Amongthe most picturesque and lively incidents of the sea are those of the encountering of abandoned vessels, and the struggles of the people who board them to carry them into port. Were it not for the imperative injunctions of owners, and the various obligations imposed upon shipmasters by the terms of charter-parties, policies, and the like, there is no doubt that we should hear very much oftener than we now do of the preservation of derelicts and their cargoes. The mariner often stumbles upon some substantial prize in this way. A ship is sighted, low in the water, with nothing standing perhaps but the stump of her foremast. A spell at the pumps eases her, she is overhauled, and her hold seen to be full of valuable cargo. She is taken in tow, and after several days, or perhaps weeks, of manœuvring, she is carried into port and found to be worth some thousands of pounds, a goodly portion of which goes to the men who navigated her into a place of safety. There is a touch of romance in such findings that never fails to render them amusing and even exciting reading; and as stories they are often rich in a high kind of marine characteristics.
One of these yarns, I remember, impressed me greatly at the time. The master of a vessel, called theFides, sighted a Dutch barque water-logged. On approaching her, only one man was to be seen on board. He proved to be the skipper, who said that his crew had refused to remain by the vessel, and had left him alone in her. He was brought aboard theFides, but had not been there ten minutes when he begged to be sent to his water-logged barque again. His entreaties were so moving that the captain of theFidesyielded, and he was once more put in possession of his wreck and left there. Next day a vessel, called theBallater, took him off, and the wonder was that the poor fellow had ever managed to keep his life on the deck of the wave-swept hulk. Here, in the most obscure form in the world, is an exhibition of the sailor’s loyalty to his ship so great as to make a truly heroical figure of that Dutch captain. Narratives which recount the meeting with derelicts and their conveyance to port often reveal some of the best qualities of the sailor—I mean his indifference to peril, his capacity of determined labour, his triumph over forces whose antagonism would leave most landsmen helpless and hopeless. Such was the story of theCaledonia, a prize crew from which took charge of the brigEmily, and, after ten days of fierce battling with violent gales of wind in a vessel jury-rigged and half full of water, were eventually forced to abandon her. Such was the voyage of five men in the derelict barqueThorof Tvedestrand, laden with scrap-iron and oil-casks; they had to rig a jury-rudder to get her to sail, and for nearly a fortnight struggled with heavy weather and baffling winds, eventually being shipwrecked near Youghal, and narrowly escaping with their lives only to witness the craft they had desperately laboured to save go to pieces among the rocks.
Not very long since a ship-rigged vessel of ninehundred tons was proceeding on her voyage to one of the West India Islands. The weather had been calm and thick through the night, with a long swell rolling up from the westwards, and the morning broke with a fiery sun, red as that luminary is at his setting, and a mountainous heave of the sea that in the wake of the orb rolled in billows of molten gold, giving a kind of dreadful splendour to the hazy morning, with its faint and tarnished sky and the sickly green of the swelling and foamless deep, and the stubborn belt of haze that hung like the greyish shadow of rain upon the horizon, save where the sun loomed like a blood-red shield as he floated heavily out of the deep. There were a hundred signs to betoken a gale at hand, and preparatory measures were accordingly taken aboard the ship. All the light canvas and the mainsail were furled, and single reefs tied in the topsails. Never was such rolling. The draught of air had no weight to steady the vessel; she fell into the hollow of the swell, and from side to side she swayed as each ponderous liquid fold caught and hove her over, the water bursting inboard in smoke through her scupper-holes, the shrouds creaking with the tension of the strain as though they would draw the chain-plates like pliant wire, and every beam, strong fastening, and bulkhead added their groaning notes to the general clamour of the labouring hull and the beating canvas. By nine o’clock the sun had vanished under an expanse of slate-coloured cloud that hung over the whole surface of the deep; but yet another hour elapsed before the gale burst, and then it came along in a voice of thunder and over a surface of milk-white waters. With the upper topsail halliards let go and hands by the lower topsail sheets, the ship leaned down to it until the foam was up to a man’s shoulders in the lee scuppers;but they managed to get her to pay off, and presently she was speeding like an arrow on the wings of the tempest, piling the foam as high as her figure-head, her main-topsail blown in rags out of the bolt-ropes, and sheets of spray fogging her decks like bursts of vapour from a boiler.
The next thing to do was to bring her to the wind before the sea rose; the crew went aloft to stow the topsails and frap what remained of the main-topsail upon the yard; and after a little there was the ship with nothing on her but a small storm trysail, bowing and shearing at the huge surges which the storm had lifted in cones and pyramids, and which were now pouring and breaking with a terrible roaring noise. All day and far into the night the storm blew without intermission, but it broke in the middle watch, and then fined down so rapidly that at eight o’clock in the morning the ship was pursuing her course under whole topsails and topgallant-sails, and curtsying over the long heave of the sea, whose green seemed to sparkle after the purification of the tempest, and whose beautiful arching coils were brilliant with the diamond-like flashing of the foam chipped out of the emerald acclivities by the keen teeth of the clear, fresh north-east wind.
Shortly after noon the watch on deck had come out of the forecastle after eating their dinner, when a small brig was made out right ahead, apparently standing athwart the ship’s hawse. On approaching her it was seen that she was drifting, and that though there might be people aboard, she was not under control. Aloft she was in a state of great confusion, her foreyards squared, and her after-yards braced as wildly as the leeches of the canvas would allow. The davit falls were overhauled to the water’s edge, and all the boats were gone.Here and there ends of her running rigging trailed overboard, and as she rolled heavily in the trough of the sea, the sound of her flapping canvas threw a wild and melancholy echo athwart the breeze. The master of the ship loudly hailed her, and all eyes were eagerly fastened upon the brig to observe if there were any indications of life in her. Possibly nothing so heightens the mournful and tragical suggestions of an abandoned vessel as the loud hail of a passing ship and the deathlike stillness following, unbroken save by the hollow beating of canvas, the drowning sob of swelling water, and the creak of straining timbers.
It was very evident that nothing alive was in the brig, and the master of the ship, after consulting with his mate, decided on sending a boat. Accordingly, the second mate and a couple of seamen went over the side, and, after some hard rowing and careful dodging of the seas, they gained the brig, and scrambled upon her deck. They found that she was damaged to an extent that could not be imagined by inspection of her from the ship. Her galley and cabin skylights were smashed in, bulwark stanchions were started, and, in addition to various other injuries, there were three feet of water in the hold. Whether she had drained this water into her from the deck or whether it was due to a leak could not at once be ascertained; it was certain at least that her hold was full of cargo, and that it was of a nature that would not enable her to float should the water gain upon her. These facts were reported by the second mate, who added that he could find no papers belonging to the vessel, and that she had been stripped of all her provisions.
“It seems a pity to leave her knocking about here,” shouted the captain. “It’ll be another man’s job if we don’t tackle it. Do you see your way to carry her to Fayal?” then distant about four hundred miles.
