Literature / The Ship That Sailed to Mars

With its sheen of ivory and gold, and luster of emerald and sapphire; its peacock hangings and rose silk ropes, the Ship was nearly as beautiful as a sunset.

"The Captain and Crew had the utmost difficulty in persuading the homestaying Fairies to release the ropes, but at last the ship was free; and with a curtsey it slid up a sunbeam through the clouds. As they sailed past those impalpable towers that the Westing wind had piled up, the Captain and the Crew were fairly swollen with elation. They could not conceive the dangers that they must inevitably meet. Nor had they knowledge enough to turn their course aside from the Sorrowful Planet, where tears as big as mountains are wrung from lowering purple clouds; nor from that repellant dwelling of Hate, the Thunder City amongst the Iron Hills of Mars, or from those other Sinister Things that, driven from inhabited spheres, brood in uncanny silences on ancient horrid stars forgotten of the Gods."

— William Timlin, "The Ship That Sailed to Mars" Part 1, "The Launching of the Ship"

The sole published work of William Timlin, The Ship That Sailed to Mars is an early (1923) work of Science Fantasy distinguished by the author's four dozen fanciful watercolor illustrations and hand-drawn calligraphic text accompaniment.

Broken into three parts, the adventure follows the motley crew — a single elderly human man and ten fairy craftsmen and seamstresses — of a fantastical ship bound for Mars. They encounter many strange worlds and dangerous obstacles on the way to their destination, including worlds populated solely by Pirates, monsters, and characters from Greek Mythology. Upon their arrival at Mars' Fairy City, the crew is befriended by the Martian King's daughter. The Princess begs for their help in rescuing her beloved Prince from the treacherous Thunder City, and the certain doom that awaits him there.

The book can be read on The Internet Archive, with scans of the color plates presented next to a transcription of the calligraphic text.

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Tropes in The Ship That Sailed to Mars:

