Callao with a cargo of coal, but a strong north-westerly gale had driven
her much further to the southward than the captain had any desire to
find himself. The gale left them on a Wednesday morning, rolling their
yardarms into it on a real Cape Horn swell. What is there to which to
liken these prodigious heavings? The actual altitude of those liquid
hills may seem small in comparison with the appearance they present when
viewed from their hollows; but whatever may be their height, to lie
dipping and wallowing among them in a vessel of the tonnage of that
brig is to undergo an experience hardly less formidable than what was
devised by the Mohocks, when they shut up old women in empty casks, and
sent them spinning down Ludgate Hill. What straining and groaning and
complaining of the tortured fabric, if it be of timber! Every beam,
carling, tree-nail, transom, knee, stanchion, and futtock lifts up its
dismal creaking and wailing voice as the bewildered craft, with her
topsails rattling in the motionless atmosphere, is swung like a pendulum
up the shoulder of the swelling mass of green water, leaning down as she
goes until she is fairly on her beam-ends, with pots and pannikins,
sea-boots and sea-chests, dishes, books, furniture, and whatever else
may be inside of her, fetching away with dreadful noise to leeward, amid
a volley of sea-blessings from skipper, cook, and steward, and muffled
shouts from the watch below in the forecastle.
Luckily Cape Horn calms do not last very long; indeed, there is nothing
but “weather” down in those regions, and a calm is only a short pause
among the gales and squalls whilst they are considering whose turn it is
next. Within an hour from the time of the first gale failing them,
another gale from a little to the north-of-west was bowing down the
bothered and beaten brig, which, under lower topsails and fore-topmast
staysail, manfully struggled to look up to it with her head in the
direction of Cape Horn and her wake streaming away over her weather
quarter. It was one of those pictures of storm which are rarely seen in
like perfection out of the parallels that divide Terra del Fuego from
the South Shetlands--an ocean of mountainous seas, raising each of them
a note of thunder as their arching summits crashed from a dark,
oil-smooth ridge of green water into huge avalanches of snow: a sky of
gloomy slate, along which masses of scud--torn, ragged, and
tendril-shaped--were flying with incredible velocity. The horizon was
broken with the incessant rising and falling of the pyramidal billows,
dark as the night, against a ring of sooty clouds, from which, ever and
anon, one would break away, like a winged messenger of evil, whitening
and veiling the air with a kind of boiling appearance as it swept its
furious and blinding discharge of snow and hail along. No wonder that in
olden times the man who had passed these tempestuous and inclement seas
should have considered himself an object of importance. Stand, in fancy,
upon the deck of that labouring brig, and survey one of the countless
aspects of marine life. The seas are breaking heavily over the port bow
of the vessel, deluging her forward and racing aft in a foaming torrent
as she sinks her stern to mount the huge surge that almost lays her
yardarms level. The bitter, raw, flaying cold of the wind there is
nothing in language to express. The flying spray smites the exposed face
like a volley of sail needles. Now and again a squall of snow and hail
comes along with so much fury in it that it takes the breath away from
the strongest of the seamen cowering with their backs to it. The rigging
crackles to every strain put upon it like burning wood. The snow upon
the yards makes them glimmer like lines of pallid light as they
furiously sway against the dismal ground of the dark and rushing sky.
There are spears and arrow-heads of ice upon the bulwark rail, upon the
catheads, upon the scuttle-butts lashed amidships; and though the seas
repeatedly break over them they are always left standing. The helmsman,
with his hard fists wrapped up in mits, rigged out in oilskins from his
head to his huge, well-greased sea-boots, and with the after-thatch of
his sou’-wester blown up by the gale, and standing out from his head
like the tail of a gull, gets the full of it. Nothing of the man is
visible but a fragment of mahogany face showing between the flannel
ear-covers of his head-gear, and a pair of watering eyes, which he now
and again wipes upon his mit when a pause in the yaws and come-to’s give
him a chance to raise one of his hands from the spokes.