The second mate conversed with the two men who were with him, and, after a little while, called out, “Ay, we’ll risk it.”
On this the two seamen were ordered to come alongside, when some provisions, water, a sextant, chart, and other needful articles were lowered into the boat. With these they put off, receiving a loud encouraging cheer from the rest of the ship’s crew; and, reaching the brig’s side, hoisted out the provisions, and hooked on the boat and dragged her up to the davits. The ship stood by for awhile, watching the plucky fellows, and perhaps suspecting that they might repent their undertaking, for even with a dry bottom the brig might have been reckoned a big navigating job for three men. She rolled heavily and continuously, her canvas striking the masts with loud reports, and making the light spars buckle, and as she lifted her shining sides out of the bright green seas the water was seen to gush from her bulwarks in a manner to prove the wrenching they had undergone from the recent tempest. There was no show of misgiving or repentance, however, on the part of the men. Having hoisted their boat they turned to and trimmed the yards, clapping the jigger on to the topsail halliards, and giving everything a good spread. The little vessel took the wind, slightly heeled, and came round to her course for the Western Islands, and the last thing the ship, as she filled and stood on her voyage, saw of the brig was the second mate at the wheel, the two men toiling at the break-pump amidships, and the little vessel under fore and main topgallant sail heavily swinging over the long ocean swell, throwing the foam from her deep round bows, and looking but the merest toy amid the vastsurface of undulating waters which leaned away into the furthest reaches of the sky.
A crew of three men leaves, with one at the wheel, only two to do the ship’s work. Four or five seamen would not have been too many to hand that brig’s main sail alone, and a gale of wind might therefore oblige the second mate and his two companions to put their helm up and run for it, and leave the canvas to blow away with a blessing upon it before they could bring the vessel to. Four hundred miles seem but a short voyage nowadays; but a head wind might enlarge the period of such a journey into weeks, in which case, unless these men met with help—which, though very likely, was by no means certain—they were bound to perish of starvation, as the quantity of provisions supplied to them by the ship could not, however economically used, outlast four or five days. It is just because a sailor would keenly understand all the heavy risks and difficulties comprised in such an adventure as these three men had engaged in, that the courage implied in this and many other attempts of the same kind to save property found at sea deserves a good place in the annals of naval heroism. A half-hour’s spell at the pumps satisfied them that by regular application the water might be kept under, though there could be no longer any doubt that the vessel was leaking either from a started butt or some puncture below the water-line. A tarpaulin was found and secured over the broken skylight, as a provision against dirty weather; the galley fire was lighted, and the decks cleared up, and there being an old reel-log near the wheel, along with a sand-glass, they managed among them to heave it—the second mate at the helm holding the glass—and discovered that the brig was making a little less than four knots. But the weatherkept fine, and this supported the men’s courage, as did also their assurance one to another that they were bound to be well rewarded for the risks they were running. They had another spell at the pump, and then fetched a bit of the ship’s beef that had been put to cook in the galley-copper, and bringing it aft with some biscuit, made out a tolerable meal, the mate steering with one hand and eating with the other.
The day passed quietly, but the wind was light, and the progress made was small. The duty of keeping the pump going at regular intervals grew exhausting, but it was absolutely necessary that the quantity of water should be kept under the depth found in the brig when she was boarded, and every hour throughout the day the harsh clank of the pump might be heard, ceasing after an interval when the men, pale with fatigue, and with the sweat streaming from their faces, flung themselves upon the deck breathless and spent. The breeze freshened at sunset, and the topgallant-sails were taken in. The night came down very dark, with a few misty stars here and there, and a flavour in the swing of the wind as it blew in gusts over the bulwarks that was a promise of bad weather. The weight of the water in the little vessel, coupled with the cargo, that came flush with the main hatch, sunk her deep, and as the sea rose her behaviour grew wild. The billows tumbled against her weather-bow, and such was her inelasticity that at times she would not rise to them, but let them roll over her forecastle, burying herself pretty nearly as far aft as her foremast, and flooding her decks to the wheel. Fortunately her upper works were staunch, or she must have been drowned again and again by the seas which tumbled in tons’ weight over her head. The men made shift to stow the upper topsails before it came on hard,but they could do nothing with the lower canvas, which must blow away if it would not stand. This the fore-topsail did shortly after ten o’clock in a squall of wind; the weather sheet parted, and in a few moments the sail was in rags, increasing the roaring noise of the gale and the crashing sound of the sea by the fierce whipping of the tattered cloths. Amidst all this confusion and wild scene of the black heavens and glimmering heights of water, the men betook themselves again and again to the pumps, and the metallic ring of the working brake flung a dismal note of shipwreck into the harsh uproar of the warring elements. It is difficult to realize a sterner picture of struggle, a more furious array of perils. Here were three men as crew of a vessel which wanted a good nine hands to work her, exhausted by pumping, and yet obliged regularly to apply themselves to the pump to keep the vessel afloat—forced by this work, or by having to tend the helm, to remain unsheltered upon the decks over which the seas were bursting in whole oceans; wet through to the skin, without the means of obtaining a warm drink, and without the chance of preserving a dry stitch even were an opportunity afforded them to change their clothes; a black and howling void overhead, and below a huge broken sea, in whose thunderous hollows the little vessel laboured like a drowning thing, one moment upright and becalmed by the towering coil of a rushing surge, the next on her beam-ends on the summit of the liquid height, with the full force of the gale howling through her rigging, and the spray from the breaking heads of the near combers sweeping over her decks upon the breath of the black and ringing wind like a furious snow-storm.
