The Sea Devil
It was a sultry January night in the Argentinian summer. The black sky was covered in stars. The “Jellyfish” lay calmly at anchor. The silence of the night was unbroken by the splash of a wave or the creak of rigging. The ocean seemed to be in a deep sleep.
On the schooner’s deck, half-naked pearl divers lay. Exhausted by their work and the hot sun, they tossed and turned, sighed, and cried out in heavy slumber. Their arms and legs twitched nervously. Perhaps in their dreams, they saw their enemies – sharks. On these hot, windless days, the men were so tired that, after the catch, they couldn’t even pull the boats onto the deck. Besides, it wasn’t necessary: nothing foretold a change in the weather. And so the boats remained on the water overnight, tied to the anchor chain. The yards were not squared, the rigging poorly tightened, and the uncleared jib shuddered slightly with the faintest breath of wind. The entire deck between the forecastle and the poop was cluttered with heaps of pearl oyster shells, fragments of coral limestone, ropes the divers used to descend to the bottom, canvas bags where they put the collected shells, and empty barrels. Near the mizzenmast stood a large barrel of fresh water with an iron dipper on a chain. Around the barrel on the deck was a dark stain from spilled water.
From time to time, one or another diver would rise, swaying in a half-sleep, and stepping on the arms and legs of the sleeping men, would stumble towards the water barrel. Without opening his eyes, he would drink a dipper of water and collapse wherever he landed, as if he had drunk not water but pure alcohol. The divers were tormented by thirst: it was dangerous to eat in the morning before work – a person experiences too much pressure in the water – so they worked all day on an empty stomach until it became dark in the water, and only before sleep could they eat, and they were fed salted meat.
At night, the Indian Balthazar was on watch. He was the closest assistant to Captain Pedro Zurita, owner of the schooner “Jellyfish.”
In his youth, Balthazar was a renowned pearl diver: he could stay underwater for ninety and even a hundred seconds – twice the usual time.
“Why? Because in our time, they knew how to teach, and they started training us from childhood,” Balthazar used to tell young pearl divers. “I was just a boy, about ten years old, when my father sent me to apprentice on a tender with Jose. He had twelve boy apprentices. He taught us like this: he’d throw a white stone or a shell into the water and order, ‘Dive, get it!’ And each time he’d throw it deeper and deeper. If you didn’t get it, he’d whip you with a line or a rope and throw you into the water like a puppy. ‘Dive again!’ That’s how he taught us to dive. Then he started accustoming us to staying underwater longer. An old experienced diver would go to the bottom and tie a basket or net to the anchor. And then we’d dive and untie it underwater. And until you untied it, you weren’t to surface. And if you surfaced, you’d get the whip or the line.
They beat us mercilessly. Not many endured. But I became the best diver in the entire district. I earned well.”
Having grown old, Balthazar abandoned the dangerous trade of a pearl seeker. His left leg was disfigured by a shark’s teeth, and his side was torn by an anchor chain. He owned a small shop in Buenos Aires and traded in pearls, corals, shells, and sea rarities. But on shore, he was bored, and so he often went on pearl fishing expeditions. The industrialists valued him. No one knew the La Plata Gulf, its shores, and the places where pearl oysters lived better than Balthazar. The divers respected him. He knew how to please everyone – both the divers and the owners.
He taught young divers all the secrets of the trade: how to hold their breath, how to ward off shark attacks, and, when it was opportune, how to hide a rare pearl from the owner.
The industrialists, the schooner owners, knew and valued him because he could accurately assess pearls with a single glance and quickly select the best ones for the owner.
Therefore, industrialists readily took him with them as an assistant and advisor.
