Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

The archipelago of Chiloé, off the rainy south of Chile, is a country of its own: a hundred islands of wooden churches and potato fields, fog, tides, and a mythology so complete that the Chilotes speak of it less as folklore than as a parallel administration. And the flagship of that administration—literally—is the Caleuche : the great ghost ship of the southern channels. She appears at night, in the fog, blazing with light and loud with music : a beautiful vessel, lit stem to stern, with the sounds of a fiesta aboard—accordion, laughter, dancing feet—where no ship should be; and she vanishes when approached, or sinks smoothly under the surface to continue her voyage beneath the sea , for the Caleuche sails under water as easily as over it, and against wind and tide when it suits her. Her crew is the archipelago's dead: the drowned , gathered from the wrecks and the rip-tides by the mythology's three sea-beings—the mermaid Pincoya and her siblings, who carry the drowned to the...

Off the Cape of Good Hope, where two oceans grind against each other and the weather turns murderous without apology, sailors for three centuries reported the same impossible sight: a seventeenth-century Dutch East Indiaman under full press of canvas, beating into the teeth of a gale that no ship could sail against, her hull glowing with a light that belonged to no lantern. She never made port. She never sank. She was the Flying Dutchman , the most famous phantom of the sea, and the law of her legend was simple and terrible: the ship that hails you is doomed, and the doom is contagious. To sight her was to expect fouled water-casks, dead men in the rigging, letters to be delivered to persons long deceased—and, perhaps, no landfall at all. The Captain Who Cursed the Wind The legend crystallized around a name: Vanderdecken —"of the decks"—captain out of Amsterdam for the Dutch East India Company, though some tellings prefer Falkenburg, and one persistent tradition names the...