In the limits assigned here it is impossible to do justice to this struggle. To make it a conceivable thingto the landsman’s intelligence something of photographic minuteness is wanted in the reproduction; the picture of the men leaving the pumps and crawling along the deck to the wheel, their talk, their postures as they sat crouching and listening to the infernal din in the ebony void on high—a hundred such matters, indeed—together with the outline of the vessel, revealed for a breathless space, as she swooped into a trough with a headlong shearing of the bows that made the water boil in whiteness which flung a kind of twilight round about, in which the ink-like configuration of the straining and beaten fabric was thrown up as though a gleam of pallid moonshine had broken through the dense vapours of the storm and fallen for an instant into the swirling and creaming hollow in which the brig lay weltering. That the deeply-laden and half-drowned vessel should have outlived that night was a real miracle. Fierce as had been the preceding storm encountered by the ship, this gale had at times an edge in it that the other wanted. Happily, like its predecessor, it was short-lived, and blew itself out soon after daybreak, though it left such a tremendous sea behind that for several hours after the wind had sobered down into a topgallant breeze the brig was in the utmost jeopardy. The rolling was so frightful that the men could do nothing aloft. The mate refused to allow them to leave the deck, expecting every instant to see the mast go over the side. It was almost impossible to stand at the pumps; sometimes the little vessel would literallydisha sea over her rail that swept the two seamen off their legs, and forced the mate, who grasped the wheel, to hold on to the spokes for dear life; and it was as much as their necks were worth to let go for a moment. By noon, however, the swell had greatly subsided, and the men made shift to set the main and upper fore-topsails andtopgallant-sails, and to board the foretack. The mate also got an observation which enabled him to set his course. But the night that was passed had almost done for them; they could scarcely stand, and crawled about like sick men; and such was their pass that when the mate, laying hold of the pump, sung out to one of his companions to come and lend him a hand, the reply was that if the pumping was to depend uponhim, the blooming hooker might as well sink at once, as there was not strength enough left in him to kill a flea; and it was not until the mate and the other man who stood at the wheel had consumed twenty minutes in entreaties, curses, and other marine rhetoric, that the exhausted creature was induced to “tail on.” Fortunately for the poor fellows the wind had shifted into a quarter favourable for their voyage; they dried their clothes, cooked some beef, and managed to snatch sufficient rest between the intervals of pumping to give them back something of their strength. Everything went on well until they were about forty miles distant from Fayal, when the wind backed and blew a fresh breeze right ahead. This was maddening enough. They braced the yards hard up, packed all that they could hoist upon the vessel, and swore that, come what might, they would not slacken a halliard nor touch a sheet though it should blow fit to prize the old butter-box out of the water. It was not long after this that a steamer hove in sight, and, probably suspecting a case of distress by the look of the brig aloft—for the rags of the lower fore-topsail still fluttered upon the yard—slowed her engines to speak the little vessel. “What ship is that?” was asked. The name was given and the circumstances related. The steamer then offered to give the brig a drag towards Fayal, but when it was understood that a share in the salvagewould be expected, the second mate sung out no, they wanted no help, they had scraped through it all right so far, and were willing to venture the remaining risks. Thereupon the steamer proceeded, but had not sunk her hull when the wind again shifted, and enabled the brig to look up for her port with the breeze full abeam; and within nine hours from the time of having been spoken by the steamer, a pilot had boarded her, and she was safely moored at the west end of Fayal Bay. The value of the brig and cargo proved to be sixteen hundred pounds, and when the award came to be made, four hundred pounds were given to the owners of the ship that had boarded the brig, one hundred pounds to the master and crew of the ship, and a substantial sum to the second mate and his two men.
Thecaptains of the steamers which ply as passenger and cargo vessels between London and the French ports are a class of men familiar in a more or less degree to most of us, and it is probably this familiarity that prevents us from dwelling, with the emphasis that is deserved, upon the singular skill they exhibit, day after day, and year after year, in carrying their ships through what may be fairly called the most dangerous waters in the world, with scarcely a misadventure to vary the chronicles of their little voyages. By night and by day they are threading the intricacies of the crowded river Thames, groping through white mists so thick that a buoy must be alongside before it can be seen; struggling against sudden bursts of furious Channel weather, which bring up the most abominable kind of sea that a sailor can tumble about in—short, roaring cross surges which seem to knock the very breath out of the paddle steamer, sloping her funnel like thebâtonin the hand of a band conductor, submerging one paddle-wheel to let the other revolve like a windmill out of water, and blowing up in storms of snow from the sponsons, whilst the worried vessel pitches savagely into the narrow hollows, flinging up her stern like the hind legs of a colt that takes fright at a passing train, her tarpaulins streaming with wet,the escape-pipe blowing as she reels, a few sea-sick passengers wet through aft, two or three seamen in oilskins dodging the seas forward, and the skipper on the bridge holding on to the rail with both hands, and wondering what that confounded old “Geordie” right ahead is up to, coming along with square yards and his patched boom-foresail bellying out like a sailor’s shirt drying in the forestay, as if the whole of the Channel were his private property, and it was his duty to run over anything that got in his road.
Take the trip to Boulogne alone. In fine, clear weather it is all plain sailing, no doubt. But if a passenger wants to appraise the merits of these captains rightly, let him quit the pitch-dark deck, and a night so black and thick that it is a positive relief to the eye when a shower of sparks breaks out of the funnel and blows away into the ebony gloom to leeward, and go below into the bright, warm cabin, and overhaul a chart of the mouth of the Thames and the adjacent waters as far as the South Sands Head Light. Why, the sight is bewildered by the mere look of that chart. It is as though a spider had got foul of an ink bottle, and had been cleaning its legs on a large sheet of white paper. West and East Girdlers, Margate Sands, Long Sands, Sunk Sands, Goodwin Sands—it seems to be all sand; whilst the soundings are more alarming still—eleven fathoms here, and close against it, one fathom—the English of which is blue lights, rockets, hovellers, lifeboats, and Board-of-Trade inquiries. Jones, asleep in his little state cabin, knows nothing of the maze of perils through which he is being steered; he will rise in the morning and take his seat at the breakfast-table, and in the composed features of the brown-faced, hearty-looking captain who sits modestly eating a rasher ofbacon, he will find no trace or hint of a vigil which began at London Bridge and which will not terminate until Boulogne is reached, though perhaps—the Goodwins being astern, and neither the Varne nor the Ridge being very much in the road—the hardest part of it may be said to be over.
But the dangers of the English Channel are by no means limited to shoals and foul weather. If those were all, the captains who safely carry hundreds upon hundreds of passengers to and fro in the course of the year, would have to abate something of the praise to which their excellent skill and remarkable vigilance entitle them. In truth, a danger more to be feared than shallow water and tempestuous weather is collision. I am not speaking of the daytime and fine weather; though even in the daytime and in fine weather collisions at sea will happen through a dozen circumstances more absolutely unavoidable than the most apparently unavoidable railway collision ever attributed by a coroner’s jury to pure accident. It is the thick and silent night that is most haunted by this deadly peril. There is no wind, but a drenching drizzle drops unseen, save in the haze of the cabin skylight, from a black heaven that seems to rest its ponderous burden on the slender mastheads of the creeping steamer. It is the English Channel, the great maritime highway that leads to all parts of the world, and now as ever it is crowded with shipping; and through this mighty shadow, full of hidden life and hidden danger, those captains I am writing of must bring their vessels, day after day, week after week. They must not lag, for time is precious to their owners. Their unscathed emergence year after year must surely savour of the miraculous to any man who will but give his mind to the character of thedangers through which these sailors steer their vessels in safety. As a sample of this particular peril of collision, let me give an instance—a recent one. It may remove reference from all risk of misapprehension if I say at once that the steamer was from Bilbao, bound to a North country port.
