22-04-2025
Eden's Shore - read an extract 10 April
We present an extrract from Eden's Shore, the new novel by Oisin Fagan, the acclaimed author of Nobber and the short story collection Savages.
At the close of the 18th century, Angel Kelly, an Irishman, sets sail from Liverpool aboard The Atlas with the intention of creating a Utopian commune in Brazil. But when a mutiny takes place aboard the ship, he finds himself stranded upon the coast of an unnamed Spanish colony in Latin America...
From its erratic trajectory, Lafcadio suspected the vessel in the distance to be a Hollow One, a ship unmanned by war, plague or tempest. If such was the case, he would send a party to board her, salvage what they might, requisition the log, and scuttle her, wearing scarves over their mouths to protect them from any noxious fevers therein.
He ordered Quentin Cricklow to keep an eye on it, but then spent the rest of the day watching it himself.
Once, in his youth, he had boarded a Dutch frigate that had been drifting along the coast of Senegal, weighted down by an acreage of barnacles, swarmed by a froth of diverse fishes, and dragging after her densely woven reams of seaweed. He had been the first to board, then; had hauled himself up by a knotted rope grappled to a cleat and spilled aboard. His boots echoed out across empty, tomblike decks. He rifled through defunct instruments; incomplete maps; rusted astrolabes; blunted, demagnetised compasses, the points dragging against the markings. The log was unreadable, a dried pool of inky pap; seven strands of blonde hair pressed between its disintegrating pages. The hold carried an algaed lagoon. Wind moaned through enormous holes in the sails. They had fluttered without interruption for more than a decade, by now so coated in salt they glimmered like a cave of crystals broken open to the sunlight.
'Marry, there she is, sir,' Cricklow said. 'If we set the course we should have her steering athwart our hawse afore nightfall.'
'Set it.'
More loitering sailors joined Cricklow, passing a telescope amongst themselves. They followed it with their eyes and their ship until dusk, when a Swedish carpenter named Fuchs wiped down his spectacles on his trousers and put them in front of his face, at a good distance from his nose and said:
'No sloop, and she is too small in the hull to be French.'
'Ain't got no hull at all,' Cricklow said.
'Where is her mast?'
'La, she has two,' Cricklow said.
By now a crowd had formed that blocked most of the larboard deck. Nearly fifty men had clambered onto hatches, bulwarks, up the rigging. A soft patina of invisible and unfelt rain glazed them.
Angel pushed through this gathering, asking:
'Does anyone know where Jacques is, the boy Jacques?'
Then he saw what seemed to be an island floating very slightly above sea level, its surface pocked with mussels and blankets of bulbous seaweed that adorned it like loosening flesh. It was something slick and animal, like the submerged hump of some rotting leviathan. An olive tree grew out of it, its trunk seven twisting branches. Grey leaves shivered relentlessly, their lighter underside flickering in and out of vision with the wind, giving the appearance of something trying to become something else; even the bark seemed to crawl with motion. On a low limb, almost hidden behind the latticed mesh of sprigs and leaves, was a small girl, perhaps nine or ten years old. She had her back pressed against the trunk, her arms around her knees, her shawl funnelling the wind. Out of reach of the tree's shade, a pale, one-eyed man had been crucified on the severed upper part of a mainmast. His body swayed constantly with the pitch and roll of the sea. The arms were wide across the spars; a loose shirt flapped across the emaciated body; whips of wet hair plastered across his cavernous cheeks, and his whole face was obscured in shade by a faded tricorne hat which had remained stuck on his head by way of a nail hammered through the top of his skull.
'El jardín,' Hieronimo said.
''Tis a wandering graveyard, la,' Cricklow said.
A swell submerged the surface, making it seem like the tree and the crucifix had been discharged, fully formed, from the depths. They tilted back and forth, bursts of whitened water splashing them, and then, like a sigh of release, the bubbling water hissed its way out through the wefts in the seaweed, and then there was the foamy rush of the breaching, the displaced water exploding about it.
'It is the hull of a capsized vessel, in putrefaction,' Lafcadio said. 'It is the fruit of mutiny, only. They have been cast away. This man was the captain, and she must have been—'
Angel looked away suddenly, having noticed something terrible.
There was a noise above; eyes strained upwards. Jacques hung off a sheet, a figure-of-eight coil around his shoulder.
'No, Jacques,' Lafcadio shouted. 'Look.'
He gestured at the crucified man whose head was slouched forward now, the tricorne an inverted black triangle where his face had been; Angel noticed for the first time that the dead man's trousers were flapping wildly, like untethered lines. There were no feet hanging down, the trousers unfilled; only the upper half of a man hung there.
'Get down, Jacques,' Angel called. 'Come down, now.'
Jacques cast the rope, and it landed amidst a tumbling clump of black seaweed.
'Prends-la, 'moiselle,' Jacques shouted.
The wind rose in an ache; the girl didn't come down from the tree.
As the Atlas pushed on, the rope wound its way through the reams of seaweed, its knotted end bouncing, and then it plopped back into the sea, and dragged through the water where it created a white rushing furrow in the form of a cobra's hood.
Then they were past it. Jacques looked at the disappointed length of rope in his hands, and then found himself on his back, pulled down by Lafcadio. The first mate knelt over him, and commenced slapping him, open-palmed, across the face. Sailors clustered around them like clotting blood, their faces a mass of indistinguishable shadows in the drab evening. Jacques glanced around, blinking dizzily.
'Sir,' he said. 'A child.'
'A cannibal,' Lafcadio said.
He slapped him twice more, and then left off.
The tree and the crucifix cast a faint, joined shadow against the water, and then they, too, became shade. Soon all that was visible were two vertical lines rearing thinly out of the sea, a throbbing spot, stalking closely the water, obscured by every slight pitch of the ship.
Jacques writhed on deck, his mouth and nose bleeding.
'Angel,' he said. 'Angel, please.'
As Angel was moving through the crowd, Lafcadio touched the underside of his chin so he was looking up directly into his face.
They stared at each other silently.
Eventually, the first mate folded his hands behind his back, stepped aside, and Angel helped Jacques up and led him back to his own quarters.
