Whaling voyages can make certain men a little obsessed. That's what we learn in Moby-Dick, anyway, a novel I myself have adapted for the stage.
The obsessions of whaling captains also show up in the early plays of Eugene O'Neill. For instance, in O'Neill's play Ile (a New England Yankee pronunciation of "oil") a captain becomes so preoccupied with going after more whale oil that he drives his wife mad.
However, Captain Isaiah Bartlett in O'Neill's Where the Cross is Made has a different obsession. He was on a whaling voyage when he was shipwrecked in the Indian Ocean. There, he and a handful of survivors found a treasure, buried it, and created a map marking the location with a cross.
Bartlett not only obsesses over the treasure, but after the other survivors are killed trying to get it, he passes his obsession on to his son Nat, though his daughter Sue is immune to the madness. O'Neill implies that the treasure exists, but is fake. A bracelet Bartlett returned with turns out to be made of brass with paste jewels rather than real ones. The play makes Bartlett's dream of fortune manifest onstage, though, by having actors playing the drowned crew members cross the stage like ghosts.
Where the Cross is Made premiered in 1918 by the Provincetown Players. Ida Rauh, who directed the production as well as playing Sue, apparently had difficulty staging the ghostly effect that really makes the play stand out as something special. "You'll have to do something about the ghosts, Gene," she reportedly said. "The boys never can look like ghosts, you know it. The audience will simply laugh at them." O'Neill stuck to his vision, and the ghosts stayed.
O'Neill later turned the one-act play into a full-length work called Gold. It opened on Broadway in 1921, but closed after only 13 performances.
