The Dead Slaver’s Tale by Robert E. Howard (Poem)

“The Dead Slaver’s Tale” was first published in Weirdbook Eight (1974). It also appears in the Robert E. Howard anthologies Night Images: A Book of Fantasy Verse (1976), The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard (2008), and Robert E. Howard: Selected Poems (2009).

 

About Robert E. Howard

Robert Ervin Howard was an American writer of pulp fiction. Often considered to be the man who began the sword and sorcery subgenre, Howard was the creator of Conan the Barbarian.

Howard began writing fiction when he was just nine years old. In December 1922, aged 16, his work began paying off when The Tattler (Brownwood High School newspaper) printed two of his stories: “‘Golden Hope Christmas” and “West is West”. Then, in 1924, after years of having his stories rejected by Weird Tales, he made his first sale to the magazine with a caveman story called “Spear and Fang”. This marked the start of Howard’s career as a pulp fiction writer and Weird Tales subsequently became one of his main outlets for weird fiction.

 

The Dead Slaver’s Tale

By Robert E. Howard

Dim and grey was the silent sea,
Dim was the crescent moon;
From the jungle back of the shadowed lea
Came a tom-tom’s eerie croon
When we glutted the waves with a hundred slaves
From a Jekra barracoon.

Our way to bar, a man of war
Was sailing with canvas full;
So the doomed men up from the hold we bore,
Hacked them to pieces and hurled them o’er,
And we heard the grim sharks as they tore
The flesh from each sword-cleft skull.

Then fast we fled toward the rising sun
But we could not flee the dead
And ever behind our flying shipWavered a trail of red.

She sank like a stone off Calabar
With all of her bloody crew.
There was no breeze to shake a spar,
No reef her hull to hew.
But dusky hands rose out of the deep,
And dragged her under the blue.

 

Robert E. Howard (1906 – 1936)