The Night Ship

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She feels a soft touch on her arm. The grown daughter is saying something earnest about mothers and angels. Gil inhales. He is alone with the mineral air and hard-shelled creatures. Alone with the briny fish and bitter land shrubs and the warm brown birds nesting in their shingly holes. Alone with the lap of the sea on the shingle and the breezes. Alone with a sky full of unnamed stars. The cast of characters include many "real life" identities, and it is obvious that Kidd has done her research uncovering them. The Batavia is the whole world and the whole world is always moving. Mayken has learned to walk again by watching the skipper’s soft-kneed swagger with the pitch and roll. A sailor doesn’t fight to stand upright because there is no upright. They let the ship come to their foot. And, like a good skipper, Mayken keeps a ship’s log. Mayken loves the sailors instantly. The daring of them, their speed along the ropes, the heights they climb to! The predikant is pointing out the Dutch East India Company cadets and officials gathering at the top of the stern castle. Look, there is the upper-merchant in his red coat and plumed hat. Flanked by the under-merchant, also well hatted, and the stout old skipper, hatless. Three men entrusted by the Company with a cargo richer than the treasuries of many kingdoms, the lives of hundreds of innocent souls and this wonderful ship, newly built—her maiden voyage! Imke nods as though she’s interested. Mrs. Predikant stares ahead with her mouth turned down, trout-like, abiding.

T he Night Ship is an enthralling tale of human brutality, fate and friendship – and of two children, hundreds of years apart, whose destinies are inextricably bound together. There are many books around at the moment featuring children as narrators and protagonists. But Kidd has created such delightful characters – both very different but also similar in key ways – that it is a joy to spend time with them. And what Kidd does well in The Night Ship is to give a child’s view of the world that also provides insight into the interactions of the adults around them in a way that allows the reader to understand what is going on. While there is a large body of both true and fictional works centred around the Batavia, The Night Ship provides new insights into both that benighted voyage and the isolated islands on which the survivors found themselves. A special shout out to the sour-faced tortoise Enkidu, who always made me smile even while reading some of the horrors that Mayken and Gil had to cope with!

More from The Author

I listened to the audio of Jess Kidd’s “The Night Ship”. Fleur de Wit and Adam Fitzgerald narrate this story told in two different time periods: 1629 and 1989.

In 1989, a boy mourning the death of his beloved mother, called Gil, with a dark past, is placed in the care of his solitary grandfather on a tiny fishing island off the Australian coast. Mayken is a fine lady so she gets the winched seat, which is a plank with ropes attached at the corners. An old sailor wearing an India shawl around his head helps her up.

You are aft-the-mast,” he tells them, pointing to the vast mainmast. “You can never go forward of that.” There were words Mum said quietly and carefully because they were dangerous. Devil. Hangman. Tutankhamun. Cancer." Lying brings bad karma. Even a small lie can make something really bad happen and the karma will grow to match it.” She is beautiful. Her upper works are painted green and yellow and at her prow – oh, best of all – crouches a carved red lion! His golden mane curls; his claws sink into the beam. He snarls down at the water. I loved the elements of magical realism tied into the narrative through legends/folklore. People having a second sight, a stone with a hole in the middle that allows the beholder to gaze into the past or future, and best of all, a mythical creature that lives in the bilge of the boat.

A: The Epic of Gilgamesh inspired Gil’s name and also the name of his best friend on the island. This felt apt, as it’s a nod to big themes of mortality, bravery, and friendship. I also bring in both Dutch and Indigenous Australian folklore in the forms of the bullebak and the bunyip, both water monsters. This is just one imaginative link between the times and the children. I was fascinated to find the existence of similar entities in such different cultures. Two epic sea tales also influenced the writing of this book, The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. From these I think I got a sense of the strangeness and relentlessness of the sea, and how small and frail we are to pit ourselves against it. Mayken loves the sailors instantly. The daring of them, their speed along the ropes, the heights they climb to!” Watch yourself,” warns Pelgrom. “Aft-the-mast you’re protected. The rest of the ship has different rules. Don’t expect people to treat you nicely. You’re not fine anymore.”

Table of Contents

How does Kidd mirror Mayken and Gil’s separate journeys in chapters 1 and 2? As the story progresses, do you find Gil’s outsider identity important to the novel? How does his ‘otherness’ reflect Mayken’s experience? In 1628 the Batavia, the Dutch East India Company’s grand flagship, set out on her maiden voyage from Holland to her namesake: the capital of the Dutch East Indies. The ship foundered off the coast of western Australia, and the 300 surviving passengers and crew, including women and children, were stranded on the Houtman Abrolhos islands. What followed was a nightmare: merchant Jeronimus Cornelisz fomented a mutiny against the Batavia’s commander Francisco Pelsaert and he and his followers murdered nearly half of all who remained on the islands, enslaving the rest. By the time rescue came, only 122 passengers survived. Mayken closes her eyes and listens, to the billow of canvas and the rasp of rope and the plash of water on the hull. The ship creaks, heeling as her massive sails fill with wind. And beyond this, the ship’s own song in the accent of the forest she is made from – a whole forest of trees! In the ship’s song is the memory of branches and leaves tasting the wind. The heartbeat of the slow-growing oak, the rushing pine. Jess Kidd’s novels cross genres, blending light and darkness, whimsy and mystery, the real and the supernatural. If you had to sum up this book in one line, how would you describe it?

I think it might have been a case of "it's not you, it's me".... because it is an engaging story and it's well written. I seem to be in a bit of that dreaded reading slump and finding it almost impossible to concentrate. I think I've just read too many novels in a row and I need some nonfiction. Gil feels himself calm. 'There's no such thing as ghosts.' He moves forward, touches the ribbons, straightens a fallen toy at the foot of the bush.

The Night Ship

The Batavia. In 1629, this ship set sail to the Dutch East Indies carrying an orphan, Mayken, and her nursemaid Imke. Then tragedy strikes months after their voyage has begun. Mayken and Gil’s stories are told in alternating chapters. The duration of their experiences, however, is not the same. Mayken’s time on the Batavia is considerably longer than Gil’s, on what is now Beacon Island. Kidd handles this disparity well, so that difference is not obvious. The story is interesting and I want to know how it all wraps up but one of the narrators has really done the book a disservice.