issue 5, spring 2001

 
an episode from
 
 

© 1999 Michael Evert, used with permission
 
the epic
At the turn of the last century, Gonzaga was a beloved character of children's literature, with fans all over the world. The tale, set in the late eighteenth century, of a pious brewer who wanders the world bringing beer and liquor to the thirsty and fine food to the hungry, was loved by readers of many nations. Indeed, such was the popularity of the story that it began to have a life outside the confines of the written page.



this episode:

While The Travels of Father Gonzaga was popular amongst the middle classes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its appeal was by no means limited to the bourgeois yearning break the dreary bonds respectability of by experiencing, vicariously, the life of a lousy (to mention the least deficiency) sot.

The notorious Duke of Cumbria, was a fervent fan of the Gonzaga tale. This degenerate aristocrat, a third cousin on both sides to the Queen, became notorious amongst his peers for an incident in the House of Lord's Library so depraved that even the lowly standards of the internet do not allow for its description (although a Yahoo search for the following keywords - architectural folly, lanolin, puppetry, and goat-herding - will give the reader a broad idea of what was involved). Although the scandal was hushed up, and never reached the ear's of the lower orders, the Duke was forced by his influential family to spend several years in interior exile in the Outer Hebrides. There he remained until it was discovered that he had convinced the entire congregation of the local Free Church of Scotland to reenact scenes for the controversial and often suppressed final chapter of Gonzaga's travels [Coming soon to Chocolate Thunder! Unexpurgated!]. It was then decided that, all in all, it was better he be kept where an eye could be kept on him, and he was offered a post in the 1905 Campbell-Bannerman Liberal Government as Minister for Entertainments, despite a growning dependance on Absinthe.

We rejoin Gonzaga accommodating himself to life on the high seas. A ship has come into sight, and Gonzaga recognizes it as the HMS Calvary the craft assigned to take him from Australia to London to face justice, from which he has recently escaped.

    

  episode 5

There was a ship. A ship festooned with vines, a ship that carried groves of trees and vineyards heavy with fruit upon its decks. The Calvary! This in itself did not bother me overmuch; where I foresaw problems was in the puffs of cottony white smoke that began to blossom at her gunwale. At this precise moment, a brace of squinty rogues came to fetch me on deck. I tried to reason with them, pointing out that I had valid reasons for wanting to avoid the deck right then, but the one whose name was Ignatz poked my buttock with his clasp-knife, and continued to do so until I was halfway up a ladder, at which point a shot from one of the Calvary's 24-pounders neatly removed his ribcage and all of its contents. I say neatly faute de mieux, for it was neat work, but the term belies the seven gallons of blood that doused the companionway and everyone in it. The smell was nearly indescribable, a thick, coppery sort of smell, with top notes of jasmine and a body like the sea. It gave the brewer in me ideas, great ideas; but I digress.

The Calvary's gunners had placed their first salvo straight between wind and water, the twelve iron balls smashing twelve great holes in the Jonathan Edwards' gun-deck. As the ladder beneath me had gone the way of Ignatz' chest, there was no way to go but up. The main deck presented a scene that might have been taken from that ferment of things that the Pagans claim existed before the seas were separated from the earth and the skies placed above them all: it was the original Chaos. Amidst it all, a mob of twenty-odd Yankees was trying to load one of the ship's enormous thirty-six pounders, under the direction of Captain Toper.

"By Queen Anne's velvet arse! What the hell do ye think you're doing, boys? Ye take the swab, see, and ye swab out the bore. It's as simple as that. Not now, yokel! BEFORE ye put the powder in! Can ye remember that? Look, it's as simple as dipping sheep: we swab out the bore, we ram the powder in, we ram the ball in, and fire! NOT NOW!"

The crashing fall of the foremast, which the Captain's thirty-six pounder had managed to knock down, shook me from my inaction. As I ducked into the foc'sle, I heard him still shouting, "First you aim, and then you fire! Aim and fire! Aim, fire, aim, fire! Got that? Good!"

A bunch of grapeshot tore up a portion of the deck, exposing my hiding place to the reluctant South Atlantic sun. There was an occult silence up top, bar the distant boom of cannon and hiss of shot. Even the Captain was silent. I looked out on deck to see the crew gazing North, away from the Calvary.

The watch atop the main mast shouted out, "She blows, sar!"

"Launch the boat, boys, we have a whale!" shouted the Captain, as a sniper hit the lookout, causing him to fall to the deck and land in the rendering kettle.

"Damn the British for the stumped up pizzler of a Whale's fart they are! All right, boys, load up a cask of whale oil in the cannon."

A dozen men scrambled for the gun, while the other eight grabbed harpoons and ran for the boats, depending whether they were motivated by fear or greed. Unfortunately, they ran into each other and went sprawling on the oil-slicked deck.

 

"Damn ye, poxets. This ain't a dance for poppets and dainties. Remove the harpoon from that man. Now: man the cannon!"

The crew, now in a panic of fear, ran to the guns, pausing only to tip the fresh corpse into the rendering vat.

"Now: Powder, Load, Ram, Aim, Fire!!"

