He was a young man, even a boy, when ill-fate stumbled him onto the water.

He was a young man, even a boy, when ill-fate stumbled him onto the water. His mother dead and his father a stranger, the lad had no family to gather care for or from. All he knew of his past was a love-sick mother and a father’s affair with the torrents of a great ocean. All he knew of his future was the grime of the streets he was left with in her death. That he survived the plague ridden gutters of his youth with neither alcoholism nor the clap speaks well enough for his strength of character, and at the age of sixteen- as best any records from that time might show- he signed on as a cabin boy with his sights set on the water and what might remain of his family.

Or that’s how one version of the story goes. This story, after all, may or may not be true.

Some say that he wasn’t orphaned at all, that even as a child he was obsessed with the vastness of the ocean. The ocean in his child’s eyes was God’s Magnum Opus. Perfection carved by the liquid hand of the divine. Any man seeking to test his might and worth in the eyes of God must at least once set out upon the open sea- to meet Him face-to-face. His childlike piety grew from endearing to obsessive and where his well-to-do parents had encouraged religion in the boy, his watery version of a malevolent God did not fit with the daily goings on of a protestant household. When they sought to placate the boy with weekends at the sea shore disaster ensued. Nights better spent in bed the not-yet-captain would be found rowing a dory toward the eddies and waves. Father and mother screaming from the waterline would watch the pale face of young McKay begging for God to challenge his devotion. When one such night the boy failed to return to shore his parents were overwhelmed with both the intensity of grief and the guilt of relief. Perhaps it was not their right after all to keep the child from reaching his divinity. When they were informed some years later that their disobedient son had signed with a merchant ship as a cabin boy they let their memory of him fade away, and concentrated instead on the docile girl they had given birth to in his absence.

But that’s just another version of the story. Whether searching for his father or searching for eternity one thing remains true. He lost faith in the power of both God and man when he first set eyes on the Great Whale.