The Nantatacas.

Far from Nantataca now you roam,
Further than ever before from your island home
Returned to oft afore with sea blood as your hood
At the chapel door of your God brotherhood.

The women now book keep,
Braided hair down plaited,
In stiff and prim blackfrocked bodice
And tears from the sirens Isle of Lesbos.

Gathering wreckage and dead for their cemeteries
With their sons who dream of midshipmen to be,
Whilst the men hunt on their anointed sea
For God’s food bequeathed to their industry,
Blubber for the capital and wealth for Nantataca.

But you ship in your holds now the yellow sperm oil:
That fine day in Nantataca harbour when you set sail,
Three fine riggings, Essex for equator, two Chile bound.
God’s spawn has waned on your hunting grounds,
Still from the far sperm whale’s cranium you take oil by the barrel.
Sated on the precious essence you suck from its marrow.

How it sticks now, sickly, slithery, slime of horror
In your three harpooner’s, adrift on the equator,
And the royal Essex sunk full to its quota.
From the heart of the sea you met your fate.
The monster that swallowed you at the pearly gate.

You pray the old prayer’s chapel drone,
On what slender threads are our lives hung.
They are hung on both sides, your nearest sides
Are cannibals, your only routes are sixty miles
A day on sea for sixty days, and water,
a gallon and half a pint a day for the crew.

That great scarred head that battered you down.
Had you ever looked upon such a scar as your ship groaned?
To your makeshift boats you are consigned:
Nine Nantatacas, five off shore whites and
Eight blacks, to the first the captain and four Nantataca young,
Two whites, two blacks, to the second to come,
The mate, two whites, two blacks and to the last one,
Four blacks and the young midshipman, the captain
with musket, mate and midshipman pistols for discipline.

You hope to find the variable breezes, safeways,
Or encounter merchant traders who’d befriend the Nantatacas,
Who could pay their way, well known on the seas highways.

And that fine day, three years later,
As children play with seagulls and women stray
Amongst cemeteries, work of day and nights to lay,
Drifts a solitary barge into the bay, baked as clay.

A black char hulk with broken mast
That hangs rotted rags of salt crust
And feted stench as mire for more than a mile,
As the sons of the word made flesh approach without smile.

And inside first they see the caked and putrid slime,
Swamped from stern to bow and running on the rim.
And in the hold the festered skeletal corpses in rags,
Putrefied, cannibalised, caulked, glued. At the prow sag
Two bodies, their long hair and beards caked in salt,
Blind, as from their blistering bodies maggots crawl.

The captain and the young midshipman, the Nantatacas,
Have returned to Nantataca but they have no eyes,
No words to speak the terror of the sea, nor of the hell
They occupy, only the odious ship log pages tell,
And the sirens from the Isle of Lesbos.

Copyright Robin Ouzman Hislop. 2003.
All rights reserved.


The Nantatacas