William Hope Hodgson's The Stone Ship: A Detailed Summary and Literary Analysis
- Michael Kellermeyer
- 41 minutes ago
- 7 min read
I can say virtually nothing about this story without giving some important elements of the plot away, and while there are some stories in Hodgson’s canon (“Demons of the Sea,” for instance) that I can spoil without much damage, the power of this tale hinges on its mystery. It is – like so many others – the story of a derelict which appears out of nowhere, interrupts the voyage of an earthly-minded merchant ship, and draws it into another dimension – a dimension of misanthropic misrule, the dimension of riotous, chaotic, brutal Nature.
Let it suffice that this oft-anthologized piece follows dutifully in the footsteps of “From the Tideless Seas,” “The Thing in the Weeds,” “The Mystery of the Derelict,” “The Derelict,” “The Voice in the Night,” and many other Hodgson stories: it tells the story of humanity’s intersection with a merciless, rebellious Nature, chanting the moral “We are floating, aimlessly in a cruel, hostile Universe brimming with unspeakable dangers, and the remnants of our ideals and ambitions – if we do not prepare to defend ourselves – will soon be nothing more than mere fossils.”
And that is a fitting word to leave you with before you start the next story: “fossils…”
SUMMARY
The narrator, Duprey, recounts a remarkable and terrifying maritime incident that occurred when he was a young sailor aboard the barque Alfred Jessop, a small wind-driven vessel whose owner also served as captain. The ship was about twenty days out from London and deep in the tropics when the strange events began. Duprey emphasizes the isolation of the moment: during the second dog watch, with the sea completely calm and no other ships or land anywhere nearby—“not even the far off smoke of a steamer, and no land nearer than Africa, about a thousand miles to the eastward.” The night was utterly silent except for the faint creaking of the ship’s rigging.
While on lookout duty near the bow, Duprey suddenly hears Jensen whisper, “Did you hear that?” Both men soon detect an inexplicable sound: the steady noise of running water, “for all the world like the noise of a brook running down a hill-side,” coming from the dark sea roughly a hundred fathoms off the port bow. The sound is impossible, since they are thousands of miles from any land. The crew gathers silently, listening in amazement. Then an even more unsettling phenomenon occurs—a deep, hoarse cry from the darkness: “oooaze, oooaze, arrrr, arrrr, oooaze,” accompanied by a foul, charnel-like stench drifting across the water.
Shortly afterward, faint lights appear out on the sea. Through binoculars, Duprey sees them flicker and shift, though he cannot identify their source. Suddenly, loud explosive reports echo through the darkness, “almost as loud as the sound of small cannon.” The officers come forward to investigate. After observing the strange lights and sounds for several minutes and receiving no answer to their hails, the Captain decides to launch a boat and examine the mystery more closely.
Within twenty minutes the crew lowers a lifeboat. Duprey rows stroke while the Captain and Third Mate accompany the party, armed with revolvers and axes. As they row toward the mysterious sound, a warm mist hangs over the water. The steady sound of rushing water grows louder. Suddenly something grabs the bow-oar’s oar beneath the surface. The frightened sailor cries out, “There’s somethin’ got a holt of my oar, Sir!” The Captain instantly orders the men to back water. Moments later a massive splash erupts ahead of them, sending a wave over the boat.
Returning briefly to the ship, the Captain organizes a second expedition, this time with lamps, weapons, and stronger resolve. Armed with axes and a cutlass, the men row again into the darkness. Soon they discover the source of the earlier disturbance: enormous eels thrashing in the water around the boat, some so large that the water “was thick and living for yards round the boat with the hugest eels I ever saw.” The Captain’s lantern frightens them away, and the crew continues toward the sound of running water.
As they advance, a strange echo begins repeating their voices and oar strokes through the mist. When Duprey remarks, “There’s an echo,” the night repeats the words eerily: “I thought I heard something rummy… heard something rummy.” The echo suggests large unseen surfaces nearby. Soon they glimpse a tall, strange mast rising above the mist. When the Captain shines his lamp upward, the object resolves into part of a ship’s hull looming above them.
Rowing closer, they discover something astonishing: the vessel appears to be made entirely of stone. Water pours constantly down its sides, explaining the earlier sound of running water. Duprey touches the hull and confirms, “my hand was pressed solid upon stone.” The Captain orders Duprey to climb aboard first. Using an oar as a ladder, Duprey reaches the deck and hears his boots strike with “a horrible, ringing, hollow, stony sound.” The deck, mast, and structures all appear to be stone.