There was an enormous explosion, and for a moment I thought they had blown up their own ship. Then the main deck of the British ship erupted in a sheet of flame.

"Right. Reload. Reload. We've got a Whale to harpoon. First one job, and then the next. Clean up the British. Burn them. Get to the business at hand. NOW: POWDER, LOAD, RAM, AIM AND FIRE!!"

And a second keg of flaming whale oil was pitched at the Calvary. The sun had now descended below the horizon in disgust with us wretched mortals, but we were not worried, for the shrubbery aboard the Calvary made a crackling fire. Great billows of hemp smoke were carried across the waves, and we drank deeply of those happy fumes. For a second, I felt myself back in the Asiatic wastelands, knee-deep in pitch. Then I was struck in the face by a few hundredweight of mixed greenery and pitched back onto the deck. As I extricated myself from the colewort, escarole and Irish moss, Captain Toper cried out:

"Alright, shipmates! Now see, those lime-faced fellows have provided us with a glorious lamplight by which to conduct our business, which, as I have had cause to mention previously, is to hunt for whales. Let's send a second boat down, and let's keep stoking that fire, boys."

I was carried forward in the surge towards the boats, and before I knew it, I was in the briny, my ample girth holding the longboat firmly to the water. Captain Toper stood at the bow as we cut through the squally waves, our faces glowing warmly from the Calvary's burning deck, our lungs filled with the glorious smoke. Suddenly, before us there was a terrific surge in the water, and we froze in amazement as thirteen tons of flabby flesh, with a pair of olives for eyes (how I coveted those eyes!) burst into the air.

"Whale!" cried Toper.

"Hvalt!" nodded Cupidity sagely.

"C'est la baleine!" gasped Pierre, our Canadian cabin boy

"Cetus," I muttered sagely to myself.

"Work those oars, boys!" yelped Toper, drenching us more with his sputum than the South Atlantic's toughest waves had yet succeeded in doing. "Try and cut him off and force him in towards the Calvary. We'll roast that plaguey fish!"

The oarsmen, driven by that supreme force, sc. greed, lashed the sea into a churning foam. Little by little we began to draw even with the massive cetacean. The Captain bade me lie down in the boat's sump, so that he might stand on my buttocks and thus get a better view of his prey.

"Fix harpoon!" I heard him cry.

"Wait for it. . . wait for it . . .NOW!" I lifted up my head and saw the hulking brute whom the crew (with the wit for which the Yankee is so justly famous) called Tiny heave a massive barbed harpoon, like Jupiter himself casting one of his bolts at a Nymph who would not sleep with him. Suddenly the line attached to the spear tautened and the boat gave a tremendous jerk, knocking Captain Toper head over heels into the stern. And we were off! The oarsmen shipped their oars, the Captain scrambled to the bow, making sure to grind my face into the splintery salt-soaked boards on his way, and the boat started moving through the waves at a truly frightening clip.

"Tiny, my boy! You fastened him! There'll be an extra gobbet of pork in your beans tonight, my lad." The Captain quivered with excitement. The whale was dragging by the prevailing wind, and the waves were threatening to smash the boat apart. As we went faster--for the Leviathan's speed kept increasing--we began to go not through the heading waves, but over them, leaving the water at every crest and rejoining it with a mighty crash at every trough.

Soon we were flying past the hulk of the Calvary. I rose up on my knees just in time to see the whale lash the water with his massive flukes with so much force that a black shape that had been bobbing in the waves was sent flying through the air directly towards us. In fact, the beast was so strong that the object covered the fifty-odd yards that separated us in a lazy arc, and would have sunk us had it not been for Tiny, who absorbed most of the impact with his head.

The object proved, mirabile dictu, to be a charred cask containing some of the fruits of my labors aboard the Calvary, one hundred gallons of something strong, to wit, my finest south-sea rum. Under the Captain's orders, we cast the headless Tiny over the side and rolled the keg amidships.

Still we raced, parting the water like a minor Moses. The whale drew us in a great circle around the two boats, splashing us with phosphorescence until we glowed in the moonlight.

At last it paused, and the circles our boat described grew smaller and smaller, until we were bobbing along at no more than two or three knots.

"Men, the whale has stopped," cried out Captain Toper. "Let's make straight for him, in with the harpoons, and back to ship, one-two-three."

But scarcely had we gotten our oars into the water when our whale delivered a terrific spout of fishy water unto the air and began to move again in our direction.

"My boys," Captain Toper began, "I know things don't look so good for us, but let me tell you a little story. It's about a man named Whitfield; a good man, for a minister." The whale was drawing nearer, and the oarsmen began backing oars frantically. The Captain went on.

"Now this Whitfield fellow lived in Deerfield, you see, and he had to go to Pittsfield one day, to preach--d'ye follow me? And so he sets out, on foot. Did I mention that it was winter? It was November." The whale leveled its flukes at us, but the Yankee Captain would not be swayed from his anecdote.

 
 
   

"So this fellow sets out, and after a few miles he sees a pack of wolves, over to his left. Now, it doesn't take a lexicographer to figure out how he feels about this, but Whitfield was a smart fellow, and he knew that there was a river not half a mile ahead of him, with an Iroquois village on the other side."

