Captain Nowhere

An adventure for Sydney PCs, working for Dr. Crabbe.

The Zanthu Tablets.

Twelve palm-sized slabs of black jade. Etched with Naacal glyphs - the undeciphered rongorongo script of Rapa Nui. Zanthu, high priest of Lemuria, details his nation’s mutually destructive war with Atlantis, and explains how its sibling trinity of mollusc gods - Ghatanothoa, Ythogtha, Zoth-Ommog - retreated from the calamity into abyssal tombs, where they slumber to this day.

Bought as a curiosity by Captain William Bligh from King Pomare I of Tahiti. Fell into Dr. William Redfern’s hands following the Rum Rebellion. Wound up gathering dust in the collection of the Australian Museum.

Raoul Rigault. Elderly revolutionary. Modern-day Jacobin. Fanatical atheist, anarchist, Blanquist. Chief of police for the Paris Commune. Oversaw a new Committee of Public Safety. Personally executed the Archbishop of Paris. Saved Renoir from the firing squad. Transported to the Isle of Pines in New Caledonia in 1871, following the Commune’s collapse. Unclear why he wasn’t just shot.

Remained in Noumea after the 1880 amnesty. Made his fortune as an island trader, dealing in copra, sandalwood, pearls. Colonial villa on the hills overlooking Orphelinat Bay, stocked with leftist literature and curios from his cross-Pacific travels.

Spectacles. Marxian beard. Old-fashioned frock coat. Loves expensive brandy, pub singalongs, women of loose virtue. Lectures, rants, gesticulates. Inspired by the October Revolution. As committed as ever to the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.

Employs only the most murderous convicts ever to be imprisoned on the Ile Nou. Salt Marie, who cured her victims’ bodies in a smokehouse in Bayonne. Vincent l’Anguille, who kept skinless horrors in the oubliette beneath his mountain inn. All too old to do harm now - their kids have no noticeable propensity for crime.

Tonkinese housekeeper Madeline Tran. Teeth cosmetically dyed black. Chews betel nut - spits red juice on the floor. Cackles at her own obscene jokes. Terrorises Kanak maids. Tends to Rigault’s collection.

Nautilus shells. Sandalwood Lakshmi idols. Penis sheaths and slit drums from the New Hebrides. “Torture mitten” sewn from abrasive ray skin. Gilbert Islands blowfish helmet, woven armour, sharktooth spear. First and only issue of La Vengeance Anarchiste. Gros Pierre, free-roaming pet giant gecko from the Isle of Pines - avoided by the Kanaks, who think it can pull out their souls.

Rigault tries to buy the Zanthu Tablets from the Australian Museum. Offers a lot of money. Makes a special trip to Sydney to plead his case. Is flatly denied.

Tablets vanish two days later. No clues. Police stumped.

Jock Garden. Communist agitator. Active in the Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat, a division of the Red International of Labour Unions. Key ally of premier Jack Lang. Recently returned from a conference in Hankow, where he received instructions from Stalin to offer Rigault all possible assistance.

Bill Struthers. Shabby unemployed Trotskyist. Well-known Sydney eccentric. Partially reformed safecracker - served two years in prison for a half-hearted attempt to rob a bank. Can be found most days atop a soapbox in the Domain, decrying the evils of capitalism to anyone who’ll listen. Often loses his train of thought.

Hired by Garden to steal the tablets. Slowly going mad. Soapbox rants and home-printed newspapers increasingly refer to “the workers’ leviathan” who will “awaken from his slumber” and “drown the continents of capital beneath his ruddy tide”. Wharfies sent round by the union to shout him down - Garden afraid he’ll talk.

Fletcher Christian. Master’s mate aboard the Bounty. Learned Lemurian secrets from Tahitian princess Mauatua, avatar on Earth for the supreme creator god Ta’aroa, who holds all humanity in the shadow of his penis and sculpted the lesser deities from his own flesh. Led a mutiny against Captain Bligh in 1789.

Settled with the other mutineers on Pitcairn Island, an isolated rock in the Pacific’s empty heart. Made a pilgrimage south to the impossible futurist city of R’lyeh at Point Nemo, the globe’s most inaccessible pole. Extracted forbidden wisdom from its squamous angles, cyclopean contortions and green slimy vaults.

Secretly returned to England in 1795 to recruit Coleridge and Wordsworth to the R’lyeh dream-cult. Oversaw the composition of The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner. Left behind a son, Thursday October Christian, in the care of Mauatua, to act as priest and magistrate over the mutineers and their inbred descendants.

Pitcairners relocate to Norfolk Island in 1856. Some don’t like it and go back. John Tay converts them to a form of Seventh-Day Adventism in 1886 - a doctrine which believes that all impudent souls will face annihilation upon Christ’s return.

Thursday October Christian III. Maritime adventurer. Born on Pitcairn Island some time in the 1860s. Lanky. Bearded. Hollow-eyed. Destined to resurrect the sleeping gods of R’lyeh and raise the lost continent of Lemuria from the depths.

