The captain’s eyes were shadowed in sadness, but death and whaling were no strangers. He turned his attention to the task at hand. He ordered his men to maneuver the whale’s body until it was under a staging on the ship’s starboard side. Using hooks, they rolled the carcass over and hoisted it to a vertical position. They cut the head off, and, before starting to strip off the blubber, used an iron hook to extract the whale’s innards and haul them onto the deck to examine them for ambergris, the valuable perfume base that can form in the stomach of a sick whale.

Something was moving inside the big stomach pouch. A deckhand assumed it was a giant squid, a favorite meal of sperm whales. He used his sharp spade to cut into the pouch, but, instead of tentacles, a human leg flopped out through the opening. He peeled back the stomach walls to reveal a man curled up in a fetal position. The cutter and another deckhand grabbed the man’s ankles and pulled the limp form out onto the deck. An opaque, slimy substance enveloped the man’s head. The first mate came over and washed away the slime with a bucket of water.

“It’s Caleb!” the mate shouted. “It’s the green hand.”

Caleb’s lips moved, but they made no sound.

Dobbs had been supervising the removal of blubber from the whale. He strode over and stared at Caleb for a moment before he ordered the mates to carry the green hand to his cabin. They stretched the youth out on the captain’s bunk, stripped off his slime-coated clothes, and wrapped him in blankets.

“Lord, I’ve never seen anything like it,” the first mate muttered.

The handsome farm boy of eighteen had been transformed into a wizened old man of eighty. His skin was bleached ghostly white. A lacework of wrinkles puckered the skin of his hands and face as if they had been soaked in water for days. His hair was like strands on a cottonweed.

Dobbs laid a hand on Caleb’s arm, expecting him to be as icy cold as the corpse he resembled.

“He’s on fire,” he murmured.

Assuming his role as the ship’s doctor, Dobbs placed wet towels over Caleb’s body to bring down the fever. From a black leather medicine case he produced a vial of patent medicine containing a heavy dose of opium and got a few drops down Caleb’s throat. The youth rambled for a few minutes before slipping into a deep sleep. He slept for more than twenty-four hours. When Caleb’s eyelids finally fluttered open, he saw the captain sitting at his desk writing in the log.

“Where am I?” he mumbled through dry, crusted lips.

“In my bunk,” Dobbs growled. “And I’m getting damned sick of it.”

“Sorry, sir.” Caleb furrowed his brow. “I dreamed I died and went to hell.”