A Portrait of the Ann by the painter Virgil Day

The Sargasso Sea. An empty and vast space of ocean and sky and winds.

Emerging upon the canvas splashes a great wooden vessel called the Ann, made from more than two thousand trees, steering through the ocean’s hurling might in chiseled and hushed buoyancy. Driving up enormous volume of waves, crashing into their tranquil and rabid foam that spews against the planks, creaking and throbbing, casting out in its drive a vortex and flattened pyramid wake. A mote of shark fins glide in ceremonial-dance circling the ship.

The dark Atlantic curtain, colored in shades of the underworld with stygian blue and cyan green and ice-cracked silver, and violet burning the same shade as a stargazing summer night. To the creatures beneath the surface—saltwater clam shipworms chewing through the wood and sea turtles flying just under the ship’s dark shadow, bull sharks and great whites, man-of-war fish and flying fish flapping in rainbow arcs above the waters, and sketched at the ocean’s floor in glowing silhouettes at a scale of below three thousand feet lay the skeletons of plesiosaurs, broken beams and European Flags of sunken ships and the bones and skulls of the passengers with their flesh feeding monstrous toothed dragonfish and fangtooth and tomb-mouthed wolffish, spearheaded goblin sharks and serpent shaped hagfish—hearing from the coming ship above water an opera sung by angels cast out of Heaven.

In the sky before Ann, sunlight stabs through the clouds and stretches out upon the horizon in majestic and giant golden candle flames as it were the voice of God saying, Come hither.

Its seven sails—spread out like the wings of a man-made Pegasus, flexed and rippling, flapping and shielding the winds and gliding in the cadence of stuttering thunder. The emblem of the Union Jack sewn into to the top left corner of a red-filled flag waving among the skies on the highest post mast with crossing spars designed in the image of a crucifix.

It signs in its route upon the parting and rapid waves, in cursive scribe, its own name. Coming with great tides. Scaling the seas and emerging in the new year of 1733 through dark dawn and great water-fogs, against a score of whales way underwater whistling the chorus of conch shells rising up through the air as to warn the Natives, onto a land called the New World.

The Captain, wearing long brown hair pulled back in clumped rolls and tied down his neck with frizzled strands undone and whipping against his face and caging his eyes, a long-sleeved white button down shirt rolled up by the laced ruffles at his wrists—with the vision of a new commune settled in new territory, that will almost immediately fail, where no man owns another and no man claims more land than he can humbly live, where the poor and prisoners from the old parliament are given a baptism of ordained freedom in this existence—steers the wheel with great strength like a character out of a new mythology and new ideal fixing to be born.

Cloaking the image of the galley hangs a pedaled cloud ascended and stemming from the breaths of each of the 111 passengers gathered there and huddled, trembling and shivering from the splattered waves coming down upon the docks in the form of a very fine and violent storm.

Sharing barreled crates of wine, eating oatmeal biskets, cleaning and gutting dead fish on a table. A half dozen men casting up webbed and tangled nets of haddock and Atlantic pollock and silver hake, their gills strangling against air and flopping on the deck.

The passengers soaked with dirt that washes down their flesh revealing more dirt tainting their skin, garmented in mosquitos and blood freckles and ill-pale skin and poison yellow eyes that leaks down their faces.

Among the passengers, are men and wives and madams, aged from twenty years to fifty years, and sons and daughters between infant stages of life and fifteen years old. Men wearing ripped stockings under ripped knee-breeches. Ruined coats and dampened and mud-clumped wigs. Straw hats.

The women with long unwashed hair trailing down their shoulders containing in the follicles the aroma of the sea. Torn collars and ankle-high and some calf-high dresses, dirt smeared to their neck and chests and legs.

They are drawers of silk threading new stockings and shirts, blacksmiths making iron pots to cook and nails for the loose boards, and midwives caring for newly born and the exhausted mothers.

Three shoemakers, one thirty-three with brass muscles and the others each forty-two-years-old with wood chippings on their aprons measuring the feet of a woman the same age and blowing dust off the sole of a new shoe, the wife of a carpenter thirty-three years old with a nine-year-old son named Marmaduke Cannon and the wife of a wigmaker also thirty-three, another carpenter and his wife who carry with them along the voyage their five year old daughter, a forty year old surgeon, a thirty-year-old farmer of flax and hemp and father of a two-year-old playing the violin, a forty-year-old sawyer of wood who had helped oversee the Ann’s construction, a mother and judge’s wife named Sarah, a harvester of grapes and winemaker named Daniel with a seven-year-old daughter and twelve-year-old son, a two year old named John and his six year old brother named William and their thirty-three year old mother named Elizabeth, and a doctor of ministry—will each be dead within the following seven months, and so part of their skeleton bursts through their flesh, and in fainted brush buried deep beyond the horizon are their spirits ascending under the sky’s orange lamp and lifted by the finger-rayed light.

There’s a dead child, seven months old, with rotting flesh held in his mother’s arms who weeps while the father stares out into the abyss beyond with paralyzed emotion. Another dead boy, who passed on from this world just three days before Christmas after nine months on earth lays wrapped in blankets on the floor. The brother, eleven years his senior sits on his knees kissing the dead child’s forehead. A grouping of great albatross scan the sky and swarm toward the docks, fighting each other and the passengers among the Ann for the meat of the deceased children.

The minister is holding service, wearing a long cassock with long white hair that is bald on top his crown, reading from the King James Bible and many there are singing hymns while he holds his arms stretched out under a great wave forming over his head.

The wing-shaped tail of a blue whale lays whipped above the surface, smacking down against the ocean, and in light strokes underneath the waters its form is drawn three times the size of the Ann, waiting for it.

A spectacular night hunts them down from behind the ship. The ocean blue planet of Neptune floats in the dark skies, with a half dozen rings circling the sphere comprised of dust and rock clutters. The stars sparkle and flicker and reveal the image of Taurus fleeing from Cetus.

Ahead of the Ann, above them, among the daylight that they pursue, whisk a few clouds, appearing as white hair on top the heads and faces of giant invisible creatures watching upon the world.