“Prepare cannons and a boarding party to destroy that American ship!” Captain Morley of the HMS Falmouth commanded as the frigate chased the sloop of war into the night.
“Ye best let them go,” Seaman Mitchell warned. “It’s a trap. We be nearing the American coastline and we’ll never capture that privateer!”
“Throw this mutinous midshipman overboard,” Morley demanded. “Destroy those Yankees! Hang the survivors…stinkin’ pirate rats!”
“Captain, this be the ghost ship ‘Lex Talionis!’” Mitchell screamed as junior officers dragged him off. “It leadeth a dozen pursuers to their doom!”
He was nevertheless cast overboard, ignored again, and not for the first time in what the press had dubbed “The War of 1812.”
“Mad sailors’ tale,” the Captain mocked before turning his attention to sending the Americans on the sloop to a watery grave. The larger royal ship bore down on its prey.
Seconds later, shallow rocks shredded the HMS Falmouth’s hull, turning it into a pile of splinters, the thirteenth victim of the phantom privateer.
Midshipman Mitchell swam to a shattered plank. He used his remaining strength to kick hard… in the opposite direction. Screams of the survivors were audible above the howling winds, the latest fatalities of the supernatural sailors aboard the ghost ship.
Unlike most navy men, Mitchell knew Latin and could decipher the true meaning of the ghost ship’s moniker. An eye for an eye indeed!
A year ago, a pair of British frigates cornered the privateer along Maine’s coast. The HMS Sherbrooke’s Captain had lost his brother at the Battle of Lake Erie earlier that year and desired revenge. He chained the Americans aboard the Lex Talionis and set it aflame with hot shot while the HMS Python and crewman Mitchell looked on, silent witnesses to the horror.
As the sole survivor reached the beach, he thought of what he would say to the British Admiralty. Would they believe him this time about the deadly ghost ship? Or would they brush aside his story and be doomed to sacrificing more naval vessels and men to the infernal ship?
No, he reasoned. Better to throw his lot in with the Americans, and risk being pursued as a deserter instead of having to face that demonic American ghost ship yet again.
INSTANT NOODLES 