slightly overblown. David Cameron's spokesman laughed off the idea, which means, if the PM's usual luck is in, it'll be crashing into Liverpool any day now.

With all that in mind, let's talk derelicts, and Trail of Cthulhu.

Derelicts used to be more 'in the news' than they are in the modern era. When the world's trade and transport depended entirely on shipping, people paid attention to shipping issues. Even now, the bulk of the planet's trade depends on ships, but when we want to travel from London to Australia, or wherever it may be, we don't hop aboard the next Orient Line packet and spend several weeks sailing the ocean blue. We fly, probably economy, and spend many hours regretting the lack of legroom.

But derelicts haven't gone away. The problem is, we don't know how many of them are out there, and indeed never did. We only know them when we see them - that's exactly the problem with the Lyubov Orlova - and if we don't see them, we tend to assume they're not there. Of course, that isn't so. If nobody's seen the Lyubov Orlova, that doesn't mean it sank. It merely means nobody's seen it. With nobody at the helm, it's at the disposal of the winds and tide, and often derelicts pursue a very erratic course, traveling thousands of miles through shipping lanes, with no-one the wiser.

 One study showed that, in 1887-93 a total of 1,628 derelict sightings were made, of which 200 ships were identified by name. These wrecks posed a significant hazard to navigation, and their predations became so severe that, in 1908, the United States commissioned a warship, the Seneca, whose purpose was to seek out and destroy these vessels. Unfortunately war intervened, and the Seneca was seconded to escort duty, never again to hunt a derelict.

The biggest worry with a derelict isn't that it won't be found. It is that, by the time someone sees it, it's probably too late. Even an iceberg gives some kind of warning, but a derelict carries no lights, and its course is unpredictable. At night, often the only warning you're ever going to get of a derelict is when it smacks into your hull. Imagine you're in a small craft, and something the size of the Lyubov Orlova comes out of the dark, veering across your bows. Maybe you'll get a chance to send off a distress signal, maybe not. Perhaps the last thing anyone will ever hear of you is a brief GPS signal when you sink; after that, nothing.

And of course, that's just the ships. I haven't even started talking about the other flotsam and jetsam, like the tens of thousands of containers that fall from cargo ships every year. Nor do I intend to, but if you want an interesting read, look up rubber ducks.

You see, the danger of a derelict is that you can't count on it sinking. There are plenty of examples of a crew abandoning ship, convinced it's about to go down, perhaps even seeing it 'sink' before their very eyes, only to discover later that it didn't founder at all. Perhaps it rolled over, perhaps enough air was trapped in the hull to keep it just at the surface of the water, floating almost unobserved. Not unlike an iceberg, in fact, where the vast majority of the thing is beneath the surface. Then it drifts, and drifts, perhaps for months.

In the age of sail, when ships were made of wood, sometimes a derelict would drift for years. In October 1913, according to Robert de la Croix, a sailing vessel off the coast of Tierra del Fuego encountered a three-master, apparently abandoned, with some of its sail still set. The three-master's sails were green, her rigging was green, her deck and superstructure were green. It was as though, by some miraculous transformation, she had taken on the color of the sea ... The whole vessel had turned green because she was covered with mould ... [The captain] boarded her. The deck-planks were rotted, yielding to the tread. Skeletons, still clothed, were found everywhere. One lay at the wheel, another near the hatchway to the hold, three more reclined on the poop, and there were another ten in the fo'c'sle and six in the wardroom. The ship was the Marlborough, of Glasgow. Her papers were missing, probably rotted away, so the cause of the mystery remained unknown. She had been missing since 1890, and had spent nearly a quarter-century at sea. When she left New Zealand for England she carried a number of sheep and several passengers, of whom one was a woman. The skipper, Hird, was a first-rate officer, and his crew were real sailors, not the riff-raff of the crimps. She was last seen off the Straits of Magellan, which means that an unmanned ship managed to spend twenty four years afloat in one of the most notoriously difficult and dangerous passages on Earth.

For those of you wondering, yes, it is perfectly possible for people to survive aboard a wrecked ship. It's been done many times, but of course, the problem isn't surviving the wreck, it's getting rescued afterward. More often than not, the first impulse on finding a derelict isn't to search it, but to avoid or sink it. Even though, under maritime law, a derelict vessel can be salvaged for a substantial sum, many ships don't bother. They carry cargoes of their own, and are under a strict schedule. It's very difficult to bring a derelict vessel to port, and requires resources that most ships won't have to spare.

With all that in mind, consider the derelict from a Trail of Cthulhu perspective. Let's give it a Great War twist:

City of Bradford, Grimsby registration, cargo steamer, 4,200 tons. Captain: H.A. Dawes

In early 1915 the City of Bradford was challenged off the coast of Scotland by U-17, Kapitanleutnant Hans Walther commanding. Captain Dawes, mindful of Admiralty orders, tried to run down U-17, but Walther, wary of this tactic, put a torpedo into the City of Bradford. Walther watched as the crew abandoned ship, then left the scene, recording the City of Bradford as sunk.

That didn't happen, nor did all the crew leave. Dawes, enraged at the loss of his livelihood - and his pension, as he had all of his money wrapped up in the City of Bradford - remained aboard, determined to go down with his ship. Yet she didn't sink, though she did settle, listing heavily to port. The crew were never rescued; nobody but Walther knew what had happened to the City of Bradford, and he thought she'd sunk. She drifted for several weeks.

At first Dawes survived on what was left of the ship's supplies. He couldn't understand how he hadn't been spotted by someone; he was in the shipping lanes, and ought to be within sight of land. Yet the City of Bradford continued to drift, and after a time Dawes, deprived of human contact and half-mad with hunger and thirst, began to hallucinate. In his visions he was offered a new captaincy: bring my cargo to land, said his employer, and you will be handsomely rewarded. 

Thus Mordiggian gained a new hell ship. The City of Bradford has been touched by the Charnel God, and drifts through the North Sea. Dawes is occupied with catching the ship's rats and tying their tails together, all to make a new rat king. His new crew crawled over the side the same day Dawes made his promise, and their waterlogged corpses will defend the rat king so long as the City of Bradford remains afloat. Ultimately the City of Bradford will make its way down the coast to a population center, perhaps encountering - and sinking - several ships along the way. It will beach itself close to a port, and let the rat king loose. After that, Mordiggian's plague will spread, first among the people at the harbor, then the ships that visit, then the harbors that those ships visit ...

Dawes
Athletics 4, Firearms 4, Health 6, Scuffling 5 
Hit Threshold 3
Alertness Modifier +1 
Stealth Modifier 0
Weapon: -2 (fist) +0 (handgun)
Stability Loss: 0
Special: Dawes is the still-living heart of the Hell Ship. Should Dawes be killed, the City of Bradford will sink, taking everything on board - including the Rat King - with it. This has no effect if the City of Bradford has already made landfall.

Drowned Crew
Athletics 6, Health 8, Scuffling 8
Hit Threshold: 2 (very slow)
Alertness Modifier: +0
Stealth Modifier: +0
Weapon: -1 (fist)
Armor: -2 (sodden flesh)
Stability Loss: +1

Rat King
Athletics 3, Health 5, Scuffling 3
Hit Threshold: 3
Weapon: none
Armor: none
Special: with each rat added, the King gains 1 Health. While the King has no attack, it can spread disease. Athletics difficulty 6, or lose 2 Health per day, with a new test every 3 days. Those sick with this plague who make an appeal to Mordiggian may transform into Ghouls. Symptoms: buboes in the groin and armpits that bleed pus when opened, fever and vomiting of blood.