Henry Justice Ford (1860-1940), ‘Adventure with Scylla’, from ”Tales of Troy and Greece”, ed. by Andrew Lang, 1907
The Voyage of The Dawn Treader has an episodic structure consisting of the many adventures Caspian, Lucy, Edmund, and Eustace have while seeking the lost lords across the Eastern Sea. Many of them derive from myths, fables and earlier fairy tales, like the encounter with the sea serpent, the isle of the dragon, and the pale-skinned sea people. Of course, Lewis added his own spin on them: the sea serpent is a not-so-bright entity who is dealt with in a practical, albeit strenuous, way; Eustace becomes the dragon who was originally lord of the island; and the sirens have their own underwater civilization and things to do.
(Lewis rather flippantly deals with the fact that Eustace ATE the original dragon, who may have been a transformed Lord Octesian — that means Eustace committed cannibalism. Let’s hope this is one of the details he wanted later to correct.)
Other adventures read like they came from combined, remixed, and re-imagined folk tales: the island with a pond that turns things to gold, tempting others with greed; the black cloud-island that brings nightmares to life; and the Island at the End of World where a feast awaits those who reach it, like Valhalla. Then there are mundane perils like the pirates mentioned in passing and the horror of being enslaved.
But there were more dangers the ship may have encountered on its journey.
Perils of the Narnian Sea
| Scylla | In The Odyssey, the hero Odysseus, returning from the Trojan War, has to guide his ship through a strait where there are two perils: on one side, a giant whirlpool known as Charybdis, and on the other, a sea monster, Scylla, who lives on human flesh. The ship must be navigated exactly between the two to avoid danger, but on the sea’s moving currents this is impossible, so Odysseus chooses to err towards Scylla … weighing the loss of a few men against the loss of the whole boat.
Later myths give Scylla an origin story. She was a once-beautiful naiad who incurred the wrath of a goddess, who caused long necks with the heads of monstrous dogs to grow out of her lower body; in her anger and despair she preys, or her monster heads prey, on passing sailors who pass beneath her cave. The dog heads made keening puppylike noises, and from a modern perspective Scylla was likely no more than a cliff with dangerous underwater outcroppings where sea lions chose to rest. Over the years artists have depicted Scylla in many creative ways like the Edwardian one above, where the heads are human and bearded with tentacles. There’s enough variation that I might do a visual essay on her one day. |
| Charybdis/ The Maelstrom |
I’m lumping these together because they are both giant whirlpools that can suck down a ship and destroy it.
Like Scylla, Charybdis was once a human female. She has several origin stories, but the one I’m going with is that she stole some cattle from Heracles (Hercules) and was punished for her greedy nature by being chained at the bottom of the sea forever sucking down the seawater. The Maelstrom is Charybdis’s Norse cousin, popularized in Edgar Allen Poe’s famous story. Either one of these would provide plenty of adventure for The Dawn Treader and her crew. |
| Sargasso Sea | This feature is a real-world one, a calm section of the Atlantic Ocean bordered by four different currents. The seas here are calm and blue, the weather still, and greenish-brown sargassum seaweed abounds. Pulpy adventure stories such as Uncharted Seas portray the seaweed as being so thick it entraps ships, but that’s exaggeration; the layer of seaweed is shallow, and its structure is small and fine, allowing even small hulls to cleave through. The real danger for sailors is the lack of wind and current.
I’m surprised that Lewis never used this trope. |
| Ghost Ship | Legends abound of sailors finding abandoned ships on the open ocean (see the case of The Mary Celeste) and most of the time no good comes from exploring them. There’s room for another adventure there. |
| Giant Cephalopods/Jellyfish | Another staple of pulp fiction, these (pulpy — sorry for the pun) creatures are depicted as entwining a ship in their tentacles to draw it down into the sea. To make them even more monstrous, they snatch sailors at the same time to eat. Of course, Lewis did something similar with his sea serpent, and IMO there’s room for only one snaky or tentacled ship-wrapping creature in the book.
(Lewis does allude to Krakens existing in a later chapter.) |
| Orca attack | Killer whales have been ramming boats in Portugal for a few years now. Perhaps they do so in Narnia? |
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