Balthazar sat on a barrel, slowly smoking a thick cigar. The light from the lantern attached to the mast fell on his face. It was elongated, not high-cheekboned, with a regular nose and large, beautiful eyes – the face of an Araucanian. Balthazar’s eyelids dropped heavily and slowly rose. He was dozing. But if his eyes slept, his ears did not. They were awake and warned of danger even during deep sleep. But now Balthazar heard only the sighs and murmuring of the sleeping men. From the shore came the smell of decaying pearl mollusks – they were left to rot to make it easier to extract the pearls: the shell of a living mollusk is not easy to open. This smell would have seemed repulsive to an unaccustomed person, but Balthazar inhaled it with pleasure. To him, a wanderer, a pearl seeker, this smell reminded him of the joys of a free life and the exciting dangers of the sea.
After the pearls were extracted, the largest shells were transferred to the “Jellyfish.”
Zurita was shrewd: he sold the shells to a factory where they made buttons and cufflinks from them.
Balthazar was sleeping. Soon, the cigar fell from his weakened fingers. His head slumped onto his chest.
But then some sound reached his consciousness, coming from far out in the ocean. The sound repeated closer. Balthazar opened his eyes. It seemed as if someone was blowing a horn, and then a cheerful young human voice cried out: “Ah!” – and then an octave higher: “Ah-ah!..”
The musical sound of the horn was not like the sharp sound of a steamboat siren, and the cheerful exclamation did not at all resemble the cry for help of a drowning person. It was something new, unknown. Balthazar rose; it seemed to him as if the air had suddenly freshened. He went to the railing and keenly surveyed the ocean’s surface. Deserted. Silent. Balthazar nudged a sleeping Indian on the deck with his foot, and when the man rose, he quietly said:
“It’s crying. It’s probably him.”
“I don’t hear anything,” the Huron Indian replied just as quietly, kneeling and listening. And suddenly, the silence was again broken by the sound of the horn and the cry:
“Ah-ah!..”
The Huron, hearing this sound, crouched as if under a whip.
“Yes, it’s probably him,” the Huron said, his teeth chattering with fear. Other divers also woke up. They crawled towards the lantern-lit area, as if seeking protection from the darkness in the weak rays of yellowish light. They all sat huddled together, listening intently. The sound of the horn and the voice were heard once more in the distance, and then everything fell silent.
“It’s him…”
“The sea devil,” the fishermen whispered.
“We can’t stay here any longer!”
“It’s scarier than a shark!”
“Call the owner here!”
The slapping of bare feet was heard. Yawning and scratching his hairy chest, the owner, Pedro Zurita, emerged onto the deck. He was shirtless, wearing only canvas trousers; a revolver holster hung from his wide leather belt. Zurita approached the men. The lantern lit up his sleepy face, bronzed by the sun, his thick curly hair falling in strands over his forehead, black eyebrows, bushy, upturned mustache, and a small, grizzled beard.
“What happened?”
His rough, calm voice and confident movements reassured the Indians.
They all spoke at once. Balthazar raised his hand as a sign for them to be silent and said:
“We heard his voice… the sea devil’s.”
“You imagined it!” Pedro replied sleepily, his head dropping to his chest.
“No, we didn’t imagine it. We all heard ‘ah-ah!…’ and the sound of a horn!” the fishermen cried out.
Balthazar silenced them with the same hand gesture and continued:
“I heard it myself. Only the devil can make such a sound. No one at sea cries or blows a horn like that. We need to leave here quickly.”
“Fairy tales,” Pedro Zurita replied just as sluggishly.
He didn’t want to bring the still-rotting, foul-smelling shells from the shore onto the schooner or weigh anchor.
But he couldn’t persuade the Indians. They were agitated, waving their arms and shouting, threatening that they would go ashore tomorrow and walk to Buenos Aires if Zurita didn’t raise the anchor.
“Damn this sea devil along with you! Alright. We’ll raise anchor at dawn.” And, continuing to grumble, the captain went to his cabin.
He no longer felt like sleeping. He lit a lamp, lit a cigar, and began to pace back and forth in the small cabin. He thought about the incomprehensible creature that had recently appeared in these waters, scaring fishermen and coastal residents.
No one had yet seen this monster, but it had made its presence known several times. Legends were made about it. Sailors told them in whispers, looking around fearfully, as if afraid that this monster might overhear them.