"Steady on, men! Now, where was I? The river, the river. So he heads for the river, as calm as you please, but the wolves start getting closer, you see. So the minister takes to his heels, and the wolves start running after him. But Whitfield was always fast on his feet, and so he gets to the river. . ."

At this point, the Leviathan with his teeth that are, as the Scripture informs us, terrible round about, ate half of Pierre.

". . . only to find that the bridge is out. Now, Whitfield's a tolerable good preacher, but he's not much at swimming. Still, what would you do? It's the Devil or the deep blue sea. He takes the sea." As does Cupidity, who hops over the side barely in advance of being devoured.

"So he throws himself in the river, which isn't frozen yet. It's November. Did I mention that? I think I mentioned that. Now, some Mohicans happen to be loafing on the other bank, as those folks do, and they decide to pull him out. So they pull him out. Now Whitfield gets away from the wolves, and he doesn't drown, but he's damn' wet. And cold, and right then it starts to rain. D'ye follow me so far?" I nodded vigorous assent, but the rest of the crew was far too concerned with manipulating their oars so as to extract us from the whale's closing jaws to pay much attention.

"Now, this Whitfield stumbles on one of those bark houses as the Indians build, you see, and there's smoke coming out of the chimney. So he sticks his head in it, and guess what he sees inside?"

"A fire?" I hazarded.

"Good! A fire; that's right. But by this fire there's a war-party, you see, of redskins, and guess what--they're scalping somebody at that very minute! At that very minute! And--this is the beauty part--it's a minister!"

As if to emphasize Captain Toper's point, the whale ate a couple of the starboard oarsmen, oars and all. But I was determined to find out what happened to the Reverend Whitfield, so I bade the Captain press on.

"Well, Whitfield was a lucky fellow, and the rascals didn't notice him. So he closes the door as quick as you please, and hops it over to this oak tree that's standing in the middle of the meadow there. Now, you can imagine, he's all in at this point, so he leans up against it, and starts saying a little prayer. And then the tree gets hit by lightning, and it falls on him."

"And?"

"What do ye think? He gets killed, ye damn fool!"

"What?"

"Look, laddie. The Lord has a sense of humor same as the next feller, and it's better to have a hungry wolf for dinner than have an angry god give an after dinner speech." The Captain's point was underlined by the whale's next mouthful, which included a goodly portion of boat, the rum cask, and the Captain. What was left of the crew groaned in horror and redoubled their efforts to escape, but as the boat was shipping a considerable amount of water and they lacked both oars and limbs to pull them, we could not out-distance the beast. The monster circled the boat with a smile of feline contentment, toying with us as a cat would toy with a vole, and soaking us with great fountains of spray. Just as we were sinking into a slimy wet despair, not to mention simply sinking, all traces of smugness disappeared from the whale's face. Not that I'm claiming that whales have a particularly expressive physiognomy, just a suggestion around the eyes, but this whale was beginning to look decidedly grim. Grim around the eyes certainly, but, if this is possible, there was also a touch of pallor in the whale's complexion. The beast was weaving through the water like a plowboy drunk on green ale for the first time. I have often remarked that what separates a man from the animals is his ability to hold his liquor, and my thesis was about to receive a resounding confirmation, for the whale was clearly going to...

"Duck, boys" cried the bosun, "the whale's going to spew!"

Chunder it did. With a roar of fishy air and stale rum, bits of boat flew past us, followed by the Captain, who was talking about a feller named Jonah. The whale paused and then with a supreme effort vomited a small rowboat in which sat a small, disheveled carter.

"Gunduz," I moaned.

"Gonzaga," he screamed, "you are a very bad priest indeed, you make me lose my job, I spit on you, no, I leave you in the middle of the ocean, and, I don't even stop to spit on you." And, muttering evil curses upon the house of Gonzaga, Vehbi rowed off into the moonlight.

[As the character of Vehbi Gunduz has not previously been introduced to the gentle yet canny readers of Chocolate Thunder, perhaps a note of explanation as to his enmity towards our hero is in order. Vehbi, an expert in all forms of transportation, on several occasions in the tale had the misfortune to fall victim to acts of knavery on the part of Gonzaga. Gonzaga is surprised to see him beyond the everyday surprise one might experience seeing an acquaintance spewed from the mouth of the whale because, having engineered Gunduz's death, he has every reason to suppose him no longer in the land of the living.]


text © 2000 marcus boon, david wondrich, and nicholas noyes, used with permission
art © 2000 Michael Evert, used with permission

Episodes from "The Travels of Father Gonzaga" were translated from the language of the Sami peoples on a Reindeer farm near Mexico, Maine, by Marcus Boon, Nicholas Noyes, and David Wondrich.

Marcus Boon is working on a history of drug use by writers and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Nicholas Noyes contributed to The Amok 5th Dispatch: Sourcebook of the Extremes of Information, and is currently dividing his time between London and New York, in search of the perfect ale.

David Wondrich is a Senior Research Fellow at the North Gowanus Institute for Cranial Distempers, where he resides.

Michael Evert is an artist living in New York.

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