How would some of our summer-water mariners appear beside that
salt-water sailor were they to have stood their trick at the helm on
such an occasion as this; gazing to windward as yonder skipper is doing,
holding on like grim death to a backstay, with the salt drying in
crystals in his eyes; or making one of that oil-skinned group there to
leeward of the galley, stamping their boots upon the deck to put life
into their frozen toes, ducking as a shriek in the wind warns them of
the passage of a green sheet of water over their heads, biting doggedly
upon the tobacco in their cheeks, and growling as they reflect that
another three hours must elapse before they are privileged to quit the
deck and take such warmth and comfort as they may find in the
forecastle, whose darkness is scarcely revealed by the sputtering
slush-lamp, and whose beams and stanchions are decorated with draining
clothes?
It was already blowing two or three ordinary gales in one, and the lower
topsails were more than the brig could safely stagger under, though the
captain held on, since by ratching to the northward he might hope to get
clear of the ice, of which, on the previous night and that morning, some
monstrous specimens had hove in view. Indeed, at one bell in the
afternoon watch, during a flaw in a heavy squall of snow that was
blowing in horizontal lines along the sea, they caught sight on the lee
bow of the greenish marble-like glimmer of a berg that looked to be a
mile long and as tall as St. Paul’s Cathedral. It vanished, but
reappeared broad on the lee-beam when the squall passed, and stood out
in its complete shape against the smoke-coloured gloom of the sky over
the horizon, where, though it was four or five miles off, the men on the
brig’s deck could see the white, steam-like haze of the spray that
flashed in clouds from its base, and fled past it in eddying volumes,
and almost imagine that they heard the thunder of the smiting surges
reverberating in the hollows and caverns of the mighty frozen mass. But
when it had drawn on the lee-quarter another squall blew up and
smothered it, and after that it disappeared entirely.
It was at this time that the gale increased in fury, and the sea grew
terrible. The weather was enough to blow the masts out of the vessel,
and all hands were turned up to stow both topsails and bring the brig to
the wind under a small storm staysail. How is the aspect of that Cape
Horn ocean to be described?--the rage of its headlong acclivities; the
long sweep of olive-green heights, piebald with hissing and seething
tracks of foam, blown along their gleaming sides; the hard iron-grey of
the heavens, out of which the storm of wind was rushing, bearing upon
its wings masses of vapour, which it tore to pieces in its fury; and the
cold--the piercing, poignant cold--of the gale, with its lashing burden
of sleet and spray and hail?
The men had come off the yards after having struggled, each watch of
them, for hard upon three-quarters of an hour with the frozen topsails,
when the brig shipped a sea just abaft the weather fore rigging. It was
a whole mountain of green water, and it fell in a dead weight of scores
of tons upon the deck, beating for awhile the whole life out of the
devoted vessel, and making her pause, trembling and stunned, in the
roaring hollow in which it had found her, whilst above the thunder of
the dreadful stroke could be heard the crash of breaking wood, of
splintered glass, and the rending noise of deck furniture torn from its
strong fastenings. A heavy upward send drove the water off the decks,
and all hands were found to be alive, holding on like grim death to
whatever was next them; and then it was seen that a long range of the
weather-bulwarks had been torn down flush with the deck, the cabin
skylight broken into shivers, the long boat amidships stove, and nothing
left of the port-quarter boat but the frame of its keel and stem,
dangling at the davits. The loss of the two boats was a bad job, but
still worse was the terrible straining the deeply freighted vessel had
undergone, and the destruction of the skylight that left the cabin open
for the floods of water that rolled along the deck. The benumbed and
half-frozen crew turned to to secure what remained of the skylight and
to cover it with tarpaulins; but whilst they were in the midst of this
work the brig gave a heavy lurch, which made the men believe it was all
over with her; and before a single cry could have been raised, a portion
of the weather fore rigging carried away, and in a trice the
fore-topmast broke off at the cap, and fell over the side--a horrible
muddle--with all its raffle of sail, yards, and gear.
