[Scenario Seed] The Cursing Stone and the Wasp.

[Catsmate]

A minor idea from my notes

The Cursing Stone and the Wasp.

Nothing to do with Hymenopterae or the excellent novel¹. The Wasp in question was HMS Wasp, a Banterer-class composite (i.e. wood and iron construction) small gunboat of the British Royal Navy. Constructed at Barrow in Cumbria in 1880 it is the ship’s destruction, off Tory Island on the Irish Atlantic coast in 1884 that is of interest.

On that final voyage, Wasp was commanded by a Lieutenant John Dundas Nicholls (an experienced Scottish officer of some sixteen years naval service) and was to carry out a rather unwelcome job; a group of police, bailiffs and court officials, who were to be transported from Moville on the Inishowen peninsula of County Donegal, to to Inishtrahull Island off Malin Head. There almost the entire population was to be evicted for non-payment of rents.

• At the time the second phase of the Irish Land War was happening, and economic conditions were poor, exacerbated by the drought at 1884 and the general economic malaise. Violence was not at all unknown.
  

The ship never made it. Early in the morning of 22 September 1884 Wasp was near Tory Island. While the weather had been reasonable overnight it is an area notorious for rapid and serious changes in conditions.

• I’ve dived in the area. A clear, breezy, day can turn into gale force winds and torrential, driving, rain in forty minutes.

Oddly the ship was running under sail, he boiler fires banked. Also against common sense the Wasp was sailing inside Tory rather than out to her west, which would have given the ship greater sea room.

By about 2:30AM the sky was cloudy with occasional rain showers, mostly driving drizzle. With most of the crew of 58 asleep only a small watch were on duty and the junior lieutenant² in command, and navigating the ship, was unfamiliar with the area.

At 3:55AM Wasp ran aground on a reef off Tory Island, close by the lighthouse, tearing the hull apart, while the shock of impact broke the ship's structural members. Wasp began to fill with water and was obviously lost. The commander was woken and ordered the ship's boats lowered but before this was achieved the ship sank, less than twelve minutes from the first impact.

Only six crewmen, including the quartermaster, one man who was acting as lookout in the bow, another seaman, the cook and two Marines, survived. Most by clinging to one of the gunboat's spars. All were badly injured. The six washed ashore on Tory Island and were found by islanders.

• There is a suggestion, from one of the survivors, that Nicholls had incorrectly marked the ship’s course, dead-on to the Tory Island light, far too close to the rocks. This was not accepted at the court martial. It would have been an uncharacteristically stupid error for a man familiar with the waters.
  

Also according to a survivor Lieutenant Dowe ordered a sail to be shortened just before the ship struck the rocks; when one seamen told the officer this action would surely land her upon the rocks he was ordered to shorten the sail and he obeyed.

A Royal Navy court of enquiry³ found that HMS Wasp had been lost:

“In consequence of the want of due care and attention”

All of the survivors were exonerated.

So far nothing special, many ships were wrecked in those days without radio, RADAR, satellite navigation and SONAR.

Unless, as the inhabitants of Tory Island still say, she was sunk by the use of the ‘Cursing Stone’ by their ancestors.....

A cursing stone is a pre-Christian artefact. Many have, like the sacred wells and the deeds of pagan heroes, been 'Christianised' over the centuries and consists of a larger rock with a smooth, bowel like, depression containing one or more smaller smooth rocks⁴.

• They've been a part of Irish folklore for millennia though poorly-documented.

The stone was, supposedly, used to bestow a curse or blessing by manipulation of the smaller stones within the larger one.

After the sinking of the Wasp the local priest (Fr Michael O’Donnell) had the stone⁵ removed and either cast into the ocean or hidden away somewhere.

• The stone is also credited with defeating an earlier English raiding party in 1608 during O’Doherty’s Rebellion before the final siege of the island later that year.
  
• It does not appear to have been used during the '98 where the last battle was fought nearby.
  

Hmm.

So, was the sinking an accident of carelessness or the use of a piece of left over alien technology that might still be squirreled away on the island? To be used in case of dire necessity⁶.

And if that's not enough there is actually a third suggestion as to why the Wasp sank; sabotage. There are stories that the locals deliberately extinguished the lighthouse, or even erected a false light, to driver the ship onto the rocks, in the belief that the ship was intended to support evictions on Tory Island itself.


Game use.
Everyone likes a mysterious alien artefact and almost anyone could be rambling around the island looking for it. And being separated from their ready cash by the canny locals⁷.
Where did the stone come from? Is it related to the other Treasures? What are it's powers (curious that the next ship names HMS Wasp disappeared mysteriously and there have been no more)?

It could pop up during the Great War (it's probably just a coincidence that the super-dreadnought battleship HMS Audacious sank nearby in 1914⁸) or in a Pulp era scenario where Nazis (or Torchwood⁹) are searching for a new weapon for the forthcoming war. Perhaps in conjunction with the mysterious The Isle of Spéirling (from The Lost Jewels of Eire)?

Unless of course someone else (like GUBU) has the cursing stone carefully stored away somewhere...


Comments? Ideas? Suggestions?











1. What Pratchett called the funniest terrorists handbook ever written.

2. Lieutenant W. D. Dowe the ship’s navigator, a man of two years service.

3. Curiously the records of the enquiry have disappeared.....

4. Known elsewhere in Europe as 'bullauns'

5. Noted for a 'blood red' streak.

6. Like the invasion of reality television....

7. I suggest watching Whiskey Galore before running such a scenario. And isn't it interesting that Mackenzie was heavily involved in British Intelligence?

8. Given how the RN attempted to cover-up the sinking, the mine story could be another layer of deception.

9. Or both...

[Catsmate]

A few further points.

1. From a book by the folklorist and anthropologist Robin Fox, who wrote a book about Tory in the 1960s:

“They [the local inhabitants] know that [Paddy] Heggerty the King called them to the cliff where the cursing stone is buried, put them in a circle around the stone, and chanted the spell for its turning – a spell contained in its runic writings; and that the stone turned, the cliff shook, the seas rose, and the miserable little gunboat was smashed on the rocks . . . "

The 'King of Tory' is an unofficial, semi-elected, local position. It continues today.


2. Fox's book describes the Tory Island ursing stone in more detail as a large flat stone disc with several indentations into which smaller stones were placed. (Fox describes these as being akin to the dials on a safe). Manipulation of the smaller stones could be used for wishes, blessings and other effects,  as well as curses.
When wishing the stones were turned to the right, when cursing they were  to the left.

• Personally I'm reminded a bit of the 'matrix tables' in the obsure television series Land of the Lost which triggered various effects when crystals were inserted in certain patterns.

3. The landlord of Tory and Inishtrahull islands (and other chunks of Donegal at the time), a prominent Manchester brewer and businessman named Benjamin St John Baptist Joule, was reportedly impressed by the sinking and made no further efforts to extract rents owed to him (and unpaid since 1872) before his death in 1895. His heirs were also unsuccessful and unloaded the lot to the Congested Districts Board in 1903.


4. A minor point but one that might be incorporated as background; the Autumnal Equinox of 1884 occurredon 22 September.