A Journey to the New World | Teen Ink

A Journey to the New World

December 18, 2013
By SchrConn SILVER, Loveland, Ohio
SchrConn SILVER, Loveland, Ohio
5 articles 0 photos 0 comments

God has perished.. May he have already been long perished before my horrid existence in this Hell? Thoughts of suicide distort my mindset day after day in this life of sickness and pain. At this point I crave a gun in my mouth more than a drink because I’m more familiar with the taste of blood than the taste of water anyway. Whether there’s eternal light or eternal darkness after this existence, I have no doubt that it has to be better than this world that failed me. The world is at a slow burn to disaster and the sooner departure comes, the better off I will be.

The year was 1619 in my homeland of Edinburgh, Scotland. My mother and father once English natives migrated to Scotland during the time of their marriage because of their nonconformity to the Church and government. Since their migration to Scotland, they always planned on sailing to the New World one day in hopes of obtaining rich farming and hunting land for my father. God, how I wished we could’ve stayed. Countless days of sadness and pain in return for nothing close to a happy life in the New World. The expedition to the New World was the just beginning of our demise and had we knew what was coming, we would’ve remained in Scotland. The decision was made in the spring of 1619 to sail to the New World, and at the time we had a month to prepare for the voyage. Preparations for the New World were quite simple seeing how we were sailing into unknown territory so all we needed were the clothes on our back and hopes of success.

The month was April of 1619 when we set sail on the Daisy that was set course for Virginia. Initially no one knew how long the voyage to the New World would last. The word from other explorers had everyone believing it could take anywhere from two months to four months. After the first month passed, the truth set in that we could potentially be on this boat for the whole summer and not reaching the New World until fall. The long voyage to the New World on that godforsaken ship is where my eyes slowly began to see the sick darkness that grips tightly on our world. After two months on the ship I had already witnessed death on four accounts plus a violent suicide. Depression was the leading sickness on the Daisy and one early morning depression claimed Maxwell McBeth, a dear friend of my parents as he was found hanged from the ceiling post above his sleeping quarters. His death did not affect me as it did my parents, on the outside at least. Twas after that fateful day we found Maxwell when I got my first instinct feelings that this voyage to the New World was a mistake. Sleep was no longer an every night occurrence. The entity that kept me awake those countless nights is something I never shared with anyone because of the gruesome nature and sense of hopelessness it gave me. Every night since the suicide I began having vivid dreams of gore and torture. In most cases I couldn’t even make out where I was, all I knew was that my entrails were oozing out of my sliced open stomach and I was on the verge of death, alone. If I wasn’t being sliced open, I was being burned at the stake or being skinned alive. These dreams continued until the fateful day we reached the New World in August. That day is when Hell and darkness crept into my life with no sign of ever leaving. As the ship was getting a closer and closer to shore. I started to get a feeling that something was not right. I began to notice strange movement in the trees a couple feet up from the shore. I would like to say that it was just tranquil wildlife but it wasn’t. The moment when the ship touched the New World was when the Brown Feather People stepped out of the trees into plain view. Later I would find out these were the Indians we had heard about from other famous explorers. Us being new to this strange land had no idea who these people were or if they were friendly or not. The presence of these Indians gave everyone aboard the ship a feeling of unsafety. I gathered next to my mother and father as Captain Braverman insisted we all stay aboard the ship while he tried to communicate with these shady figures. To this day, there is no one that I respect more than Captain Braverman and his courage to talk to these men even at what it cost him. From the ship, the communication between Braverman and The Indians seemed to be going well. Unfortunately the famous explorers of the New World forgot to tell us that deception was another rich product found in this cruel wasteland. The moment I thought that peace was being made between us in the Indians turned out to be murder in disguise. From the ship, I witnessed my fifth death of the voyage.. As Braverman was shaking hands with the Indian, a poison dart came zipping out of the trees and penetrated Braverman right through his neck. The visual was like watching a tomato being shot. The sight of Braverman hitting the floor, seizing, vomiting and gushing blood and gore still disturbs me day after day. From the moment on, Braverman’s murder was another added feature to my dark dreams of violence. Now that Braverman was down, The Indians now knew that it was okay to make their ambush. Five Indian men crawled onto the ship and began shooting people with more arrows and taking hostages. Everything was moving so fast, it gave us little time to react to this madness. I tried to stick with my mother and father during this blur but even that was hard. The rest of the ambush is all lost in my memory which leaves many questions unanswered to this day. The last thing I remember about the ambush was making a run for the edge of the ship to make my dissent into the water. I was merely three feet from the edge when I was pounded on the side of my head from what I believed to either be a brick or one of the Indians bare fists. Everything went black just like that.

