Book Review: ‘The Devil and the Dark Water’ by Stuart Turton

Martin Chilton

The Saardam, a ship sailing from Batavia in the Dutch East Indies to Amsterdam in 1634, is the brilliant, claustrophobic setting for the bulk of Stuart Turton’s intoxicating thriller "The Devil and the Dark Water."

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Turton conjures up a vivid picture of the depravity and stench of a 17th-century voyage. The crew are a bunch of “murderers, cutpurses and malcontents, unfit for anything else”. 

Famous traveller Samuel Pipps is being transported to the Netherlands to be executed for a crime for which he may be innocent. As he is locked away, in the bowels of the ship, he is unable to solve the dangerous mysteries that begin to afflict the vessel that is being followed by a ghost ship.

Strange symbols appear on the sails; a mysterious leper stalks the decks and passengers start to become possessed by a demon known as Old Tom. Can Pipps’s loyal bodyguard, Lieutenant Arent Hayes, solve the brutal murders before the ship descends into anarchy? As well as the threat of deadly storms, there is the constant menacing possibility of open warfare between the crew and the “black-hearted” musketeers of the United East India Company.

I enjoyed Turton’s inventive debut “The Seven Deaths” of Evelyn Hardcastle and his rollercoaster second book is also full of neat twists and nifty clues. There are some great villains – the callous Governor-General Jan Haan with his “empty, ink-blot eyes”, the violent Guard Captain Jacobi Drecht, the scheming Chief Merchant Reynier van Schooten – and terrific heroes, especially the gentle (and gory) giant Hayes.

With Pipps locked away, Hayes turns to Haan’s wife Sara Wessel for help. Sara knows from awful experience that “men are dangerous”. She has come close to being beaten to death on three occasions by her husband. She has had to protect her daughter Lia from being hunted as a witch (it was a dangerous time for young women to display supreme cleverness).

The sexism of 17th-century society is one of the deeper, darker themes explored in the novel, which is also a story of wealth disparity, avarice, and how power corrupts.