She was abreast of Beachy Head when the night fell, and the fresh southerly wind, suddenly shifting to the westward in a little squall, dropped. During the latter portion of the afternoon the weather had been slowly thickening, but when the wind went the haze rolled up all round like smoke, blackening the moonless night until the very foam breaking away from under the counter was a scarcely perceptible glimmer upon the inky surface that melted into the midnight void within a biscuit’s throw from the vessel’s side. There were a few passengers, who vanished with the daylight and might be seen, by peering through the cloudy skylight glass, seated at the cabin table, the lamplight bright upon them, and making the picture of the irradiated interior, by contrast with the breathless blackness on deck, like a magic-lantern show. There was no gleam of phosphorus, no pallid streak of foam, to define the presence of the deep; but the soft seething of the passing froth, resembling the escape of steam heard thinly and at a long distance, filled the ear with a permanent note, and the dull vibration of the engines could be lightly felt. The haze was as wetting as rain; and the bullseyes over the lighted interior glimmered like emeralds in the decks upon which the mist was crawling as the vessel carried it along. There is a mystery in the hushed blackness of a night like this at sea which may be enjoyed in the open ocean, where the imagination lets itself loose upon the hidden leagues ofwaters, and finds a kind of life in death in the mere capacity of sentience amidst such a universe of shadow; but it comes with an element of fear in a narrow sea studded with quicksands and alive with vessels. The eye struggles with the darkness in vain. Every instinct sympathizes with the blindness that has fallen upon you; but the strained ear catches no more than the sob and fret of passing water and the chafing of gear as the vessel sways upon the indistinguishable folds of the swell. A man coming up out of the cabin of that steamer might have reckoned the vessel deserted and left to her own guidance. The wheel was amidships, and there was no familiar binnacle-lamp to relieve with its soft mist of light the eye that strove to pierce the darkness aft. To know where the captain was, or whether there were any hands on the look-out, it would have been necessary to sing out or go about the decks and upon the bridge groping.
Presently, what looked to be a composant—a small trembling point of light—hovered in the blackness on the starboard bow, and a moment after there crept out under it a dull green smudge, as faint and baffling in the thickness as the wavering flame of spirits of wine. A steamer’s lights; but all that was visible of her was a deeper darkness in the air where she loomed, a row of illuminated scuttles like the beach-lamps of a little town seen afar, and fibres of radiance striking into the foggy air from the bright light on the fore-mast. A deeper fold of darkness seemed to overlap the night as the invisible steamship swept by; the pulsing of her engines thinned down, and the wash of the bow-wave melted into the vague, haunting undertone of chafing water—a sound coming you know not from where. On a sudden the decks rang with a loud and fearful cry,“There’s a vessel right ahead! Hard-a-port! Hard-a-port! mind, or we shall be into her!” Crash! You could hear the sound of splintering wood, followed by a whole chorus of shrieks, whilst a dozen orders were volleyed out in hoarse notes on the steamer’s decks. “What is it?” “Where is she?” “Get some lights along, in God’s name!” A bright red flame threw out a wild radiance over the steamer’s side: there was a rush of men to see what it was, and there, gliding past the steamer, every outline distorted by the crimson, flickering, streaming fires of a flare-tin held on high by one of her men, was a French three-masted smack, her decks apparently full of people, shrieking altogether, and in every conceivable posture of entreaty and terror—a dreadful picture indeed, standing out with terrible distinctness in the red light of the flare against the liquid pitch of the sea and the sky. Their shouts and cries were in the rudestpatois; it was impossible to distinguish their meaning amidst the hubbub on the maimed and broken hull, as it veered swiftly astern, the mainmast over the side, the wild light flashing up the crowd of white faces as the flame from the tin broke out in a blood-red fork of radiance, and the whole fearful picture vanishing as the light suddenly expired, and the night rolled its inky tide over it. The steamer’s engines were instantly reversed and the iron fabric stopped. The passengers came rushing up out of the cabin, increasing the distraction of the darkness by their eager, terrified inquiries to know what had happened. The chorus of shrieks astern was silenced, and only faint, single, most melancholy shouts broke the terrible silence upon the sea, proving but too conclusively that the vessel had foundered, and that these cries came from swimmers.
Meanwhile every lamp and lantern aboard the steamer that could be collected had been brought on deck, and you could see the dark figures of seamen struggling to get the boats overboard, rushing aft, and vociferating promises of speedy help into the blackness astern, some bending on lanterns to ropes’ ends, and letting them drop over the side, and flinging ends of line overboard for the clutch of such swimmers as should reach the steamer; whilst the cries of the captain and mates and the shouts of the crew were made deafening by the pouring and hissing of steam up in the blackness overhead. It always seems an eternity at times like this before the boats are overboard; something gets foul; the oars have been taken forward to be scraped, and cannot be found; a kink in the fall has jammed in the davit-block; there is no plug, and a dozen voices are shouting all at once for something to take its place. But two boats at last were launched, after an interval of about five minutes, and pulled slowly away for the spot where the smack had foundered, a hand in each bow holding a lantern and keeping a bright look-out for those black spots which should denote the heads of swimmers and drowning men. A silence as of death fell upon the steamship as her boats left her. A crowd of people stood in the stern watching the two spots of light upon the water, breathlessly listening for any sound that should indicate the rescue of even one man. The lanterns over the side flung a short space of radiance upon the sea, and men were posted along the rail to watch for any approaching swimmer who should have been missed by the boats.
“Are you finding any of them?” bawled the captain of the steamer, sending his voice in a roar through the hollow of his hands.
“Ay, ay, we’re picking them up,” came back the answer in the merest thread of sound.
Ten minutes went by, and then suddenly there arose a shout from one of the men stationed at the port bulwarks.
“Here’s a man swimming here!” and in a breath there was a rush to the side.
“Get another light over!”
“Fling him this life-buoy!”
“Pitch a coil of rope to him, but mind you don’t hit his head, or you’ll sink him!”
Half a dozen splashes told that these various orders had been executed. “He’s got hold of my line!” sang out a voice, and as the rope was gently hauled in, a seaman, jumping into the bight of a rope, sprang overboard, and in a few moments both men were dragged over the side.
The half-drowned French smacksman fell down in a heap the instant he touched the deck. He was dressed in heavy sea-boots and oilskin leggings, and how he had managed to swim the distance from where his vessel had foundered to the steamer was a miracle not to be explained by any known law of specific gravity. He was carried into the forecastle, unable to articulate; but another quarter of an hour went by before the boats returned.
“How many have you?” shouted the captain, as they approached.
“We have four, and the other boat has five. There are women among ’em,” was the answer.
They came alongside, and one by one the poor creatures were handed up. There were three women, dressed in the picturesque costume of the Boulogne fishwife, but draggled, streaming, with closed eyes, and aquick, suffocating breathing, half dead. Most of the others were in the last stage of exhaustion; but one was able to speak, and as he stood a moment in the lantern-light answering the captain’s questions, a more moving object could not be imagined. The water drained from his fingers, his hat was gone, and his iron-grey hair—for he was an old man—lay in a tangled mass over his eyes; and there was a most heartrending expression of horror and despair in his face.
He said his vessel had left Boulogne early that morning. There were four women and ten men and boys on board. He owned that they had had no lights burning. He trembled like a freezing man, and was then led below, with his hands to his face, sobbing as if his heart would break, and moaning in his rude French that amongst the drowned were his wife and boy.