The next memory I have about that day was waking up on the beach not far from where the ambush on Daisy took place. Waking up from being blacked out, I gathered a wide variety of observations about what happened. The first thing I noticed were the ropes tied around my wrists along with a handful of my shipmates who were tied up the same way. I was next to my mother who looked like she had been through Hell and back. Her face had been cut across the cheek with both eyes severely blackened. Her white dress was now more of a red and black dress cause of the blood from her face. The big thing missing now was my father. My mother said he managed to escape into the wilderness as the ambush was taking place. The next thing I noticed was a rank and pungent smell that I then realized was the gruesome pile of mangled and abused dead bodies being burned a feet away from me. As we were sitting there, my mother led a prayer between me and her asking God for help and to save us from the atrocities that we reluctantly saw coming. I cannot speak for my mother but I, at this point did not know who we were supposed to be praying to. All my life in Europe I was raised to believe in this powerful God who loved me but what kind of loving God puts all of His people through this? If God’s will is to have me gutted and cooked for Indian pleasure, then count me out of this so called Puritan religion. Shortly after my mother’s prayer to the Absent God, the Indians ordered all of us to stand up and follow him. There were nine captives including my mother and I. Looking around, I could tell that each person being held captive did their fair share of bleeding this afternoon. Now we were all moving and following the Indians through the woods of the New World. Our destination was unknown but reality had already set in to us that it wasn’t going to be what the explorers promised. After what seemed to be hours and hours of walking we arrived at what i assumed to be the Indian’s settlement. From the outside it seemed like a happy place to live. Teepees were set up in an orderly fashion with kids running around and playing. Looking back, I strongly envy those kid’s and their sweet innocence. My innocence was long shattered after I was put in this hell and I’ve come to learn that innocence is nonrefundable product when you’ve watched death take place in front of your two eyes. The Indians proceeded to take us to the center of the settlement and that is where the torture really began. All nine of us were rudely pushed to the ground which hurts even more when you catch yourself because you’re hands are tied behind your back. We then took in a excruciating beating from what I counted to be four Indian men. I was on the verge of blacking out again as my head was smashed against the ground several times while getting a swift kick in the stomach. I’d like more than anything to say that the pain stopped there but it didn’t. Not only was every part of my body hurting, so was my mentality. No one truly knows what being disturbed and sad is until they see their own mother being beaten senseless by a group of bloodthirsty Indians and not being able to do a damn thing about it. I was angry at everything. My life, my father for escaping and not helping my mother, God for abandoning us. I wanted to be dead, every kick in the side, I hoped would be the last one to bring my terrible existence to an inevitable close.