The rest of the party joins him, and they explore the bizarre craft. The Captain marvels, “she’s absolute a stone ship—solid stone, afloat here out of Eternity.” While examining the deck-house, Duprey suddenly glimpses what appears to be a huge red-haired head rising in a window. The Captain dismisses it as imagination, but Duprey insists he saw it.
They enter the deck-house and descend stone stairs into a flooded cabin below deck. There, thigh-deep in water, they discover a long table surrounded by massive chairs.
At its head sits a colossal stone figure, bent forward as if resting on its arms. Nearby another gigantic stone head rises partly from the water. Suddenly something horrifying occurs: red hair begins visibly growing from the stone head. The Captain cries out in shock, “Look at the hair… It’s growing!” The hair spreads over the entire monstrous face, moving and waving as if alive.
The terrified sailors panic. Duprey hurls his axe at the figure and flees with the others back to the deck. As they scramble into the boat, strange crashing noises echo from inside the ship. Duprey shouts that the “stone men” may be coming. Then the Captain fires his revolver while the crew sees the red-haired mass rise above the rail. A violent crash shakes the vessel. Suddenly the entire stone ship begins to tilt and sink. With a tremendous splash it plunges beneath the sea, dragging the Captain down with it. The survivors search the area for half an hour but find no trace of him.
Returning to the Alfred Jessop, they wait anxiously for daylight. Duprey secretly examines the stones he stole from a cabinet in the flooded cabin: twenty-six gems including large diamonds, emeralds, and a massive ruby worth tens of thousands of pounds. While dawn breaks, the crew hears again the eerie cry: “Ooaaze, ooaaze, arr, arrrr.”
As the mist clears, the mystery becomes partly explained.
All around the ship enormous reefs and rock formations suddenly rise from the sea—evidence that the seabed has uplifted overnight. The Mate concludes that “the bottom of the sea’s just riz up here… during the night.” This upheaval must have lifted the ancient wreck—long mineralized into stone—from the depths onto a reef.
Investigating the reefs by boat, the crew finds further explanations. The strange red “hair” proves to be enormous marine creatures resembling hairy sea-caterpillars clinging to rocks. The giant eels they saw earlier had been deep-sea creatures brought upward by the geological upheaval. Some had burst from pressure changes, accounting for the loud explosions heard during the night. A dead grampus-like fish explains the dreadful roaring sounds. Echoes between rock arches caused the strange repeating voices.
They also find evidence that the stone ship had once been a normal wooden vessel carrying cannons centuries earlier, later fossilized by mineralization on the sea floor along with the drowned crew whose bodies had become stone figures.
Despite solving many mysteries, the Captain is never found; the ship must have rolled off the reef and sunk again into deep water. Duprey alone keeps the secret of the treasure he stole from the cabin. He later sells the stones for a fortune, including a ruby that brought him £23,000.
The narrator ends by reflecting that although many aspects were later explained scientifically, the sea remains “the home of all mysteries,” and strange things will always occur upon it. The temporary volcanic reefs where the incident occurred were later charted as the “Alfred Jessop Shoals and Reefs,” named for the Captain who discovered them—and lost his life in the process.
ANALYSIS
The moral of this story seems to be that sometimes fact is stranger than fiction – that the Natural can be more chilling than the supernatural. Perhaps not a tale of horror, it is certainly a tale of fantasy, science fiction, and the weird, but there is something acutely horrific about a world haunted by such freaks of Nature.
Like a Frankenstein’s monster, it emerges from the grave transformed, stronger, more intimidating, more unstoppable. Once a sailing ship crewed by men, it is now a fossilized fortress overrun by mutated sea worms and any number of unnoticed monstrosities who now treat it like any other reef. There is something perverse, carnivalesque, and ironic about the way that the sea creatures – and the process of chemical fossilization – overtake the sailing ship (specifically designed by human minds to avoid the sea, to be apart from it). It’s almost comical when we recognize the red-haired giant to be a sea caterpillar (its fatal potential aside), and when Hodgson strips the wonder from such an otherworldly vision, we are – were you not? – disappointed.
But this is Hodgson’s point: that we look for and even expect miracles in a world teeming with them – miracles of Nature’s design, and miracles more horrific than we might desire. Although Hodgson’s science is entirely full of holes – as it almost always is – his message is one not of factuality, but of possibility. Science – with time and the right conditions – is imminently capable of breaking its own laws: of making stone float and the dead rise. It is a god to be reckoned with. But oh – Hodgson shudders – what a terrible god…