Clive Cussler: Shock Wave

Everyone clutching the floating wreckage stared dumbstruck at the life-and-death struggle between the two monsters of the deep.

From his position on his scrap of raft, Scaggs had a good seat to observe the struggle. The body of the enormous eel-like creature stretched from a blunt head to a long, tapering tail. Scaggs estimated the length of the body to be sixty to sixty-five feet, with the circumference of a large flour barrel. The mouth on the end of the head opened and closed spasmodically, revealing short fanglike teeth. The skin appeared smooth and was a dark brown on the upper surface of the body, almost black, while the belly was an ivory white. Scaggs had often heard tales of ships sighting serpentine sea monsters, but had laughed them off as the visions of sailors after drinking too much rum in port. Frozen in awe, he was not laughing now as he watched the once-feared Executioner writhe violently in a futile attempt to shake off its deadly attacker.

The compact cartilaginous body of the shark prevented it from contorting its head and jaws far enough backward to bite into the serpent. Despite its tremendous strength and its frenzied convulsions, it could not shake the death grip. Revolving around in complete circles with great speed, shark and serpent writhed beneath the surface before reappearing in an explosion of spray that beat the water into froth again.

The serpent then began biting into the shark’s gill slits. After another few minutes, the gargantuan combat faded, the shark’s agonized struggle ceased and the two monsters slowly sank out of sight in the deepest part of the lagoon. The hunter had become the meal of another hunter.

Scaggs wasted no time after the epic battle in pulling the bedraggled convicts from the water onto the small piece of the raft that still hung together. Stunned by what they had witnessed, the pitifully few survivors finally reached the white sandy beach and staggered ashore, carried at last from their nightmare world to a Garden of Eden as yet unknown to European mariners.

A stream of pure water was soon found that ran from the volcanic mountain that rose above the southern end of the island. Five different varieties of tropical fruit grew in the forested area, and the lagoon was teeming with fish. Their perils over, only eight out of the original 231 who set out on the raft of the Gladiator lived to tell about the horrors of their fifteen days adrift in the sweltering emptiness of the sea.

Six months after the tragic loss of the Gladiator, its memory was briefly revived when a fisherman, coming ashore to repair a leak in his small boat, discovered a hand gripping a sword protruding from the beach. Digging the object from the sand, he was surprised to find a life-sized image of an ancient warrior. He carried the wooden sculpture fifty miles north to Auckland, New Zealand, where it was identified as the figurehead of the lost clipper ship Gladiator.

Eventually cleaned and refinished, the warrior was placed in a small maritime museum, where onlookers often stared at it and pondered the mystery of the ship’s disappearance.

The enigma of the clipper ship Gladiator was finally explained in July of 1858 by an article that ran in the Sydney Morning Herald.

The seas around Australia have witnessed many a strange sight, but none so strange as the sudden appearance of Captain Charles “Bully” Scaggs, reported missing and presumed dead when his clipper, the Gladiator, owners Carlisle & Dunhill of Inverness, vanished in the Tasman Sea during the terrible typhoon of January 1856 when only 300 miles southeast of Sydney.

Captain Scaggs astonished everyone by sailing into Sydney Harbor in a small vessel he and his only surviving crewman had constructed during their sojourn on an uncharted island.

The ship’s figurehead, washed up on the west coast of New Zealand one and a half years ago, confirmed the loss of the ship. Until Captain Scaggs’ miraculous return, no word on how his ship was lost or the fate of the 192 convicts being transported to the penal colony or the 11 soldiers and 28 crewmen was known.

According to Captain Scaggs, only he and two others were cast up on an uninhabited island, where they survived extreme hardships for over two years until they could build a vessel with tools and materials salvaged from the wreckage of another unfortunate ship that was driven ashore a year later with the loss of her entire crew. They constructed the hull of their craft from wood cut from the native trees they found growing on the island.

Captain Scaggs and his crewman, Thomas Cochran, the ship’s carpenter, seemed remarkably fit after their ordeal and were anxious to board the next ship bound for England. They expressed their profound sorrow for the tragic deaths of the Gladiator’s passengers and their former shipmates, all of whom perished when the clipper sank during the typhoon. Incredibly, Scaggs and Cochran managed to cling to a piece of floating wreckage for several days before currents carried them onto the deserted island’s beach, more dead than alive.

The tiny piece of land where the men existed for over two years cannot be precisely plotted since Scaggs lost all his navigational instruments at the time of the sinking. His best reckoning puts the uncharted island approximately 350 miles east-southeast of Sydney, an area other ships’ captains claim is devoid of land.

Lieutenant Silas Sheppard, whose parents reside in Hornsby, and his detachment of ten men from the New South Wales Infantry Regiment, who were guarding the convicts, were also listed among the lost.

September 17, 1876

Aberdeen, Scotland

After Scaggs’ return to England and a brief reunion with his wife and children, Carlisle & Dunhill offered him command of their newest and finest clipper ship, the Culloden, and sent him to engage in the China tea trade. After six more gruelling voyages, in which he set two records, Bully Scaggs retired to his cottage in Aberdeen, worn out at the early age of forty-seven.

The captains of clipper ships were men grown old before their time. The demands of sailing the world’s fleetest ships took a heavy toll on body and spirit. Most died while still young. A great number went down with their ships. They were an elite breed, the famed iron men who drove wooden ships to unheard-of speeds during the most romantic era of the sea. They went to their graves, under grass or beneath the waves, knowing they had commanded the greatest sailing vessels ever built by man.

Tough as the beams inside his ships, Scaggs was taking his last voyage at fifty-nine. Having built up a tidy nest egg by investing in owners’ shares on his last four voyages, he was providing his children with a sizable fortune.

Alone after the death of his beloved wife, Lucy, and his children grown with families of their own, he maintained his love for the sea by sailing in and around the firths of Scotland in a small ketch he’d built with his own hands. It was after a brief voyage through bitterly cold weather, to visit his son and grandchildren at Peterhead, that he took sick.

A few days before he died, Scaggs sent for his longtime friend and former employer, Abner Carlisle. A respected shipping magnate, who built a sizable fortune with his partner, Alexander Dunhill, Carlisle was a leading resident of Aberdeen. Besides his shipping company, he also owned a mercantile business and a bank. His favorite charities were the local library and a hospital. Carlisle was a thin, wiry man, completely bald. He had kindly eyes and walked with a noticeable limp, caused by a fall off a horse when he was a young man.

He was shown into Scaggs’ house by the captain’s daughter, Jenny, whom Carlisle had known since she was born. She embraced him briefly and took him by the hand.