• Artistic License – Space: The Ship That Sailed to Mars is quintessentially Science Fantasy (heavy on the fantasy side), but none of the astronomy in the tale has any basis in reality:
  • Astronomers tell the Old Man that Mars is "thirty thousand miles away." The absolute minimum distance between Earth and Mars is 33.9 million miles (54.6 million kilometers) from Earth, according to NASA. The maximum distance is 250 million miles, with an average of 140 million miles between the two planets.
  • The Old Man and his fairy companions are able to breathe in outer space, and every planet they encounter has a breathable atmosphere.
  • The Milky Way is depicted as a veil of stardust closer to Earth than any other celestial body (bar the Moon). When the Ship sails through the Milky Way, two things happen:
    • The Ship is covered in shimmering motes of dust, as if it had fallen into a vat of glitter.
    • Their passage leaves a tear in the Milky Way that is visible from Earth.
  • The terms "Stars" and "Planets" are used interchangeably.
  • Numerous invented "stars" and planets are encountered between Earth and Mars. Even if Mars and Earth were the furthest distance apart possible (if both planets were at aphelion (i.e. the farthest distance from the sun in their respective orbits) on opposite sides of the sun, they'd be 250 million miles apart according to Space.com), the only astrological bodies of note between the two would be the Sun, Mercury, and Venus (and miscellaneous space dust, comets, and small Near-Earth objects).
• Batman Can Breathe in Space: The Old Man and his fairy crew have no trouble breathing in the vacuum of space — that space is a vacuum is never mentioned or alluded to.
• City of Canals: The Martian Fairy City is built up around a system of canals. Timlin's depiction played off the popular idea of the time that Mars was covered with a network of alien-constructed waterways. The trope of Martian canals can be traced back to a mistranslation of Giovanni Schiaparelli's observations of the red planet in the 1870's, wherein he called the network of dark areas he saw through his telescope "canali," meaning channel. "Canali" was translated into English as “canals,” which are always man-made. The idea of canals built by Martians flourished in popular culture and fictional depictions of the Red Planet, of which The Ship That Sailed to Mars is only one example.
• Constellations as Locations: The Pleiades Star Cluster is depicted as seven floating, spherical houses (complete with doors, windows, and chimneys) where the Pleiades of mythology (the seven daughters of Pleione) have been imprisoned after pestering the gods to judge which of them had the fairest singing voice.
• Conveniently Close Planet: Not only can the Old Man and his crew of fairies fly to Mars in a sailing ship, there are multiple planets situated on the route between Earth and Mars where they take stopovers to stretch their legs.
• Cool Ship: The titular Ship built by the Old Man and the fairy craftsmen. It can fly through space, and it's decked out with ropes made from gemstones and a golden figurehead in the shape of the phoenix.
• Crapsack World: Several of the planets the Ship flies past on its way to Mars are said to be filled with monsters or atmospheric conditions so horrible that no-one would willingly choose to live there. On the "Sorrowful Planet", all the rain in the clouds falls as a single massive drop:
  Then, slowly, a nearby cloud swelled, and dropped a single tremendous raindrop, that fell on the land with a heavy sullen sound, burying for itself a pit and hurtling mud and crawling creatures into the fetid air.
• Dragon Rider: The Old Man is outfitted with a dragon mount when he sets off to rescue the Prince, but it can only take him as far as the overgrown forest.
• Distressed Dude: The Prince has fallen under the sway of Thunder City and must be rescued.
• Fisher Kingdom: The Iron Hills of Mars are constantly beset by storm clouds and lightning. This environment of "melancholy" has the power to make anyone (or at least any Martian) who visits the area as dour and morose as the weather, and to instill a supernatural fixation with misery in those unfortunate enough to wander into the valley. Most visitors are so transfixed they refuse to leave Thunder City.
  And the Thunder roared and dreadfully rumbled, and all things were bathed in an evil leaden light, for there was never any rain - only the drifting clouds, only a dry, hot fever in the air. Here one might easily go mad.
  The Old Man landed on the hill side, and found the place an ugly, sinister City, crouching flat against the ground; and the Fairies there were incurious and wandered unseeingly, being too preoccupied with the Misery that frothed and brooded in their brains.
• Flaming Meteor: The Ship encounters a meteor in its travels that emits a "shuddering glow" and throws off heat. The fairies reason that it is "a giant spark from the Anvil of some Industrious God who was forging, maybe, an iron circlet for the ankle of his Beloved."
• Gem Tissue: The Snake of Eden is drawn with pair of massive jewels for eyes.
• Gentle Giant: In the Fairy Forest that rests between the Martian Capital and the Iron Hills, the Old Man encounters "a Monster worse than any in all the Zoos of Mars." A monster whose "eyes glimmered madly red," and that had "spiky, craggy teeth," and a heaving bloated body — but the creature is only the lost pet of a band of Forest Fairies. Once the Fairies and their pet monster are reunited, the creature is revealed to be totally harmless.
• Guile Hero: The Old Man tricks the melancholic residents of Thunder City into creating a lightning rod by positing that it will increase their melancholy to have all the land's lightning concentrated in a single spire, rather than spread throughout the Iron Hills. After the tower is constructed and the lightning is grounded, the air of melancholy pervading the Iron Hills disappears. The fairies who had fallen into the melancholic trap of the Iron Hills come back to their senses and return to their homes and families.
• Interplanetary Voyage: The middle third of the book consists of the voyage from Earth to Mars, and gives descriptions of all the marvelous "stars" (i.e. planets) and hazards the travelers brave as they sail for Mars.
• Martians: Mars is populated by a fantasy kingdom of Fairies "who fled the Moon when that unhappy planet cooled from sunny opulence to clearest shimmering ice."
• Nature Spirit: The gods send an Air Sprite to guide the Ship to Mars after it becomes lost.