The early Antarctic night was now drawing down over the furious sea, and
it was already so dark that the men could hardly discern one another’s
faces. Some active fellows sprang forward at the risk of their lives to
cut away the rigging, and release the wreck alongside before the yards
upon it should pierce the brig’s bottom; and this being done, the helm
was put hard up, with the idea of wearing ship, in order to secure the
foremast. But the storm-fiend had marked this unhappy brig, and the
successive blows came thick and fast. Scarcely was the wrecked spar sent
adrift and the helm shifted, when all the rest of the port fore rigging
carried away, and the foremast fell down, carrying with it the bowsprit,
main topmast, and a portion of the port main rigging.
By this time it was as dark as the bottom of a well; the brig wallowed
before the seas with a mass of wreckage over her side, pitching
miserably in the fearful hollows, and huge surges curling their white
heights around her. A man had need to be a seaman indeed, and to have a
seaman’s heart in him too, to act at all in such a moment as this. The
full extent of the mischief could not be guessed. Nothing was certain
but that the brig was dispossessed of all but her mainmast, and that
there were some heavy spars over the side, pounding at her like
battering-rams with every hurl of the raging seas. The first business
would be to get clear of this mischief, and the men went to work with
their knives, feeling for the lanyards and hacking and cutting with a
will. Darkness gives a peculiar horror to disasters of this kind at sea.
In the daylight you can see what has happened; you can use your eyes as
well as your hands and make despatch, and the worst is evident. But the
darkness leaves everything to be guessed at. You shout for help for some
job too heavy for you, and it does not come. The outlines of the sea
grow colossal by the illusion of the faint light thrown out from their
breaking crests; you cannot perceive the flying water so as to duck away
from it, and in a breath you may find yourself overboard. It is all
distraction and uproar, loud and fearful shouting, and blind groping.
When at last the wreck was cleared, the vessel seemed little better than
a sheer hulk, nothing standing but her mainmast, upon which the
mainyard swung helplessly. That she should have lived through that long
and fearful Antarctic night, the seas combing over her, icebergs in her
vicinity, and draining in water with every roll, must count among the
miracles of the deep. Her people had discovered that the mainmast,
having little to support it, had worked loose, breaking away the
mast-combings, and starting the planking all around it; so that through
this large aperture the water poured into the hold in torrents. The port
pump had been disabled by the fall of the masts, and the only other pump
was manned and worked with such energy as dying men will put into their
arms; but in less than an hour the coal choked it, and now nothing
remained but to lighten the vessel by throwing the cargo overboard and
baling with buckets. All through those black and howling hours, amid
freezing falls of water, and in the heart of the raging Cape Horn storm,
this severe labour was pursued, so that when the bleak and melancholy
dawn broke upon the desolate ocean it found the brig still afloat, and
the brave hearts in her grimly fighting death, though faint, famished,
and frozen. Help came shortly before noon. A sail was made out heading
dead for the wreck, and by the time she was abreast, the wind and sea
had so far moderated as to enable her to bring all the men safely off.
It was not a moment too soon, for twenty minutes after the crew had been
transferred to the ship the brig was observed to give a heavy lurch, and
so lie on her beam-ends, never righting, but slowly sinking in that
position--so slowly that after her hull had vanished her mainmast
remained forking out like the lifted arm of a drowning man.
When this story was told me I could not help thinking of what the Horn
route was in Dana’s time, and the very small chance that brig’s crew
would have had for their lives had her name been the _Pilgrim_, and had
she been beating to the westward forty years ago. Certain it is, that
however ships may come and go, and change the nature of their material
and the form of their fabrics, the weather in the Pacific down there is
very much what it was in Anson’s time, and as it has been, in all
probability, since the creation of the world. Other climates may vary in
the lapse of ages, and south-easters may in places be found to work
themselves into north-westers. But the Horn remains always the same
harsh, tempestuous, frozen headland, echoing at this hour the hurricane
notes which reverberated over it centuries ago, and grimly overlooking
the stormiest space of waters in the world. Who, then, does not hope
that the final construction of the Panama Canal may abridge the bleak
and icebound horrors of that point of continent which looks on the chart
to stretch its leagues and leagues of tongue into the very heart of the
southern frozen waters? To be sure, the passage of the famous cape has
long since ceased to be a wonder; but none the less is it full of perils
to vessels which, like the brig I have written about, are at the mercy
of the monstrous seas and furious gales of that formidable tract of
Pacific waters.
