Leviathan’s Folly; or, Oh, America the Great, the Fallen

Leviathan’s Folly; or, Oh, America the Great, the Fallen

The evening of the first of July, 1863, was remarkable not for its beauty, but for its profound, ink-black absurdity. Ten souls found themselves aboard the Leviathan’s Folly, a vessel of immaculate timber currently taking on water at an agonizingly measured pace. While across the Atlantic the soil of Gettysburg was drinking the blood of a fractured nation, a miniature theater of the very same madness was playing out upon the high seas.

Not a single soul on board knew how they had arrived upon the ship. There was no memory of a harbor, no recollection of a dock, or a ledger detailing the purpose of their voyage. They had simply awoken in the middle of the trackless ocean, bound together by nothing but the sudden realization that the cold Atlantic was slowly seeping into the lower decks. A reasonable observer would describe the situation as a prompt for immediate manual labor, but the passengers were far from reasonable.

At the center of the tilting deck stood Akando. He belonged to the old soil of Indian Country, a man of quiet stature whose copper skin and long, dark hair bore the unmistakable marks of his Indigenous heritage. He was the only soul on board who was not screaming. While the others paced the deck in a panic of self-importance, Akando had quietly knelt by the shattered starboard bulwarks. Armed with nothing but a heavy wooden mallet, a hand-adze, and a deep, ancestral understanding of forestry and water, he was already at work. He was not repairing the ship—he had seen the rot in the hull hours ago. Instead, he was methodically shaping the very deck planks into a modest, narrow canoe.

He had tried, once, to hand his mallet to the men above him.

On the forecastle stood Mr. Sterling, a gentleman of pale countenance, blue eyes, and exceptional European tailoring. He was entirely unbothered by the mystery of their arrival or the brine soaking his leather boots, choosing instead to focus his energies on a grand political alignment. “We must secure the helm,” Sterling declared, his voice carrying the crisp, unyielding arrogance of old continental empires. “It is a matter of natural governance. We require men of substance—and proper waistcoat alignment—to steer us from this calamity.”

Directly opposite him, near the mainmast, stood Mr. Onyx, a Black man of deep, rich complexion and commanding African stature. The water had reached his shins, yet his posture remained rigid with ambition. “Do not harken to the pale ghost,” Onyx warned the men gathered around him, his eyes burning with the desire for dominance. “His sort will have us in chains before the hull is dry. We must seize the midship. True strength lies in the blood of the continent that birthed the sun.”

Rather than grabbing buckets or pitch, the European and African factions immediately set to work launching aggressive recruiting campaigns. They paced the darkened deck, attempting to sway the remaining passengers to their respective banners of dominance, completely ignoring the groaning of the timber beneath them.

Meanwhile, a quiet scratching sound echoed from the dark corners of the galley. Mr. Chen, an Asian man moving with the silent efficiency of a shadow, was meticulously transferring the remaining hardtack and freshwater barrels into a private locker. Though the water was already up to his knees, he reasoned that wealth, even in a deluge, was the only true security. He was quite certain that a man with a monopoly on biscuits could dictate terms to whatever empire survived the night.

Nearby, leaning against the listing gunwale, sat the Hispanic passengers, their murmurs carrying the rolling cadences of the Iberian Peninsula. They watched the frantic political maneuvers of Sterling and Onyx, and the quiet thievery of Chen, with a detached, melancholy amusement. They conversed softly among themselves, content to remain permanent spectators to a theater that would soon be entirely underwater, preferring a dignified demise to an undignified cooperation.

“The starboard timber is split,” Akando called out to them, his voice a calm, reasonable cadence against the roaring wind. “Three men with iron nails could bind it. The water rises.”

“Heed him not!” shouted a European supporter of Mr. Sterling, waving a fastidious hand. “Look at the shape of his brow! It lacks the intellectual ridge of the modern thinker! How can we trust an Indian's architectural advice when his hair lacks a civilized wave?”

“And look at Sterling’s eyes!” an African partisan from the midship bellowed back, pushing through the rising foam. “They are the color of a dead fish! How can a man with the gaze of a mackerel command a vessel? We must count the pigment of our skin to see who is truly fit to hold the bucket!”

