![]() ![]() Gil and Mayken’s stories intersect, with the novel structured in alternating chapters. ![]() He is drawn to a bush named the Raggedy Tree, where the locals leave offerings – “faceless dolls, faded bears” – for “the dead girl who haunts the island”, Little May, whose identity is wholly unmysterious by the time she is mentioned. Introverted Gil, still traumatised by his troubled mother’s death, is a clear misfit among the island’s sparse and sinewy inhabitants, but he has his own brand of survivors’ instinct: “He can read a roadmap, do a decent French manicure, put a grown woman in the recovery position and shoplift a square meal.” Beacon is, of course, the same island on which the survivors of the wreck took unpropitious refuge, and Gil finds himself beguiled by its bloody history. It is 1989, and Gil, a sullen, lonely pre-adolescent, is taken to Beacon Island after his mother’s death, to live with his only remaining relative: an equally sullen and lonely grandfather, Joss. The second strand of the novel takes place more than three centuries later, in Australia. Disguised as a boy, she begins to search the dark and waterbound below-decks world of the Batavia for Imke’s phantom assailant. When Imke begins to sicken, Mayken is convinced by the wily cabin boy that her beloved nursemaid’s illness is caused by the Bullebak, a malign eel-like creature of folk legend. Mayken herself is precocious, indomitable and implausibly resistant to the rigid social stratification of 17th-century Dutch society. Here is an albatross, strangled on the deck. He has chestnut stallions and dapple mares.” Mayken travels with her doughty and superstitious nursemaid Imke, the first of an extensive cast of characters we will meet in this timeline who seldom rise above the stereotype: here is the lugubrious yet enchanting widow, here is the wily cabin boy, here is the twinkly eyed sailor named Holdfast. He has a legion of servants and stacks of gold dishes. We meet the well-heeled nine-year-old Mayken, on her way to the Indies to join her father, a mysterious merchant ensconced in imperial luxury: “Her father has a marble mansion, so she’s told. The first (and surprisingly, less interesting) of The Night Ship’s dual narratives is set aboard the Batavia. By the time rescue came, only 122 passengers survived. 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. 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. I n 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.
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