Captain of the Alert.

Victorian steam yacht launched in Dundee in 1876, under the name Aurora. Newfoundland whaler. Used by Douglas Mawson on his Antarctic expedition of 1911. Disappeared en route from New South Wales to Chile in 1917.

Taken by Christian’s pirates. Rechristened. Disguised. Upgraded. Now calls Dunedin home. Roams the South Seas as island trader - spreading R’lyeh’s green-flame gospel, purchasing strange artefacts, conducting sinister rituals on remote atolls. Preparing homo sapiens for the incoming end.

Tommy Fowler. First mate. Self-proclaimed “last of the Moriori” - natives of the Chatham islands who were conquered and slaughtered by the Maori in 1835. Friendly. Huge. Well-dressed. Beloved by the crew. Incredibly lucky - loses destiny’s protection if he ever kills a man or consumes human flesh.

Whatu Rua. Second mate. Son of the prophet Rua Kenana, who claimed to be Christ’s Maori brother and founded a New Jerusalem in the Urewera bush country. Studied Golden Dawn magic under Robert Felkin at the Smaragdum Thallasses Temple in Havelock North. Long hair. Bushy beard. Wife in every port.

Sosafina. Chief engineer. Samoan fa’afafine - biological male who lives as a woman. Genius with machines. Learned her trade at the American coaling station in Pago Pago. Seduced, and stole an experimental German “radio gun” from, W. Somerset Maugham, Secret Service agent during the Great War.

Jose Tepano. Bosun. Last of the Rapa Nui birdmen. Fought off sharks to collect the first sooty tern egg of the season from Moto Nui in 1888. Heard the dying words of Riro Kāinga, last Rapa Nui king, in Valparaiso in 1899. Cynical. Expert cliff diver. Lies to anthropologists. Knows true purpose of moai. Collects Chilean scalps.

Sadhu Vashist Muni. Steward. Disciple of Gandhi. Mysterious. Smiles a lot. Friend to all living creatures. Makes delicious vegetarian meals. Deported from Fiji in 1921 for leading a strike of Indian labourers against the Colonial Sugar Refining Company. Government House in Suva wrecked by lightning the day he left.

Abdelkrim al-Boumerdassi. Carpenter. Sufi marabout of the Rahmaniyya order. Transported to Noumea in 1873 for his part in the Mokrani Revolt. Long white beard. Steady hands. Pet kakapo. Endlessly disputes theology with Muni. Purifies his spirit by drinking salt water - claims it’s easy once you know the trick.

Mauki. Able seaman. Malaita salt-water chief’s son. Kidnapped as a boy by the hydrophobic inland bushmen, who claim descent from Israel’s ten lost tribes. Sold as a tobacco plantation slave to the Moongleam Soap Company. Led uprising on Lord Howe Island. Still has overseer’s head. Hunts dolphins. Befriends sharks.

Manehivi. Ni-Vanuatu prophet.

Dazzling smile. Curly blonde hair. Respected through the islands for his land-diving skills and his vast herd of bald hermaphrodite curly-tusked pigs. Inherited a captain’s hat, a gold-buttoned greatcoat and a locked sea chest holding star charts from the alien colony beneath Mount Shasta from his great-grandfather the Comte de Lapérouse, whose ship wrecked on Vanikoro in 1788.

Leader of the John Frum cargo cult, based in Sulphur Bay at the foot of the Yasur volcano on the isle of Tanna. Claims to be King of America. Promises that a Great White Ship laden with cargo - scissors, fishhooks, tinned salmon - will come from overseas to destroy the Europeans and resurrect the dead. The New Hebrides will fuse into a continent. Pork and cigarettes will be free for all.

Naked followers drink kava, throw money in the sea, burn European clothes under the sign of the red crucifix, parade with wooden guns. Rumours of captured planters fed alive into the volcano’s crater in the dead of night.

Apolosi Nawai, “the Rasputin of the Pacific”, has a similar setup in the Fijian highlands. Drunken orgies with harem of attendants called the Flock of Doves. Stockpile of polished whale teeth - can use them to buy favours from any Fijian. Hypnotic gaze. Said to have a hold over Eyre Hutson, British High Commissioner for the Western Pacific - providing him with women and making him grovel as a loyal slave.

Zanthu’s mummified head.

Mad red eyes and living brain in a shell of wrinkled stone. Kept safe in a meeting-house by a Tahitian marae, in the care of the wizard Vaita, who faithfully recorded its raving prophecies and sacrificed war captives to the gods on its command.

Brought aboard HMS Pandora with recaptured Bounty mutineers in 1791. Went down with the ship a few months later in the northern Great Barrier Reef. Knows the secret rite to awaken Ta’aroa, father of the gods, said to slumber eternally in his vortex tomb on R’yleh at the centre of the human collective mind.

The Alert, sponsored by Rigault and the Soviets, has been sent to retrieve it.

Three innocent souls must be sacrificed at Yasur, Tavurvur, Mount Ngauruhoe. The tectonic plates will tremble. Zealandia will rise.