To my dismay, I survived the beating, but just barely. I lied there on the dirty ground, fading in and out of consciousness, hoping that every time would be my journey into eternal darkness but to my disappointment, I always woke up to find myself still in pain on the ground. At this point, my mother was now gone and I didn’t have the slightest clue what those evil men did with her. Laying there on the ground I began to examine my body and all the lacerations and cuts that were on them. During my self examination I learned that during my unconscious state, I went through a series of lashings as there were about five lash marks all across my back. I thanked God for being unconscious during those lashings even though I was still adamant about the fact that my God was never there for me in the first place. An Indian man appeared out of nowhere and grabbed me by the arm and forced me to stand up. Every part of my body was sore from the beating and walking was not coming easy, but when you have a psychopathic Indian behind you, anything is possible. The Indian led me to a small teepee that was just outside the settlement. Inside the teepee was a small metal cage that was was forced into by the Indian. As if being in the cage wasn’t enough, the Indian rearranged the rope around my hand and tied it to the bar on the cage. I was restricted to move even in an iron cage. The only thing that there is to do in a cage is sleep, and that’s all I did. Sleep was my only escape from the sad reality I lived in and I took every chance I got. The sad thing is, sleep and being awake led to the same exact things. If i was awake, I was witnessing murder and torture, and when I would sleep I would dream of the same things. Often times, I wouldn’t even see anything in my dreams, I would just hear different screams of people being killed and this would last until I woke up. It got to the point where the only way out I could think of was death. At this moment, suicide was only an option, a consideration. That was until the next day when the world officially crashed before my eyes. Right now the world was like a window and the Indians were the rocks being thrown at the window that gradually cracked the window more and more. And the next day of my existence was theboulder that shattered the window.

Time didn’t exist for me anymore, since I had been in the cage. The time I woke up was undetermined. My guess would have been around noon or so. I was waken by an Indian who was opening my cage door and directing me to come out. I crawled out of my cage and was yanked to my feet by the Indian so he could the rope around my wrists again. This is the moment where everything shattered around me and I came to the horrible realization that the screaming of my dreams for the past couple of nights were real. In the distance I saw something, I can’t even put to words. Something inside me snapped and as the Indian was tying my ropes, I broke free and punched him and managed to run away towards the visual in the distance. Oh, how i wish I could've never saw what I saw. Why couldn’t I have just turned around. I guess this was another part of God’s sick will. As I got closer and closer to the visual, I collapsed and vomited everywhere. Starring back at me was the sight of my mother, hanged on a tree. Her intestines had been ripped out of her and were also dangling from her stomach. To my luck, it got worse from there. The Indians didn’t stop at her stomach, they also managed to gouge out both of eyes. The fact that she was hanging from the tree was strange to me. Part of me would like to think that she was strong enough to survive being gutted and mutilated and tried to fight back but the sad reality is that she long dead after they hung her from the tree. It must be some sick ritual done by these New World Indians. I didn’t care anymore, I was too sick to think about it and the Indians were closing in on me so I ran. I didn’t know where I was running but anywhere away from my mother and Indians the better. I ran and I ran, no destination in sight.

And that is what got me to where I am right now on this tall oak tree, moments away from my long awaited death. I contemplated everything that has happened to me and I’ve never been more sure about something in my short twelve years of life. To sum it all up, I was forced to move from my hometown to a new land that no one knew anything about that ended up being inhabited by sadistic Indians. My father is nowhere to be found, with everything else that’s happened he is probably dead too. My mother is gone and so is everything else in my life. Hope, faith, the will to live, God, it all got washed away like the waves hitting the ship that I stared at for hours on end on the voyage over to this Hell. It’s sad that the only good thing to happen to me in this New World is the fact that I still have the rope on my wrist from the Indian I escaped from. This rope is my escape from the reality that I like to call hell. I’ve came to the conclusion that even my subconscious wants me dead, seeing how I perfectly tied this noose without any knowledge of knot tying. That was the last thing that will ever make me laugh in this existence. And on that note, now I must take my last jump and breath of life...


The author's comments:
This is another paper I wrote for my English class. As I warning, there is some disturbing contents but I am not a depressed or suicidal person. My goal when writing this was to freak out my English teacher and I succeeded. She actually wrote on the paper, "do you need to speak to a guidance counselor?"

Similar Articles

JOIN THE DISCUSSION

This article has 0 comments.