The debate mutated with a slow, venomous velocity. Within an hour, the existential threat of the ocean was entirely forgotten, replaced by an intense, academic scrutiny of their own trivial anatomy. The darkness of the night seemed to bleed into their minds as they stood in waist-deep water, screaming over the wind. They compared the shade of their wrists, the thickness of their ankles, and the specific geometry of their earlobes. Every variance was treated as a profound treachery, an insurmountable barrier to cohabitation.

The fever reached a sudden, desperate pitch as the water lapped against their hips. The focus shifted away from the splitting wood and toward a solitary, slender silhouette standing by the rigging—a lone woman, her quiet presence suddenly transformed into the ultimate scapegoat for their impending doom.

“The sea demands an offering to calm its wrath!” a voice cried out from the fracturing factions, the veneer of civilization dissolving under the weight of the dark tide. “Surely the lone whore could spare our lives! Throw her overboard!”

Hands reached out, wet and frantic, seizing the heavy cloth of her traveling cloak to drag her toward the surging gunwale. They lunged to carry out the grim sacrifice, but mid-stride, their boots lost traction in the rising foam. The argument fractured instantly once more; a vicious debate erupted over which race and which lineage possessed the proper moral authority to cast her into the abyss. The hands that held her slackened, slipping away as they turned back to shout at one another over the precise shape of their own fingers.

Akando did not call out to them again. He simply smoothed the final edge of his small craft. The ship gave a sickening lurch, settling deep into the black water. The grand debate regarding whether blue eyes or brown eyes possessed a higher moral capacity was reaching a fever pitch, even as the ocean claimed their chests.

With a quiet, deliberate motion, the Indian man slid his canoe over the low gunwale and into the churning sea. He stepped into it, taking up a hand-carved paddle. As he floated away into the fog, he looked back at the Leviathan’s Folly.

Mr. Chen was now entirely submerged, desperately clinging to his floating crate of hardtack, still shouting that his knuckles were of a far superior roundness to those of the men who had tried to recruit him. The Iberian onlookers gave one final, graceful sigh as the water touched their lips, refusing to help either side until the very end.

The ship gave a final, catastrophic shudder, the deck vanishing beneath the waves. Yet, their heads remained above water for one last, fleeting second. Mr. Sterling and Mr. Onyx, locked in a mutual stranglehold of white and black supremacy, stared into each other's eyes as the whirlpool dragged them down.

“Insignificant!” screamed the white man, pointing a drowning finger at the shape of his rival's nose.

“Inferior!” the Black man bellowed back, gurgling on the brine as his hands gripped the gentleman's collar.

Those were the final words uttered into the night—not a plea for salvation, nor a cry of regret, but a final, desperate insistence on their own division. The ship settled into the abyss, perfectly level, carrying nine distinct categories of human excellence beneath the waves. Akando dipped his paddle into the water, navigating his canoe into the silent, unbroken fog, leaving the drowning old world to the absolute indifference of the deep.

Author's Note

There is a peculiar, deep-seated malady in the human spirit that prizes dominion over deliverance. This allegory is less about a literal shipwreck than about the fragile architecture of human tyranny. Stripped of their pasts and confronted by an abyss, the passengers did not seek cooperation; they sought hierarchy.

Driven by a collective god complex, their first instinct in a crisis was not to repair the vessel keeping them alive but to break, humiliate, and degrade those around them in pursuit of a fleeting sense of superiority. Their fixation on control became a psychological blindfold. So consumed were they by scrutinizing their neighbors’ bodies that they failed to notice the water rising to their own throats.

Ultimately, the ocean becomes a mirror reflecting nothing but the silent sky. It serves as a quiet reminder that the pursuit of control can hollow us out through vanity. Humanity can become so addicted to supremacy that it would sooner succumb to the tide as master of a sinking deck than pick up a tool and survive among equals. The passengers chose dominance in death over equality in life, proving that the ultimate tragedy of human division is that it leaves only the deep to inherit the silence.

© 2026 Tiffany Desiree. All Rights Reserved.