Summary
A salt-crusted ledger of greed and resurrection, Girl of the Sea opens with Stephen Verrill’s last heartbeat on a mahogany veranda; the parchment that will outlive him—ink still wet with subterranean promise—slips from his fingers into the custody of a wife already widowed by ambition. The Caribee, a steamer fat with Empire brass and perfumed parlor gossip, groans southward, its belly full of coal and premonition; Cuttle, a trader whose smile is a rusted grappling hook, conspires with the mate Allen to gut the hull beneath the waterline, turning the ocean into a shareholder. In the churn, a lifeboat becomes a cradle, then a coffin, then a cradle again—a tentacled leviathan upends the skiff and the infant heir, swaddled in a flotation collar of legal parchment, is coughed onto a beach the color of tarnished doubloons. A decade later, Tom Ross, son of the disgraced skipper, returns to that unnamed comma of sand and discovers Mimi: legs barnacled with coral scars, eyes holding the refracted memory of deeds, lungs full of tide. Together they sail back through a gauntlet of forged signatures and blood-bright water, until Cuttle—his face finally as readable as a shark’s dorsal—becomes chum for the very abyss he once weaponized. The mine, long a mouth swallowing men, becomes a dowry; the sea, which once erased lineages, now writes a marriage certificate in foam.
Synopsis
Stephen Verrill dies, leaving the deed to a valuable gold mine to his wife and child. Verrill's widow, planning to establish a company to operate the mine, sails aboard the steamer Caribee bound for New York. With the aid of Allen, the mate, Cuttle, a notorious trader, scuttles the ship on a wild coastline. As the lifeboat drifts towards a small island, it is overturned by a giant octopus, and the baby is washed ashore, the mine deed tied to her neck. As Verrill apparently has no heirs, his property reverts back to the state and Cuttle buys it. Ten years later, Tom Ross, the son of the Caribee 's captain, determines to prove his father's innocence and returns to the South Sea island where he finds Mimi Verrill, now grown to adulthood. After obtaining proof of his father's murder, Tom returns home with Mimi where they fight to reclaim the mine. After many arduous confrontations with Cuttle, the villain is devoured by a shark, Mimi regains her claim to the mine and marries Tom.
Review Excerpt
"
The first time I saw Girl of the Sea I was nursing a flat white in a pop-up cinema carved out of a Brunswick wool-store; the projector’s carbon-arc threw so much heat the corrugated iron sweated. I thought I was in for another creaky nickelodeon curio, but what unspooled was a saltwater Faust shot through with celluloid fever—an orphaned deed, a tentacled moral auditor, and a finale that plays like The Flying Circus swapped circus dust for brine.
A Plot Written in Brine and Blood
Stephen Ver..."