“Are you sure there were no others afloat when you came away?” asked the captain of the mate, who had charge of the boats. “One man swam to us, I must tell you, and we have him aboard.”
“Sure, sir,” was the answer. “We pulled round and round, but there was nothing to be seen. The people were saved by the mainmast that was left afloat when the smack went down. Those who were drowned missed it, otherwise it was big enough to keep all of them up.”
For another twenty minutes the captain lingered, peering into the darkness, and keeping one boat overboard ready for the first sound. But the deep was as silent as the tomb, and nothing disturbed the deathlike stillness, unless it were the murmur of the men forward talking over the tragical incident, and the quick, passionate whispers of the passengers, as one would suddenly say, “Hush! what was that?” and another,“See! is not that something moving out yonder?” Nothing more could be done. Very reluctantly the captain quitted the stern of his vessel and gave orders to get the boat on board, and in a little while the steamer was slowly moving again through the blackness, her decks wrapped in darkness and silence, whilst the haze floated like steam round the masthead light, and the water gurgled like the cry of a drowning man as it eddied round under the counter and went away in a pale glimmer of froth into the midnight gloom astern.
This little incident will, I believe, fairly set before the reader one of the perils against which those particular captains to whom I referred in the beginning of this article have to contend. Here is a fishing-smack, lying becalmed, without a light showing, on a night made pitch dark by a drizzling haze. How could such a collision be averted, short of the captain of the steamer bringing up?—a remedy which his owners most assuredly would not think the better of him for adopting. I repeat that having regard to the difficult navigation of the mouth of the Thames, as far south as the southern limb of the Goodwins, to the mass of shipping of all kinds that is always crowding these waters, to the perilous weather to be found there, and to the negligence, foolhardiness, and indifference which are characteristic of the seamanship of scores of the men—English as well as foreigners—who have charge of small craft navigating that sea, the manner in which the masters I am speaking of carry their steamers from port to port, year after year, showing always the same clean bill of health, implies an amount of skill and vigilance which any one acquainted with the navigation and dangers of the English Channel from the Nore to the Bullock Bank will own cannot be too highly praised.
I fellonce into conversation with a smack-boy—a Yorkshire lad—who told me a story which I privately declined to believe until I saw the printed report of the inquest, and had confirmation of his narrative from other hands. Men who go to sea meet with strange accidents, and perish through causes which landsmen would ridicule as impossibilities in marine novels; but seldom do a vessel’s crew encounter such a disaster as that which befell the people of the smackApostle, of Hull. I wish I could tell the story as the fishing apprentice gave it me. No painter could imagine a finer study than the figure of the lad in his blue knitted overall, his big boots, his sou’wester, the hinder thatch of which forked out from the back of his head like the tail of a gull on the wing, his young face as he talked warming up into a kind of passionate awe and fear, as it might in his sleep when the dreadful circumstance stood out in the sharp configuration of a dream; whilst now and again he would pass the back of his rough hand across his forehead to rub off the gouts of sweat which gathered there. However, I can do no more than translate the lad’s yarn, and make it complete, in its way, by facts I got from others. TheApostle, then, was a smack, belonging to Hull. Will Stevenson was her master, and John Butler hermate. Besides these she carried two other men and a boy—the lad who told me the story—making in all five souls. She left Hull, however, with only four men, for the boy did not join her until she had been out cruising a week, when he was sent to her in a steamer.
Life on board a smack is but a dull affair, and such excitements as it has are all against the fisherman. It is tedious work drifting for hours with the trawl overboard; but what is to be made of it when, as sometimes happens, the trawl is got aboard and the net found torn to pieces by a piece of sunken wreck or something of that kind, and all the fish gone? Or take a gale of wind blowing for a week, keeping the fisherman waiting and waiting for a spell of moderate weather to fetch his ground. To be hove-to in a smack in the North Sea is such a dance as you must endure—not for a day, but for several days together—to understand. Who that has rolled in a big steamer across the tempestuous stretch of waters which wash our eastern coasts has not watched from the reeling, spray-swept deck the spectacle of some dandy or cutter-rigged boat, jumping as if by magic into the arena of the green, pelting, and foaming amphitheatre, with her storm jib-sheet to windward or well amidships, a slender band of dark, close-reefed mainsail tearing at the quivering gaff, whilst she tosses the high spring of her bows at the rushing snow of the surges, chopping sharply down into the livid vortex and making it flash up in white spume that smothers her like the smoking spray of a great waterfall, vanishing until her gaff is hidden, and nothing shows but the jerking vane at the masthead behind the glittering ridge of the sea that runs at her with the roar of a goods train sweeping through a tunnel; and then springing afresh to the height of the thunderous surge until some fathoms ofher keel forward are exposed, and leaning down upon the slope of the mountainous wave, and under the giant pressure of the ringing gale, until her mast seems parallel with the water and her dark shred of canvas a mere black patch upon the snow-storm under her?
One wonders, looking at such a sight, how the big-booted fellows aboard of her hold on; how they manage to cook their food; by what inconceivable art they contrive to “fetch” their bunks, or sleeping closets, without numerous ineffectual struggles, first of all, to hit the holes. But, in truth, no class of sailors make less trouble of dirty weather than fishermen. With his tiller securely lashed, the storm jib slatting a moment or two as the reefed mainsail swings the little craft into the wind, then shoving her nose round again as the sea runs hissing away under her, the air forward dark with flying foam and the water draining overboard in bucketfuls with every send, the smacksman sits cosily in the companion, pipe in mouth, keeping one eye on the look-out and the other eye on the time when one of his mates shall come and take his place, and send him below to toast his hands at the little stove, whose ruddy glow pleasantly tinges the darksome twilight of the cabin, and enables him to find, without groping, another pipe of tobacco before he lies down.
Daybreak on Friday, theApostlebeing then very nearly five weeks out from Hull, found the smack with her trawl over the weather quarter and near the north-east end of the Dogger Bank. There was a fresh breeze blowing and a middling sea running, and the smack, surging to leeward with the trend of the waves, rose and fell with the regularity of a pendulum. Many miles distant to windward was another smack, apparently heading for the same ground over which theApostlewasdragging her trawl; otherwise the sea was vacant, and the greenish dawn, flinging a sickly tint into the sky, but leaving the water dark by contrast, and throwing up the great circle of the horizon until the ocean resembled a black and solid disc centring the huge concavity of the heavens, made the immediate aspect of the deep indescribably wild and melancholy. Indeed, there is not a more desolate scene in the world than daybreak at sea. The shadow of the night still hangs in folds upon the water, and the dim illumination in the east only serves to accentuate the chilly sullenness and grim bleakness bequeathed by the black hours, the last of which is drawing away in gloom into the west. But the sun is a noble magician, and one stroke of his flashing wand converts the mystery of the dawn’s vague hints into a glorious revelation of blue heights and sparkling waters. TheApostle’strawl had been over all night, but a further short spell of drifting could do no harm, and might furnish out another trunk of fish, and the interval would give them time to get breakfast. So the little fire in the stove was stirred into a good blaze, the coffee boiled, and the two men at rest in their bunks routed out for the meal. Fishermen are usually well fed, and that is one reason, I suppose, why they appear to relish their food in a manner you shall not find in any forecastle. They have generally a good freight of fish to pick from, and they are not slow to boil a cod or cook a big sole when fancy and appetite prompt them. Somehow or other, to me, the smoke that comes blowing away out of the little chimneys which pierce their decks always savours of good cheer, and I was not at all surprised, on looking over some victualling accounts shown me by a smack-owner, to discover that the fishermen’s sea-larders—many of them, certainly—are stocked with aliberality that must make owners very anxious indeed to know how much fish there is aboard, when their vessel’s number or burgee comes within reach of their telescopes.
