Humans have been setting sail for as long as we’ve had boats. That’s not to say, however, that every ship returns to port, and those that do, don’t necessarily return the same as when they left
Map’s End is written and recorded by Nicole Chevalier with music by Scare the Raven.
More of Scare the Raven’s work can be found via our website, MapsEndPodcast.com, or by emailing them at ScareTheRaven@gmail.com. Transcripts and sources can be also found on our website by accessing the episode page.
Have a story you want to share? Head over to our website and click on the submissions tab.
Just want to say hello? Follow us on twitter and instagram at “MapsEndPodcast,” spelled with no spaces and no breaks- that’s “MapsEndPodcast.”
And thanks for listening.
There are few things I've ever liked more than a ghost story. More specifically, a good ghost story. The kind of story that makes you make your roommate double check the windows just to confirm that no, there is no way Mothman could get inside them, and leaves you sitting up late worrying anyway.
And I know for a fact I'm not the only one who feels this way. Humans have been telling each other scary stories for as long as there have been rainstorms to huddle inside from, whether out of malice over a too-persistent younger sibling, or just the general thrill of sharing a little bit of your own terror. If misery loves company, horror demands it.
Of course, that doesn’t mean I’m crossing my fingers waiting for the day a hook handed man scratches the top of my already dented corolla, but we love the prospect of it being someone else, comfortably far away, and wonderfully unattached. It’s one of those things that, while being uniquely human, also seems to be what we shove off the most. We don’t like the idea that it could live in our backyard, with neighbors who we swear would never do something like that, but that’s the thing of it. Half the horror is the surprise. The questions it leaves us with and the stories we rush to pass on, be it to journalists or subreddits, horror loves to be shared. Perhaps it’s also just part of the human instinct; it’s a warning, to let others know what we didn’t, teaching lessons in as safe a way as possible. Because we’re not safe, and if we’re being honest, we never were.
Humanity loves to explore. If there’s one thing we hate, it’s minding our business. So it’s no surprise that any culture that arose near the ocean wasted no time at all in crafting boats and attempting to find what was lying just out of sight. And for the pre-modern world, the answer was, just about everything. As humanity slowly ebbed on and the boats got bigger, so did their world. And while it’s wonderfully romantic to imagine the millions of people going out in search of what lay beyond, it’s just as important to remember all those who didn’t come back. At the time, crossing the horizon was a very real threat, not because of any world drop-off, but because it meant everything you didn’t know, and there’s no way to prepare for that. The ones who did come back, carefully chartered out what space they had traveled; where they knew was safe, where to steer clear from, burning away the edges of the unexplored bit by tiny bit. Because if one thing held any semblance of safety in check, it was with staying well within what they knew. But again, humans have never been good at that.
And so the boats went on and the people went out, and the maps became more intricate and, one would like to think, more correct. At the very least, they gave what information they could, sometimes going so far as to draw what animals could be expected where, and what sort of difficulties one could expect upon arriving, right up until the very edge. It’s human nature, it seems, to warn and explain and help, to point out the boundaries of what we know, taking one little step at a time to expand that view.
Most maps we see today are based off of a map by a Flemish geographer and cartographer named Gerardus Mercator. His map, referred to as the Mercator World Map was designed with a peculiar projection, or, distortion, emphasizing the size of land masses nearer the equator, and shrinking them as it approaches the poles. As disastrous as this might be for land measurements, the map was actually designed to be used in sea-faring, for nautical navigation. Despite this, it’s still in common use today, and is most likely the map you’ll be looking at in any sort of classroom. Even with all our modern technology, Mercator’s map remains, quite frankly, popular.
And that’s what makes it interesting, that only 60-odd years before, the oldest terrestrial globe showing the New World was made out of two lower halves of ostrich eggs. Named the DiVinci globe, it’s thought to be designed after a map made by Leonardo himself, and was completed in 1504, only 65 years before the Mercator map. Other than being one of the oldest globes, the globe is functionally useless for travel, and might not be remembered as fondly as it is, except for one charming antiquated fact. Off the side of Asia, written in bold letters, reads the warning: “HC SVNT DRACONES [Prn: Hic Soont Draconaise],” “Here, there be dragons.”
The original intention might be to mark off islands reported by explorer Marco Polo to be infested with the creatures, but in modern times, the phrase has taken on a more romantic sense, becoming a warning of the unknown. Through translation and word of mouth, it’s changed over a bit, often becoming a warning specifically against sea serpents, or just monsters in general. It’s such a beloved hallmark of everything desirable about the forbidden, that it’s actually become overstated, used much more in reproduction than it ever was historically. Still, it’s also found its niche in the modern world, appearing everywhere from classic RPGs to code writing, still being used to caution against the unexplained and unobserved. Or at least, so it’s intentioned. As it was from the beginning, humans never have been good at refusing curiosity.
So, if you’d stick around, I’d like to take you with me right to the map’s end. But be warned; Here, there be monsters.
