The Night Ship

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Mayken watches in fascination as Stonecutter swipes one of his soldiers around the head with the easy savagery of a bear. As he paces along the line several of the men flinch. No one meets his eyes. Mayken rolls her eyes. “ Lucretia Jansdochter is giving out to Zwaantie Hendricx on account of the maidservant giving encouragement to sailors old and young.” You are aft-the-mast,” he tells them, pointing to the vast mainmast. “You can never go forward of that.”

The best thing about Imke is her missing finger tops. Mayken gets a thrill just looking at them. Second and third fingers, right hand, nubbed joints smoothed over where nails ought to be. Imke will not tell how she lost her finger tops. Mayken never tires of guessing. A: I was searching for a story and a friend came to me and said, “You have to write about the Batavia.” I had never heard of the ship, but as soon as I started researching, I was hooked. I was both daunted and reassured to find that there hadn’t been a great deal of fiction written about the Batavia. I had previously written historical novels, but this would be the first time I would take real people and their lives for the basis of a story.Each child has parental figures who step in at different times in their journeys (for examples, Imke, Holdfast, Dutch, and Silvia). How would you describe these stand-in parents? In what ways were these adults important for Mayken and Gil? Mayken, woken by the change in the ship’s movement, slips out of her bunk. She peers at her nursemaid. The old woman sleeps on, mouth open, breath evil, cap crooked. The Night Ship is an enthralling tale of human brutality, fate and friendship – and of two children, hundreds of years apart, whose destinies are inextricably bound together. The Night Ship" by Jess Kidd is a book with a gorgeous cover and a beautifully written story inside! Pelgrom looks closely at Mayken with his mouth pursed and his eyes narrowed. The exact same way Imke would regard a salmon held up by a Haarlem fishmonger. Mayken tries to look bright-eyed and fresh.

In 1628 the Batavia, the Dutch East India Company’s grand flagship, set out on her maiden voyage from Holland to her namesake: the capital of the Dutch East Indies. The ship foundered off the coast of western Australia, and the 300 surviving passengers and crew, including women and children, were stranded on the Houtman Abrolhos islands. What followed was a nightmare: merchant Jeronimus Cornelisz fomented a mutiny against the Batavia’s commander Francisco Pelsaert and he and his followers murdered nearly half of all who remained on the islands, enslaving the rest. By the time rescue came, only 122 passengers survived. Mayken applies her ear to the hole in a corner of the ceiling. This hole is for eavesdropping on conversation from the neighboring cabin. Mayken listens hard. Nothing is happening. Gulls are nervously testing the yardarm, clumsy-footed compared to the sailors who are all over the rigging: climbing, dangling, rolling, lashing, hollering and cursing.Another recent book about this area is The Brink, by Holden Sheppard, which I just read and reviewed here. It's a modern story of young school-leavers "holidaying" on one of the islands.

While he is encouraged by another of the islanders he befriends, when this predilection is discovered, it puts him at odds with the conservative fishing community. Tension ratchets up for both Mayken and Gil. While we know the fate of the Batavia, we do not know the fate of all those she carried. I loved the elements of magical realism tied into the narrative through legends/folklore. People having a second sight, a stone with a hole in the middle that allows the beholder to gaze into the past or future, and best of all, a mythical creature that lives in the bilge of the boat.

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The great-bellied ship looms above. One, two, three masts – rising up through a web of rope. The pennant flags snap and stream against a sky of louring clouds. Gil is also nine and he has also recently lost his mother. The year is 1989 and he is living on a small island off the coast of Western Australia with his fisherman Grandfather. His story is horribly sad and I cried all the way through one chapter involving a tortoise. You have to read it to understand! For a novel inspired by a historical atrocity, The Night Ship is curiously insipid. The search for the Bullebak seems like unnecessary magic-realist interpolation into already fascinating fact. It never really goes anywhere, nor does it generate much dread through its soggy presence – one is left to conclude that the Bullebak is a metaphor, although for what is unclear. The evil of man? The corrosive power of greed? Perhaps I’m reading too much into a device solely meant to illustrate Mayken’s cosseted naivety. Her limited perspective also renders the colonial context of the Batavia’s voyage curiously absent, beyond vague allusions to the origins of Mayken’s father’s wealth. When the Batavia briefly anchors off the coast of Sierra Leone, an encounter with the Sierra Leonese is described with strange flatness, in a novel otherwise quite resplendent in its language: “The Batavia’s sailors greet the locals, unfurling rope ladders and climbing down to retrieve samples of goods and produce. The passengers marvel at the crafts and carvings, at the wonderful and strange new foods.” Then – on we sail. The Batavia is the whole world and the whole world is always moving. Mayken has learned to walk again by watching the skipper’s soft-kneed swagger with the pitch and roll. A sailor doesn’t fight to stand upright because there is no upright. They let the ship come to their foot. And, like a good skipper, Mayken keeps a ship’s log. How would you characterize the tone of the story? How does the language contribute to the tone? What else contributes to it?