Breakfast done, the master gave orders for the trawl to be got in, and all hands tumbled up on deck to help at one of the few heavy jobs which happen aboard fishing-smacks. I have already said there was a fresh breeze blowing, and the vessel, though hove-to with her jib-sheet to windward, leaned down freely under the weight of the reefed mainsail. The sea was regular, but ran quickly, and every lift of the surges helped the wind to lay the little craft along, until at times her lee gunwale was flush with the water; but, like all boats of her class, she would right with great vehemence, jumping to windward like a goaded creature of instinct, and making the decks, slippery with wet, extremely dangerous even to practised feet. They say that a fisherman’s walk is two steps and overboard, and any one would have thought the saying a true one who had seen this jumping bit of a fabric—sparking like a shrimp in and out of the hollows of the tumbling waters—and watched those big-booted, clumsily-moving, powerfully-built men striding about the decks and making ready to drag the great trawl in.
The process is very simple. The dandy-wink is manned, the beam secured, and the net is then dragged in over the side. TheApostle’smen had succeeded in getting in the net to the cod-end, as it is called. All five hands were employed on this job, as it is one that demands the united strength of such little companies as smacks carry. They leaned over the rail to grasp the net, but the vessel at that moment burying her lee side through the lift of an unusually heavy sea, one of themen lost his balance and went overboard, and the net bellying out and sending away as the vessel rolled to windward, in the twinkling of an eye the other three men whose hands grasped the meshes were torn clean over the beam and buried in the sea alongside, leaving only the boy on deck. It was done in a breath. There was no time even to raise a shriek. One moment there were all four men leaning over the side, the net securely inwreathed about their fingers and waiting for the signal from the master to drag together; the next they were floundering in the water alongside, struggling, desperately clutching at the sinking net, and drowning. There was a portion of the net on deck, and to this the boy—who preserved an heroical presence of mind in the midst of this appallingly sudden and dreadful disaster—clung, that the men might not drag it all overboard (and so have nothing to hold by) in their wild and overhand grasping at the deadly, deceptive meshes which floated and sank under them, and clogged the free action of their limbs, and clung to them like masses of seaweed, settling them lower and lower as new folds of it were swept by the water around them. The net being to leeward, the tendency of every sea was to belly it out and increase its weight, whilst also setting the whole mass of it further and further away from the vessel’s side; but this weight was beyond description increased by the men who battled with the fury of strong dying creatures in the deadly envelopment of the trawl. Every now and again a sea would break under the vessel and bury the poor fellows in foam; and then, as the smack swept down into the hollow and leaned heavily to windward, the drag of the hull upon the net would strike it up again, and the four smacksmen would reappear with dusky despairing faces, their eyes protruding as they strained for breath. Robust as the boy was, here was a conflict it was impossible for him long to engage in. He held to the net with as manly and resolute a heart as ever an English lad brought to a struggle for life; but the weight of the bellying net and of the men clinging to it, increased as it was tenfold at times by the swing and rush of the smack upon the sea, must have taxed and presently exhausted the strength of a dozen such as he; gradually as he failed the net was torn foot by foot away from him, though every time it was wrenched from his hand he grabbed at it again, and held on with clenched teeth until another swoop would unlock his fingers as you might snap a clay pipe-stem.
Suddenly turning his head—for hitherto he had been engrossed by the dreadful struggle in the water just a fathom or two away beyond him—he spied the smack that had been sighted at dawn, about half a mile to windward. She was manifestly heading for theApostle, and the boy shouted to the miserable drowning men that help was coming, and urged them to hold on. But it was doubtful whether they heard the lad’s voice. Close upon the water the seething and hissing of foam would be deafening; moreover, their eyes were glazing—death had his hand on their throats; they presented a row of asphyxiated faces, now and again revolving in the eddies amid the trawling gear, sometimes thrown up until their bodies as high as the waists were out of the water, in which posture they would remain poised with uplifted arms that gave them a horrible appearance of entreaty, then vanishing utterly, to emerge a few seconds after as the roll of the vessel swung them up and out. The boy’s strength was now completely exhausted, and also he had to let go in order to signal to the approaching smack. The whole of the net then went overboard.
About an hour had passed since the men had fallen into the sea, during all which time this most shocking tragedy was being enacted, whilst the boy with magnificent courage protracted his shipmates’ lives by maintaining his hold of the net. But the moment he let go the net veered out to its full sweep, and an instant after one of the men sank and rose no more. The smack was now within hail. The boy rushed to the weather side, and shouted out the dreadful story with such strength as remained in him, at the same pointing frantically at the water where the drowning men were. The dreadful scene was by this time visible to the crew of the vessel, which proved to be a Yarmouth smack called theEsther. They tumbled their boat over the side; a couple of hands jumped into her and rowed at once for the perishing fishermen. The boy ran back to the lee side of his vessel to encourage the poor creatures, but, looking, he discovered that the third man was gone; the master and mate only were to be seen, both clinging to the gear and scarcely living. The little boat—hardly better than a walnutshell in such a sea—came along fast; but before she could come up to the master, he let go his hold and floated away, face down and arms hanging lifeless, upon a running wave. A few strokes of the oars, however, brought the rescuers abreast of him, and he was seized and lifted into the boat, which then returned and took off the mate from the gear, to which he clung like a mass of black seaweed torn from the rocks. Calling out to the boy that they would see to him presently, the Yarmouth fishermen rowed back to theEstherwith their dreadful freight, but when they came to hand the men up over the side they found that the master was dead. The mate was carried below, stripped and dried before the cabin stove, then wrappedin rugs and laid in a bunk. But he was little more than a corpse when rescued, and the skipper of theEsther, going presently to see how the poor fellow fared, found that he had expired. This was the last of the four seamen who a couple of hours before were full of life and hope and heartiness. Meanwhile the master of theEstherhad sent three of his men aboard theApostle, and two days after the disaster both vessels arrived at Yarmouth.