This creature harmed some and unexpectedly helped others. “It’s a sea god,” old Indians would say, “it emerges from the depths of the ocean once every millennium to restore justice on earth.”
Catholic priests assured superstitious Spaniards that it was “the sea devil.” It had begun appearing to people because the populace was forgetting the holy Catholic church.
All these rumors, passed by word of mouth, reached Buenos Aires. For several weeks, “the sea devil” was the favorite topic of chroniclers and feuilletonists in tabloid newspapers. If schooners or fishing boats sank under unknown circumstances, or fishing nets were damaged, or caught fish disappeared, “the sea devil” was blamed. But others said that “the devil” sometimes threw large fish into fishermen’s boats and once even saved a drowning man.
At least one drowning man claimed that as he was sinking into the water, someone grabbed him from below by the back and, supporting him in this way, swam to shore, disappearing into the breaking waves the moment the rescued man stepped onto the sand.
But the most surprising thing was that no one had actually seen “the devil” itself. No one could describe what this mysterious creature looked like. Of course, there were eyewitnesses – they endowed “the devil” with a horned head, a goat’s beard, lion’s paws, and a fish tail, or depicted it as a giant horned toad with human legs.
Government officials in Buenos Aires initially paid no attention to these stories and newspaper articles, considering them idle fiction.
But the unrest – mainly among fishermen – intensified. Many fishermen hesitated to go out to sea. Catches decreased, and residents felt a shortage of fish. Then the local authorities decided to investigate this story. Several police coast guard steam launches and motorboats were sent along the coast with orders to “detain the unknown individual sowing discord and panic among the coastal population.” The police scoured the La Plata Gulf and the coast for two weeks, detaining several Indians as malicious spreaders of false, alarming rumors, but “the devil” was elusive.
The police chief published an official statement declaring that no “devil” existed, that it was all just fabrications of ignorant people who had already been detained and would receive due punishment, and urged fishermen not to trust rumors and to resume fishing.
For a time, this helped. However, “the devil’s” tricks did not cease.
One night, fishermen who were quite far from shore were awakened by the bleating of a kid goat, which had miraculously appeared on their bark. Other fishermen found their pulled-up nets cut.
Delighted by the new appearance of “the devil,” journalists now awaited explanations from scientists.
The scientists did not make them wait long.
Some believed that an unknown marine monster, capable of human-like actions, could not exist in the ocean. “It would be different,” scientists wrote, “if such a creature appeared in the little-explored depths of the ocean.” But scientists still could not allow that such a creature could act rationally. Scientists, along with the head of the maritime police, believed that it was all the antics of some prankster.
But not all scientists thought this way.
Other scientists referred to the famous Swiss naturalist Konrad Gessner, who described a sea maiden, a sea devil, a sea monk, and a sea bishop.
“After all, much of what ancient and medieval scholars wrote has been confirmed, despite the fact that modern science did not recognize these old teachings. Divine creation is inexhaustible, and for us, scientists, modesty and caution in our conclusions are more appropriate than for anyone else,” wrote some older scientists.
However, it was difficult to call these modest and cautious people scientists. They believed in miracles more than in science, and their lectures resembled sermons. Eventually, to resolve the dispute, a scientific expedition was dispatched. The members of the expedition were not fortunate enough to meet “the devil.” Instead, they learned much new about the actions of the “unknown person” (the old scientists insisted that the word “person” be replaced by the word “creature”).
In a report published in newspapers, the expedition members wrote:
“1. In some places on sandy shoals, we observed traces of narrow human footprints. The tracks came from the sea and led back to the sea. However, such tracks could have been left by a person who came to shore by boat.
- The nets we examined had cuts that could have been made by a sharp cutting instrument. It is possible that the nets caught on sharp underwater rocks or iron debris from sunken ships and tore.
- According to eyewitnesses, a dolphin, washed ashore by a storm a considerable distance from the water, was dragged back into the water by someone during the night. Footprints and what appeared to be long claw marks were found on the sand. It is likely that some compassionate fisherman dragged the dolphin back into the sea.
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