• No Name Given: The Old Man is never referred to by his name, only as "the Old Man." Likewise, the King, Princess, and Prince of Mars are never given names besides their titles. The only named characters are the ones borrowed from Classical Mythology (Orpheus, Medea, Calypso, etc...), and the "Snake of Eden" that menaces the Ship.
• One-Book Author: ''The Ship That Sailed to Mars" was Timlin's only published work.
• Our Fairies Are Different: The fairies from Earth look like little old men and women in turn-of-the-century clothes, with their only distinguishing feature being pointed ears, pinched faces, and deft craftsmanship. On Mars the fairy women all appear to be beautiful maidens, while the fairy men appear either as little trolls/ goblins or men with pointed ears.
• Our Mermaids Are Different: Mermaids appear both on the "Star" [read: planet] of Classical Mythology and on Mars. In both cases they're beautiful half-women, half-fish creatures who welcome incoming ships.
• Pirate Booty: Pirate Planet is home to all sorts of piratical myths and mores, including tropical islands hiding buried treasures.
• Purple Prose: Exuberantly so. Although the passages that accompany each illustration are brief (usually not more than three or four short paragraphs), the text contains florid descriptions of the beautiful sights the crew sees and brave deeds the Old Man accomplishes.
  As they arrived at the City of Mars, it was coming on to evening, and the Ship floated down through a wonderful purple twilight and came to rest, buoyant as a flower, on the placid mirror of a broad canal, from whose pellucid depths came flashing a band of Mermaids to bear the Ship to where, on a marble causeway, stood many of importance in that City, to welcome the visitants.
• Sadly Mythtaken: The "Star of Classical Mythology" is home to Calypso, Jason, Medea, Icarus, Orpheus, Eurydice, and other figures of Greek Mythology — but all Bowdlerized and given happy endings inconsistent with their source material. Calypso is a gracious hostess, Medea is defanged, Icarus has survived his famous flight, and Orpheus succeeded in escaping the underworld with his dear Eurydice.
  The light flashing from sails and gilded prow showed them the far-famed Argo returning, bearing again the triumphant Jason and the Golden Fleece; and Medea was there, but wonderfully changed, and not the horrific witch the fable knows.
• Save the Princess: Genderflipped — The Old Man is tasked with rescuing the Prince betrothed to the Martian Princess.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: The work is definitely Science Fantasy, but it depicts Mars as a celestial body near enough that a sailing ship (albeit a flying one) can reach within a few weeks of travel. Additionally, the "learned astronomers" of Earth that appear in the book assert that Mars is thirty thousand miles away... which is explicitly untrue (see the Artistic License – Space entry above for details). For comparison, the Earth's equator is 24,901 miles around — 30,000 miles is enough to circle the globe one and one fifth times. Earth's moon sits at an average of 239,000 miles away (between 251,900 miles at the apogee and 225,700 miles at the perigee). The distance from Earth to Mars was roughly calculated as early as 1672, when Giovanni Cassini and Jean Richer took measurements of the position of Mars from their positions in Paris and French Guiana, and triangulated those measurements with the known distance between their locations on Earth. This information would have been readily available to Timlin even in 1921, when he began work on his story.
• The Scottish Trope: One of the worlds the ship passes over contains the monstrous creatures "One Whose Name is Shuddered At on Earth" and "That Evil That Has Troubled Men Through All the Fabled Days":
  Once the fiery breath of that One whose Name is shuddered at on Earth, and whispered to-and-fro on dark and windy nights, nearly engulfed the Ship, and shriveled it in the cascading flames that ascended from its myriad eyes and mouths. His horrible spouse, that evil that had troubled men through all the fabled days, wallowed at his side, and adding her voice to his, shrieked in maniac rage at her hatred of mankind.
• Science Fantasy: Arguably the best descriptor for this work, where fairycraft enables a man to fly to Mars.
• Science Hero: The Old Man. Though he's described as being at odds with the stuffy scientists and astronomers of Earth, the Old Man nevertheless proves capable of fantastic feats of engineering and science:
  • He designs a ship capable of interplanetary travel and is able to construct it with the aid of some like-minded fairy craftsmen.
  • The Princess of Mars seeks out the Old Man's aid in saving her beloved Prince from Thunder City, recognizing that the Old Man has a greater breadth of experience and understanding of meteorological phenomena affecting the Iron Hills.
  • The inhabitants of Thunder City are saved when the Old Man arranges for the construction of a lightning rod, tricking the tenants of Thunder City into building the structure to trap the lightning and freeing them from the weather's thrall.
• Snakes Are Sinister: The ship is nearly devoured by the monstrous Snake of Eden.
• Space Is an Ocean: Overlaps with Space Sailing — the voyage to Mars is conducted on a sailing ship that can fly as well as it floats and planets are treated much like islands in a sea.
• Space Sailing: The ship constructed by the Old Man and the Fairies looks exactly like a sailing ship, only it can fly. Whenever it lands on a planet for a visit, it touches down on the water and sails like a typical watercraft.
• Wedding Finale: After the Old Man rescues the Prince from Thunder City, the Prince and Princess are married in the last paragraph before the Epilogue.
  Then the Prince and the Princess were married, and the bells rang out afresh, and on the scene shone the Double Moons the Old Man had so longed to see.
• "Will Return" Caption: The Epilogue confirms that there are further adventures of the Old Man, and of the Fairies left behind on Earth, that aren't covered in The Ship That Sailed to Mars. Timlin always intended to write a sequel, The Building of a Fairy City, but died before he finished it.
  Here it is that this most brief account must end, but there is much more yet to be told concerning certain great and little happenings on the World of Mars. Of the Old Man's visit to the Forest Fairies, and his stay amongst the Goblins in the heart of that far distant Planet. Of how the Fairies left in the Shipyard on Earth, distressed and anxious about the Old Man's lengthy absence, built a ship according to his design, and finally arrived on Mars.

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