I know not how this simple little narrative may affect others, but the relation of it moved me deeply. That four English sailors should meet with death so unexpected, so full of anguish in its protraction, so bitterly cruel throughout a long, long hour’s suffering, is perhaps significant only as another illustration of the perils of the deep. It is just one of the brief and simple annals of the poor sailor. But I cannot but think that the behaviour of that young apprentice—named Frederick John Graham—makes it worthy of record. Those who have any acquaintance with English fishermen are only too painfully well aware that the relations between owners and apprentices are by no means of a cordial kind, and in several places I hear of the clergy and others taking up the cause of these boys, and asking the public for funds to help to give them homes and to educate them into some knowledge of religion and morality, and out of the deplorable ignorance in which they are suffered to live. I am well aware that some apprentices are decidedly trials to smack-owners. They will run away with their master’s clothes. They will refuse to go to sea in the hope of being taken before a magistrate and sent to prison instead. But, nevertheless, I cannot quite satisfy myself that smack-owners—taking them as a body, grantingmany exceptions—treat their apprentices with the consideration that even the most hard-worked and ill-paid servants in other walks of life expect and extract from their masters. One does not want them to act the part of schoolmasters, and teach the boys to read and write; but upon what principle do they oppose the efforts of others who are willing to perform that duty? and why do they find something obnoxious in homes established to furnish smack apprentices with certain comforts and harmless recreations—calculated to keep the lads out of the streets when they come ashore from a voyage—which smack-owners themselves do not apparently see any reason for providing? For these and other reasons, therefore, the endurance and hearty English spirit of Graham may be thought a proper subject to hold up to applause; for, accepting the lad as a type, the public may witness enough merit in the hardly-used and laboriously-worked community to which he belongs to justify them in giving a helping hand to the humanitarians who are struggling to make the lives of the apprentices when ashore happy and useful to themselves; whilst the smack-owner will recognize in this narrative of Graham a spirit to which he is by no means unaccustomed, though he needs perhaps to have it more diligently emphasized than he has yet found it, before he will accept the hint it offers to his forbearance and to his humanity as the owner—in a most literal sense—of lads who, taking them all round, are the most friendless beings in the world, with the whole machinery of the law against them, and only here and there a few seaside dwellers to take their part by endeavouring to give some little wholesome sweetness to their existence when out of their vessels.
Animpressive story of the destruction by fire of a full-rigged American ship in the North Atlantic has been told me. Certain features of it combine to make it an incident certainly worthy a longer record than is usually devoted to maritime disasters, and altogether it yields such an idea of the horror of fire at sea as is not often to be got from stories of misfortunes of that kind.
A certain Wednesday in August found theR. B. Fullera little over three weeks out on her voyage from Cardiff to Valparaiso. She was freighted with coal, and carried a crew of twenty hands, being indeed a ship of 1360 tons register. A vessel of that size, unless maimed by short fore and mizzen topgallant-masts, is sure to make a handsome picture on the water under full sail. The Americans rarely mutilate their ships, but, on the contrary, with sky-scrapers and moon sails, pile their canvas to the heavens, and, mixing plenty of cotton with their sail-cloth, carry a yacht-like whiteness aloft that will shine upon the horizon like a peak of ice brilliant with snow.
The weather had been fine all day, with a beam wind, and the deep, long, black-hulled ship, leaning under the weight of her cloths, slipped softly along her course over the trembling and flashing blue. Whatwitchery is there comparable to such sailing? No sense of delight that is born of freedom and movement surpasses the joyousness kindled in the spirits by the swift, smooth rushing of a lofty sailing-ship over the swelling bosom of a great ocean, all sky above, all sea below, and between, the music of the clear, glad breeze.
The sun sank and the night gathered, the wind fined down, and the American ship, with spars erect, floated over the dark waters, in which the starlight seemed to flake away in small coils of quicksilver. Over the side nothing could be heard but the tinkling of the ripples at the stem; aloft there was not a stir, unless it were now and again the muffled chafing of the foot of a sail upon a stay or the rattle of a reef-point upon the canvas. Forward all was in shadow, with the figure of a man on the look-out; whilst aft the mate on duty paced the deck, pausing sometimes to take a peep at the compass-card, where the binnacle-lamp glistened in the brass centre-bit of the wheel, and shone upon the face of the officer as he stooped to observe the indication of the card.
The captain, Mr. Thomas Peabody, had left the deck about three-quarters of an hour. He was asleep in his cabin, when, shortly after ten o’clock, he was awakened by a feeling of suffocation, and perceived that the cabin was full of smoke. Moreover, the atmosphere was charged with a deadly, nauseating, gaseous smell that gave an iron tightness to his throat and filled his body with an unendurable prickly sensation, as though strong mustard had been rubbed into his skin. He rushed on deck, where the fresh air at once revived him, and not immediately perceiving anybody about, shouted for the officer of the watch. The chief mate came running out of the darkness forward, and before CaptainPeabody could address him, cried out that the ship was on fire. The news spread as if by magic, and in a few moments the decks were alive with the crew hurrying out of the forecastle.
Of all cries, none thrills through the heart of a sailor like that of fire. Human helplessness is never so felt as at such a time. The ship is a burning volcano, from whose cabin the red flames may soar presently, making a wide circumference of air scorching hot with a furious play of withering flame. The mate said that he believed the fire was in the hold under the cabin. Forthwith there was a rush to the hatches, which were immediately closed; calking-irons were fetched, and the air was busy with the hammering of mallets. It was a sight to see the men. There was no lack of determined courage among them, but the cry of “Fire!” was ringing in their ears; they toiled in quick impulsive rushes, with feverish haste, glancing to right and left, knowing not in what part of the ship the fire would first show itself in flame. Every ventilator was closed, and the cabin shut up, in the hope of stifling the fire, and the crew then gathered in a group in the waist to watch and wait and see what their work would do for them.
Presently somebody called out that the smoke was still breaking through.
“Look there—and there, sir!”
It was hard to guess how it could escape; the hatches were closed and calked, every aperture securely blocked, and yet there was the smoke breaking out from all parts of the vessel as steam rises from the compact earth. On this the carpenter’s chest was overhauled, and by order of the captain the men fell to work to bore holes in the deck. As the solid planks were pierced the smoke belched forth in puffs, mingled with a pestilentialexhalation of gas that forced the seamen to work with averted faces. The pumps were then manned, the hose got along, buckets dropped over the side, and all hands turned-to to drown the fire by discharging water into the glowing cargo. Clouds of steam came up through the holes, regularly followed, as the white vapour thinned, by spiral columns of black smoke which wound round and round to the height of the maintop, where the light breeze caught and arched them over. No flames were as yet visible, but the men knew that the ship was full of fire, that at any instant the hatches might be riven and shrivelled up by a discharge of flame, and therefore when the captain gave orders to lower the boats there was a rush to the davits.
When the boats were in the water alongside, the captain, desiring to save certain articles, called the mate and four seamen to accompany him to the cabin; but they had not been there a minute when they suddenly ran out, some of them vomiting blood, and all of them complaining that their heads were swelled so that they were like to burst. Indeed, but for their speedy flight, they must have dropped dead in an atmosphere that was rendered virulently poisonous by the combined gas and smoke. A short spell of rest and fresh air recovered the poor men, and the crew then proceeded to victual the boats with such provisions as they could come at. The mainyards were braced aback, and the men entered the boats and rowed to a distance of about half a mile from the vessel, where they remained.
