Summary
Amid the bruised planks of the three-masted Southern Cross, Bull Dorgan’s tar-slick boots drum a tyrant’s cadence while salt-caked lashes bloom across Pedro’s back, each welt a crimson signature on the contract of maritime law. The vessel, a gothic cathedral of spars and shadows, groans toward the Barbary Coast, that fabled ulcer of the Mediterranean where every tavern door exhales opium and treachery. Ashore, a woman’s scream—sharp as a marlinspike—pierces the accordion haze of a dockside saloon: Emily Gordon, lace cuffs shredded, is hauled from the clutches of a pimp-impresario whose chandeliers sway like cutthroats. A bible-brandishing minister, Hugh, swept along in Dorgan’s wake, becomes an unwilling pawn when the captain, drunk on possession, commands a hasty sacrament that binds Emily to him beneath a crucifix of rigging. Nine lunar cycles later, a squall of whispers erupts in the fo’c’sle: the newborn’s eyes, too pale, mirror Hugh’s sanctimonious gaze. Pedro, scarred but unbroken, fans the ember of gossip into mutinous inferno. In the cramped cabin, candle-gutter reveals Emily in a tableau of half-buttoned chastity; the scene is ambiguous enough to detonate Dorgan’s last vestige of trust. Yet when cutlasses flash beneath a blood-red moon, loyalty surfaces in the form of one steadfast tar who cleaves to his commander. Victorious, Dorgan offers Emily safe passage back to the granite propriety of Bostonian parlors; she, reading the harrowed tenderness in his weather-lashed face, stays, turning the ship into a drifting cradle where vengeance dissolves into the hush of lullabies against a ceaseless swell.
Synopsis
To maintain order aboard the Southern Cross, Bull Dorgan, its fierce captain, beats Pedro, a trouble-making sailor, who swears revenge as he steers the boat toward the wild Barbary Coast. While on shore, Bull hears the cries of Emily Gordon coming from a saloon, rescues her from the owner, and drags her and Hugh, a minister, to his departing ship. Bull refuses to believe that Emily came to the cabaret to visit a dying friend, but overcome with desire for her, he forces Hugh to marry them. Nine months later Emily gives birth, but Pedro, still bent on revenge, insinuates that the baby actually belongs to Hugh. When Bull goes to confront Emily with this accusation, he finds her in a compromising position with the minister. Taking advantage of Bull's confusion, Pedro foments a mutiny, but Bull and a devoted shipmate defeat the traitors. Eager to compensate Emily for her hardship, Bull allows her to return to land, but seeing his love for their child, she chooses to remain with the sea master.
Review Excerpt
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The celluloid reels of 1925 still smelled of photochemical brine when The Sea Master slipped into nickelodeons like contraband, and what audiences confronted was not the square-jawed derring-do of Fairbanks but something rawer—an erotics of cruelty shot through with Pentecostal guilt. George Fisher’s Bull Dorgan arrives as if Melville had queasily merged Ahab with Rochester: a man whose idea of courtship begins with the crack of a rope’s end and ends with a forced wedding atop a heaving deck. H..."