_A STRANGE CHASE._
One is sorry to hear of the growth of the very un-English habit of
sheering off and scuttling away after a collision. The first duty of a
shipmaster who plumps into a vessel or is run into is to stand by, if
the condition of his ship will permit him, and render all the assistance
in his power. There is nothing more despicable and cowardly than running
away after a disaster of this kind. We know what came of such conduct in
the case of the _Northfleet_; and week after week one reads in the
shipping papers how such and such a vessel was run into, and how the
other ship made off, and how so many people were drowned in consequence.
Darkness, that is fruitful of collisions, is also, unhappily, favourable
to these mean and unmanly escapes. At night it mostly happens that the
utmost you can tell of the vessel that comes grinding into your ship is
that she is big or little, a steamer or a sailing-vessel, and rigged in
such and such a fashion. The letters on her nameboard cannot be
deciphered; she will not answer your hail; and her reply to the
melancholy shout of “For God’s sake don’t leave us, we believe we are
sinking,” is to shift her helm and vanish in the gloom. The obligation
to record such casualties in the log-book or to depone to them before
receivers of wrecks does not, it is to be feared, always imply the sort
of accuracy that would be useful to sufferers. From time to time a buoy
is sunk, a lightship run into, and the Trinity Corporation offer a
handsome sum of money for information, but without avail. The absence of
all reference by shipmates to such occurrences must make one hope that
they are mainly the work of foreigners. But whatever the flag under
which a captain sails, his sneaking away from a disaster in which he has
had a hand expresses a species of cowardice that presses heavily upon
the humbler order of shipowners. A little coaster is run into by a fine
large vessel, which stops a minute or two and then proceeds. The master
of the coaster may be her owner, and all that he has in the world is in
his little ship. She is not sunk, but her masts are over the side, and
she looks as if she had been for some hours under the guns of a fort.
Whether or not the master be to blame for the collision, he is pretty
sure to consider that the fault was not his; and his hardship is, that
whilst he stands a chance of being ruined, he is unable to discover the
name of the ship that ran into him, so as to be able to bring her owners
into a court of justice, and take his risk as a litigant.
I was amused and interested some time since by hearing the story of the
resolute behaviour of Mr. John Whitear, master of the schooner _Jehu_, a
vessel of about 150 tons. Giving chase, if you can, is one way, at
least, of clearing up the mystery of the paternity of an offending ship
that sneaks off in the darkness in the hope of saving her owner’s
pocket. Any way, Mr. John Whitear’s conduct illustrates a spirit
pleasant to come across in the homely prosaics of the marine life of
to-day. Eighty and a hundred years ago it was men of the stamp of Mr.
Whitear who commanded British privateers; otherwise how should the
maritime memorials of that kind of vessel be so full as they are of the
unflinching obstinacy and the grim courage which followed the fleeing
enemy over leagues and leagues of ocean, through storms and through
calms, finally overhauling and boarding the breathless chase in
latitudes so remote from the point of departure that the span between
the two places might even now be reckoned a long voyage?
Not very many days ago, then, the _Jehu_, with 230 tons of coal aboard,
was quietly jogging along on her way to her port of destination. The
afternoon had been fine, and the night came down very clear and bright,
with starlight. The water was smooth, though a merry wind was blowing,
and the little vessel under easy canvas lay softly leaning in the gloom,
with the white water rippling and crisping past her sides in a hollow,
brass-like tinkling. Starlight gives beauty even to a coalman; and I
have known stump topgallant-masts and sails yawning upon sheets hard
upon a fathom from the points in the yardarms through which they lead,
make as dream-like and dainty a picture in the tender sobering shadows
of the night as the tall and tapering rig of the handsomest yacht now
afloat.
At all events, the _Jehu_ was Mr. John Whitear’s sea-home, and as he
paced the weather side of the deck, sometimes squinting into the
windward darkness where the loom of the land hung low upon the vague
greyish softness of the water that way, or sometimes aloft where the
stars, like so many benign and encouraging eyes, were tipping him
cheerful winks through the black squares in the shrouds and over the
main gaff and among the dim tracery of the standing and running rigging,
whose heights seemed to bring near the sweeping enfoldment of the
glittering heavens, as though the vast star-laden shadow were revolving
and was weaving its circling burden of gloom closer and closer yet
round the lonely schooner journeying slowly along with a bell-like
resonance of broken water around her, he was no doubt as well satisfied
with his little hooker as the captain of an ocean steamer could be with
his stately ship.