It was a fine night, very calm, and the ship, with her mainyards aback, lay steady. Hour after hour went by, but no flame showed itself, though there was a gradual thickening of the smoke from the deck, and the seamen could observe it hanging in a shadow over themastheads of the vessel and to leeward of her. Gazing at her as she stood like a marble carving upon the dark sea, it was difficult for the men to realize that her hold was a concealed furnace; that by taking off one of the hatches and looking down they could have beheld an incandescent interior, a red-hot surface like a lake of fire, with blue and green flames crawling over it, and masses of smoke, repelled or consumed by the intense heat of the central spaces. But for the shadow overhanging her glimmering heights, there were no signs that anything was amiss with the ship. Surveyed from the low level of the boats, she looked a majestic fabric out there, a brave sight in the faint, fine starlight. It was a long, weary, and bitter vigil for the poor fellows to keep. They would not leave the neighbourhood of the vessel while she remained afloat. They could not tell what might happen. If she burst into flames the light she made might bring them help. Or the fire might die out and so give them their home to return to. Whilst she was there, she was, in a manner, something to hold on to; for it was a fearful thing to look away from her into the mystery of the darkness around, and to think of being left to struggle amid that black and fathomless desert of water in open boats, which brought the mighty deep within reach of their hands.
Slowly the long hours went by, and then the dawn came, and the sun uprose. With the first of the grey light every eye was turned upon the ship. They could see the shroud of smoke that overhung her, yet not a spark of fire had been visible throughout the night, and this, now that the sunshine was on the sea, begot a hope in the men that, though to be sure the smoke crawled thickly from the ship, the fire was not so bad as they had feared, and that a long and resolute struggle mightenable them to conquer it. Accordingly the oars were thrown over, and the boats headed for the vessel. The boat occupied by the captain was the first to get alongside. He jumped on board, and was followed by others; but the heat of the decks striking through his boots made him put his hand to the planks. It was like touching hot iron. He walked to the cabin, but on feeling the door he withdrew his fingers with a groan. The whole fabric was full of fiery heat; whatever touched the flesh gave it pain; the very ropes which lay coiled over the belaying pins were too hot to handle; the pitch was bubbling in the seams; the air between the bulwarks resembled the atmosphere of a furnace; in the haze of the heat every object seemed to revolve like a corkscrew; and the men in the boats said that feeling her side, even to the level of the water-line, was as bad as putting the hand upon a boiler full of steam.
A cry from one of the seamen who had come over the side in bare feet, raised a kind of panic among those already aboard. “Over with you,” was the shout, “before she bursts into a blaze!” and in mad haste the poor fellows dropped over the bulwarks, seized their oars, and resumed the same distance from the ship that they had occupied all night.
Soon after this a small breeze of wind arose. It seemed to penetrate the vessel, for with the draught there soared up a thick body of smoke. Her passage to leeward was perceptible in the short, oil-smooth wake to windward of her; but the drift of the boats was the same as hers, so that the men had no need to use their oars to maintain their distance. There was now weight enough in the wind to blow the smoke clear of the decks before it rose a foot above the bulwarks, so that the picture of that full-rigged ship remained there in itscompleteness. As the time passed the men would see a fountain of sparks hove up occasionally in the smoke. It was dismal work sitting and watching that fine ship smouldering. All that the men possessed was left aboard of her; they had come away, most of them, in their shirts and trousers, many without shoes, and there in those three boats they sat looking at the burning vessel, silent in the main, often glancing around them on the look-out for a sail, and holding on to the thwarts or gunwales as the boats jerked and toppled sharply about on the bit of a sea that the wind had raised. A little before noon those who had their eyes on the ship perceived the mizzenmast to sway to and fro a moment; then suddenly it fell with a crash; a rush of smoke, like a monstrous balloon, hovered over the quarter-deck and concealed the ruin; but it soared into the air, and sailed away on the wind under a sudden furious discharge of sparks, which resembled the explosion of a mass of rockets, and when the vapour had settled down it was seen that the mizzenmast was over the side, the vessel a wreck aft, whilst forward the sails were dusky and red, as though iron-stained, with the blowing of the sooty coils and the fire of the glowing sparks.
Until the night came down no further alteration took place in the appearance of the vessel. During all those long hours the men sat crouched in their boats, watching their burning ship and searching the sea for the help that did not come. The second night rolled down dark, with windy clouds drifting across the skies. Here and there the phosphorus shone in the curl of a breaking surge. The half-clad men shivered under the fresh night wind; but the ship whilst she stayed there was a beacon. If they quitted her, what was there to do? She was a dreadful signal upon the dark sea, and might yet bringsuccour, and so they stayed. But the darkness had not gathered an hour when a tongue of red flame darted out of the deck abaft the mainmast. It threw out a great light, like the flash of a big gun, and the men could see one another’s faces in it. It sank and seemed to expire, and then there rushed up a body of crimson sparks which clearly defined the dense and swelling volume of smoke that blotted out the heavens in the south-east; but speedily the flame swept aloft again like a serpent, wreathing itself around the mainmast; then forward and apparently out of the fore hatch sprang up another pillar of fire, and presently there were tongues and lances of flame crawling and hissing all over the doomed vessel, gliding in serpentine convolutions along her bulwarks, over her stern, around her bows, limning the configuration of her hull with burning pencils, filling whole leagues of the darkness with light. The stays, the shrouds, all the gear connected with the bowsprit and jibbooms, caught fire; the yards were kindled; the whole outline of the vessel was scored in fire upon the night; every detail of the standing masts and yards and sails, the crosstrees, outriggers, and tops—all the furniture of the ship’s decks, the boat-davits, the catheads, the martingale, the spritsail yard, were expressed in flame. It was like the picture of a ship drawn in fire upon a black curtain. Not a sound came from the men in the boats. They watched breathless, full of amazement, thoughts of their serious position being overwhelmed by the dreadful but magnificent sight of that noble ship. When suddenly the burning vessel opened, a flame such as might go up from Vesuvius soared into the air, making a roaring noise upon the wind; there was a sound of the falling of the burning masts and yards; and then, in a breath, the whole terrific picture vanished; itdisappeared as you might blow out a candle; the boom of an explosion came dully up against the wind, and there was nothing but the stars and the black sea and a dense shadow in the south-east where the smoke from the foundered ship was heavily sailing away.
If ever loneliness was felt at sea it was felt by those men when that great light went out, and left them in darkness and dread and uncertainty. But enough if I say that after tossing about for two days and nights, they sighted a sail to the westward, which they chased until they were sufficiently near for her people to see them. She proved to be the London barqueParacca, whose captain gladly received the poor fellows and treated them with the utmost humanity.