In the 1940s, several ships travelling the Strait of Malacca [Ma lock aah], a strait off the coast of Sumatra and Malaysia, picked up a disconcerting signal. Tapped out in morse code, the message was as follows: “All officers including captain dead, lying in chartroom and on bridge, probably whole crew dead,” followed by a string of unintelligible and frenzied code, finally followed by two, coherent words. “I die.”
Of course, it’s not an optimistic message for anyone to receive, and rescue crews went out to help, knowing they were probably already too late. Specifically, the American merchant ship the Silver Star went, though it was still over 19hrs away from the projected call. By the time the Silver Star found them, the ship had drifted only fifty miles from the point wherein the call had been placed. They discovered the origin point of the grave message, a Dutch vessel by the name of the Ourang Medan [O rahng meh dawn], and as they boarded, their suspicions were confirmed. Just as the message had promised, the crew arrived to find a deck littered with the dead. And if that was the worst of it, it might have become another story that was forgotten shortly after, but as always seems to be the case, things somehow managed to get much worse.
The crew of the Ourang Medan were indeed dead, but it was that death itself that added to the terror. The men seemed frozen in a facade of horror, arms raised as if in defense, pointing or perhaps flinching away from something. All of them were transfixed upon some unseeable point, and all were equally terrified. The returning crew, understandably shaken, described the men they found as having “teeth bared, with their upturned faces to the sun, staring, as if in fear… the mouths were gaping open and the eyes staring.” The captain was discovered on the bridge in a similar state of agony, and with the remaining bridge officers found in the chartroom or wheelhouse, sporting expressions of sheer terror. The engineering crew were all at their station, all equal portraits of unimaginable horror. And lastly, a young operator was found in the wireless room, headphones still on, presumably having died where he stood, still ready to send out distress calls. Even the ship’s dog, which, yes, my apologies, was found in a similar state, frozen and snarling at… something.
The crew of the Silver Star investigated as best they could, noting that despite the sheer amount of deaths, none of the men seemed to be physically injured. The ship itself also seemed fine, not showing any visible damages. As they continued to investigate, members of the American crew noted that the bodies seemed to be decaying much… quicker than they ought to.They also noted that, despite the emanating chill, the temperature was reading well over 100 degrees. They had already made the decision to tow the ship back to shore when they saw the billowing smoke coming from the ghostly ship. Reboarding the Silver Star, they cut the Ourang Medan loose. Whatever answers there might have been for what had happened there quickly went up in flames, quite literally, as the Ourang Medan caught fire at sea, exploding. I’m telling you, you can’t make this stuff up. Needless to say, further investigation was all but impossible, any answers that might have remained quickly scattering themselves across the ocean floor, in a flurry of what i imagine looked quite like a lot like nonsensical sheets of morse code, typed out in a hurry, and with no consideration for legibility.
And this is where the mystery unfolds into a second, bigger question. Is it true? For as remarkable an event as it may be, there has been little documentation to suggest such a thing ever happened, and skeptics happily point to that lack of evidence as evidence itself. Now, darling listener, I’m not in the habit of believing things I know to be false, no matter how good the story might be. Of course, if a story is good enough, facts can often be persuaded into reliability, or at least plausibility. In the case of the Ourang Medan, despite lack of press coverage, there is one theory that explains the lack of explanation. An old German publication from 1953, entitled Das Totenschiffin der Südsee [Dad toten schoofen der zoot say], or The Death Ship in the South Seas and uncovered by researcher Theodor Siersdorfer [Sears da fah] details a story strikingly similar to the one of the Ourang Medan. This story, however, holds a detail the popular telling didn’t, disclosing that within the ship’s hold was a large shipment of potassium cyanide and nitroglycerine. Holding in mind that the date of the event is placed in the late 1940s, and the desire to keep it all secret makes a bit more sense. At the close of WWII, international relations were tense at best, and the story of a ship that made itself a bomb may be less than helpful in repairing any sort of relationship.
And that’s all well and good, at least fitting the narrative into a frame if not quite pinpointing the cause itself. Which would be relatively comfortable if not for the fact that we still don’t know what started it all. A covert shipment of explosives explains everything except the beginning. “All officers including captain dead, lying in chartroom and on bridge, probably whole crew dead.” And despite its prevalence in our lives, fear is not exactly the deadly pathogen it might seem to be. Sure, it can spur people into committing atrocities, but it hasn’t been found yet to create large-scale instantaneous death. Of course, there is the shipment itself, and many have speculated that perhaps there was a noxious gas leak of sorts. But then why the frozen terror? Why the looking to the sky? And even if it was the product of human paranoia and delusion, what about the dog, or the one lonely survivor who lived just long enough to send the briefest, and most poignant, of messages: “I die.”
Map’s End is written and recorded by Nicole Chevalier with music by Scare the Raven.
More of Scare the Raven’s work can be found via our website, MapsEndPodcast.com, or by emailing them at ScareTheRaven@gmail.com. Transcripts and sources can be also found on our website by accessing the episode page.
Have a story you want to share? Head over to our website and click on the submissions tab.
Just want to say hello? Follow us on twitter and instagram at “MapsEndPodcast,” spelled with no spaces and no breaks- that’s “MapsEndPodcast.”
And thanks for listening.