In October 1628, the newly-built Batavia departed a Dutch port for the East Indies with 341 passengers on board. Seven months into the journey, it wrecked on a small chain of islands off the western coast of Australia. While some drowned with the wreckage, approximately 300 made it to shore. What followed on that small stretch of land has been described as one of the worst horror stories in maritime history.
In The Night Ship, Jess Kidd brings the story of that journey, the wreck and the aftermath to life through two disparate yet connected stories. In 1628 Mayken van den Heuvel, a fearless and inquisitive nine-year-old, travels with her nursemaid to live with a father she has never met after her mother’s death. She keeps her own watch on the ship, disguises herself to pass between the above world of the wealthy passengers and the below world, the ship’s dark hull beneath the water line where soldiers sleep. If the ship is a microcosm of society with all its entrenched class systems and hierarchies, she infiltrates these divides and has a foreboding sense of what is to come. In 1989, 360 years later, Gil Hurley, a nine-year old boy who has no father, travels to Beacon Island to live with a grandfather he doesn’t know following the death of his mother. The islanders are mainly cray fishermen, living in remote camps on the largely desolate island along with scientists interested in diving to the Batavia wreck and digging for artefacts. They avoid Gil’s grandfather and when the skipper says his name it’s as if “he’s really saying knob pox, or road traffic accident”.
While separated by hundreds of years, the narratives parallel in multiple ways. Both Gil and Mayken have lost their mothers in circumstances they must not speak about and in their respective opening scenes we hear them rehearse the dissembling story they must say to others. Mayken must not mention how a “baby got stuck inside” her mother because “it shouldn’t have been there in the first place”. Gil repeats variations of his mother’s death as a mishap: “She’s dead, unfortunately, from a mishap.” They share an object that is a talisman for each of them. They cross-dress, Mayken disguising as a kitchen boy so that she can evade the restrictions of class and gender and travel more freely on the ship and Gil dressing up and staging fashion shows because it’s something he did when it was just him and his mother who didn’t believe in boys’ and girls’ toys or clothes. “Who wants to be given a f***ing vacuum cleaner aged three and a plastic baby that pisses?” she says. “Who wants to be told they can only play with tanks?”
Both children possess a second sight, attuned to the folktales that shadow both the ship and island: Maynek hunts the Bullebak, a water demon from Dutch folklore she believes lurks in the bowels of the ship, while Gil is haunted by Bunyip, a watery creature from aboriginal mythology. Both creatures are also displacements; ways of articulating human brutality perhaps incomprehensible to children. Both children resist naming constellations because they are open to the wildness of the dark sky without needing to map it or pin it down to a given. They remain empathic despite the inhumanity they witness. And they share a landscape, an island that gave them each refuge, the traces of Mayken’s time surfacing repeatedly in Gil’s.
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The novel weaves these narratives with dexterity and balance, and it is more than just two stories with coincidences of place, character or circumstances. The intersections or inflections suggest historical consciousness; how the past continues to impact the present. It is also a gripping read and the alternating chapters, sometimes just a page long, create a compelling momentum. I couldn’t put it down. Moreover, Kidd has created two of the most exuberantly likable characters I’ve encountered in a long time, their beauty both tempered and amplified by flashes of dark humour.
The Marxist literary theorist Georg Lukács wrote that what matters in the historical novel “is not the retelling of great historical events, but the poetic awakening of the people who figured in those events”. The Night Ship is immersive, vivid and immediate, teeming with sensory detail that could only have come from extensive and diligent research and told in beautifully assured prose. For days after, I felt as if I were still trying to find my land legs. The decision to frame the events of this shipwreck and its meanings through the perspectives of children at different historical moments is devastating and potent.
