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 smack _Apostle_, 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. The _Apostle_, then, was a smack, belonging to
Hull. Will Stevenson was her master, and John Butler her mate. 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 of her 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, the _Apostle_ being 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 the _Apostle_ was dragging 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. The _Apostle’s_ trawl 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 a liberality 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. The _Apostle’s_ men 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 the men
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 the _Apostle_, 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 the _Esther_. 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 the _Esther_ with
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 wrapped in rugs and
laid in a bunk. But he was little more than a corpse when rescued, and
the skipper of the _Esther_, 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 the _Esther_ had sent three of his men aboard
the _Apostle_, 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, granting
many 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.
_FIRE AT SEA._
An impressive 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 the _R. B. Fuller_ a 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. What
witchery 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 Captain Peabody 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 pestilential exhalation 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.