Devilfish Annotated Read-Along · Chapter 27

End Notes

1. 1
   Declan is reading the Argonauta's draft, and it's the first of about six diagnostic observations he makes before his father has even come down the gangway. A loaded ship sits deep. An empty one rides high and shows more of her hull, and any sailor could tell you within a rough guess how much cargo was under a deck from a hundred yards away. Read in context ↩
2. 2
   The teredo isn’t actually a worm. It's a clam—a long, naked, weird bivalve that uses its two tiny shells as drill bits, rasping a tunnel into submerged wood and then lining the burrow behind it with a smooth tube of its own making. It digests the wood. A colony can turn a ship's timber into something with the structural properties of a sponge while the outer surface still looks perfectly sound, which is exactly what made them terrifying: you couldn't see it until the hull failed. Shipworms were the single biggest reason wooden vessels got copper-sheathed below the waterline, and the reason wooden ships needed hauling out and inspecting on a schedule. Read in context ↩
3. 3
   The warm spell that Elliot remarked on in Chapter 23—the one he'd never known at the end of March—ends on the morning the Captain arrives. I like weather to be doing at least two jobs. Here it closes the strange, suspended, out-of-season week in the hot springs where the two of them got to be alone and nothing else existed, and it opens the last act with a cold wind off the water.
   
   It's also just true that a west coast warm snap in March gets taken away from you exactly that fast. Read in context ↩
4. 4
   I gave the Captain an entire chapter of buildup as a monster—the whip, the abduction, Elliot swearing to kill him—and then had him come down the gangway as a confused old man in a coat too big for him, who walks straight past his own son without seeing him.
   
   The was deliberate. The Captain did a monstrous thing, yes. He isn’t the monster in this book; he’s a diminished, obsessed, frightened man who has spent fifteen years chasing a ship across the Pacific and he’s losing. Both of those are true at once and Elliot has spent a whole chapter sharpening a knife for someone who no longer exists, if he ever did.
   
   I'll also note that this is Declan's point of view, not Elliot’s, and Declan’s the one who forgave his father years ago. Read in context ↩
5. 5
   Opium was perfectly legal in British Columbia—imported from China, refined in Victoria, and sold openly. In 1884 Victoria had six licensed opium factories. By 1887 it had thirteen, and in 1888, the year of this book, those thirteen factories turned out something close to ninety thousand pounds of prepared opium at around fifteen dollars a pound. It was a substantial, respectable, tax-paying industry.
   
   In 1880, the US and China reached a trade agreement that banned importing opium from China into the US. The obvious solution was to import it via Canada. The duty on opium in Canada was $5 per pound and the duty in the US w as $10 per pound. So, every pound of opium carried quietly across the Strait of Juan de Fuca instead of declared at a customs house was worth an extra ten dollars to somebody, and Declan and his father were not the only somebodies with fast boats and local knowledge. Read in context ↩
6. 6
   The Captain knows a lot more than he’s ever told either Declan or Elliot. If he had, things might have turned out differently. Read in context ↩
7. 7
   Or maybe not. Declan says this as an insult, in temper, and it's the truest sentence in the chapter. Both men lost a woman to that ship. Both responded by pursuing it past all reason, at the cost of everyone still in front of them. The Captain gave fifteen years to it and let his son and stepson grow up mostly alone. Elliot is one month in and has already dragged himself, Declan, and an entire crew north.
   
   Poor Declan loves both of them and has spent his whole life being the person left behind, physically or emotionally, while somebody he loves sails off after something. Read in context ↩
8. 8
   I wrote this as a throwaway joke, with just general knowledge that the temperance movement was A Thing in the nineteenth century. In refreshing some of my research for these annotations, I subsequently learned that this joke would have landed hard in 1888 because Washington Territory gave women full voting rights in 1883, which they apparently promptly used to vote for prohibition. So, the Territorial Supreme Court struck the suffrage law down. Women got the vote again in January 1888 and it was again struck down in August 1888. The liquor interests won, twice, and Declan, who moves whiskey for a living, knows whereof he speaks. Read in context ↩
9. 9
   Genuine fear here. You think barging in on your stepson blowing your son shocked you, Captain? Just you wait… Read in context ↩
10. 10
    Fair point, Captain. If you knew what Declan was supposed to be keeping Elliot safe from all these years, why so cagey about it? Read in context ↩
11. 11
    Sure, Captain. That’s exactly how things are going to end here. Read in context ↩
12. 12
    Elliot has spent most of this book terrified that he's turning into something Declan couldn't love. Declan has spent about four days quietly arriving at the opposite fear: that Elliot is becoming something Declan can't follow. Celeste is out there and she is, by now, what Elliot is. She can go where he goes. She belongs to the part of him Declan has to stand on a rock and watch.
    
    Notice that the man who nearly drowned in Chapter 23 has not once considered that he'd be safer without Elliot. He's considered only that Elliot might be better off without him. Then he pats his father on the shoulder and says come inside, we'll figure it out, because that's what Declan does with a feeling. Read in context ↩