Melanope, the Witch of the Waves

Even in death a ship does not sleep soundly. Timbers creak in eerie symphony with wind and wave, nesting pigeons converse in dark corners, ghostly shadows walk decks and passageways where, once, seamen ran to their stations in weather fair and foul...

Her lofty masts, white sails and graceful bowsprit were long gone when I first set eyes on her, but the sleeping Melanope remembered the distant day when she was one of the most beautiful clipper ships ever to ply the seven seas.

By the 1970s she was derelict, her ravaged iron hulk standing watch with other seagoing ladies of the past whose skeletons formed the Royston logging grounds breakwater.

Quite unwittingly, her owners had been blessed with prophecy when they christened her, Melanope being derived from ‘melanic,’ which is translated from the Greek ‘melas, melanos’– meaning black, or belonging to a black class.

When black she did become, from years of carrying coal, Melanope already had a black past...

That’s next week in the Chronicles.

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