His pipe being smoked out, the weather looking as steady as a church,
and all being well in every possible sense of that marine expression,
Mr. John Whitear thought that no harm could come of his going below for
a spell to take some rest. Accordingly, after exchanging a few words
with his mate, and taking another good look to windward and then aloft,
he walked to the companion and disappeared down the steps. But instead
of going to bed like a landsman, he kept on his boots and his coat,
merely removing his cap as a preliminary to turning in, and stretching
himself upon a locker, within easy hearing of the first shout that
should come down through the companion, he closed his eyes, and was
presently contributing to the other creaking sounds raised in the plain
and quaint little cabin by the occasional movements of the _Jehu_.
How it came about he could not say, not having been on deck at the time;
but whilst he lay dreaming such peaceful dreams as should visit a master
mariner whose whole professional life is dedicated to the careful
attention of the three L’s, he was suddenly aroused, and in some measure
startled, by a loud and fearful cry in the companion of “Below, there!
here’s a barque running into us.”
Fortunately, Mr. Whitear had no occasion to stay to dress himself; in a
breath he was up the ladder and on deck. The first thing he saw was a
large barque on the port bow, apparently paying off, having just gone
about. Fresh as he was from a deep sleep, Mr. Whitear had all his wits
about him in a moment; and he immediately perceived that, let him do
what he liked and shout as he would, a collision was unavoidable. The
barque loomed up large and massive in the darkness. Her lights were as
plainly to be seen as the stars, whilst the _Jehu’s_ burned as brightly.
The wind had freshened somewhat, and both vessels were heeling under it.
All was silent aboard the barque--not the least sound could be heard;
and in that thrilling and breathless moment all other noises took a
startling distinctness--the washing of water, the creaking of spars, the
squeak up in the darkness of a sheave upon a rusty pin. There is no
sensation comparable to what is felt in the few minutes which elapse
between the approach and shock of two meeting vessels. A railway
collision gives you no time. If by chance you look out of the carriage
window and see what is going to happen, before you can sing out the
thing has come and is over. But a collision at sea furnishes you with
leisure to think, to anticipate, and to make an agony of the disaster
before it actually befalls you. Whichever way the helm of the _Jehu_ had
been jammed would have been all the same; the barque was bound to come,
and in a few moments there she was, with her bows towering like a cliff
over the low bulwarks of the well-freighted _Jehu_, her jibboom and
bowsprit arching across the little schooner’s deck like a great spear in
the hand of a giant.
The _Jehu_ heeled over under the blow until the rail of her starboard
bulwarks was flush with the water. The men came skurrying, half-naked,
out of the forecastle, thinking she was sinking, and rushed aft to be
out of the way of whatever might tumble down from aloft. You heard the
grinding noise of crushed wood; the thud of falling gear, the tearing of
canvas. The weight of the barque, that was a big vessel in ballast,
swept the stern of the little _Jehu_ to windward, rounding her in such a
manner as to free them both. But by this time there was plenty of noise
and activity to be noted aboard the barque. Orders were rattled out in
plain English, and you could hear the scampering of feet and the songs
of the seamen as they ran to and fro and pulled and hauled. She heeled
over like a great shadow with her mainyards square and her fore-sheets
flattened in. It was impossible to know what mischief she had done; and,
running to the side, Mr. Whitear shouted to her at the top of his voice
to stand by them, as he feared the schooner was sinking.
No answer was returned.
“They’re leaving us!” cried the mate. “Look! they’re trimming sail;
they’re swinging the mainyards!”
Again Mr. Whitear bawled to them not to abandon the schooner; but no
answer was vouchsafed, and in a few moments it was not only seen that
she was leaving them, but that she meant to get away as fast as she
could, for they loosed their fore topgallant-sail and main-royal, and
sheeted the canvas home with all expedition.