and often a very great deal, to sea-sickness; otherwise how are we to
account for people suffering from nausea actually before they step on
board the vessel that is to carry them? If a sea-sick man could be sent
to sleep his sufferings would cease; yet the vessel goes on rolling, and
if it is this movement, affecting the stomach, that causes nausea, I
cannot quite see why the stomach should not be as sympathetic in sleep
as in waking. Any way, I believe that a person could be made to forget
to be sea-sick by having his imagination intensely occupied or his fears
excited. Let a vessel full of sea-sick people drive ashore, or catch
fire, or be in collision; let the captain bawl out, “We are all lost;”
it would be interesting to conjecture how much sickness would remain
aboard that ship. A good prescription might be a profoundly exciting
novel: some hideous mystery so distractingly complicate as to make one
sink all thoughts of waves and stewards in the eagerness to discover
whether the figure Sir Jasper sees was really a ghost or his first wife,
and whether it was her ladyship or the groom she ran away with who shot
Signor Squallini in the throat and did the fine arts a real service. But
it is better to be sea-sick than in danger; and, if the novelists can do
nothing for us, I am afraid there is no alternative but to go on feeing
the stewards and building swift vessels.
_A LOG EXTRACT._
The following entry was made in the official log-book of a ship named
the _Oxford_:--“Fifth November, 1882, Sunday, 4.0 p.m., lat. 35° 39´ S.,
long. 18° 53´ E., W. Waters, A.B., while furling the mizzen-topsail fell
from the yard into the sea, striking the half round of the poop in his
fall. A lifebuoy was promptly thrown him, the ship brought to the
wind--it blowing a fresh gale from the S.W., with thick weather and a
heavy sea at the time. The port lifeboat was at once lowered, and
proceeded under the charge of Mr. A. Bowling, second mate, to pick up
the man. Owing, however, to the shock sustained by him in striking the
ship, and his being encumbered with oilskins, etc., he sank before the
boat could reach him. After an unsuccessful search, the boat returned to
the ship and was with difficulty hoisted up, owing to the heavy sea
which half filled her. Everything was done that could be done to save
the poor fellow. (Signed) J. BRADDICK, Master.”
Now, here is the whole story, as who would not suppose? The sailor
dropped overboard, a boat unsuccessfully searched for him, and then the
ship braced her mainyard round and sailed away. But extracts from
log-books, I have taken notice, are like the little box which the
fisherman in the “Arabian Nights” found upon the sea-shore; when it was
opened a wonderful creature shaped itself out, and its figure filled the
sky. I particularly realized this when Mr. Bowling gave me a sketch of
the yarn of which Captain Braddick’s log is the briefest hint. Why, what
a world of adventure, of heroism, of peril grows up out of these marine
entries! Is it four lines about a ship rescuing a crew from a sinking
vessel; or about a captain coming across a smack’s boat in the middle of
the North Sea, with nothing in her but a little crouching, starving boy;
or about a brig found drifting helplessly, with her crew, dead of frost,
lying upon her deck? Assuredly in those four lines there is the making
of a thrilling volume to any man who shall faithfully put his hand to
the work and, exaggerating nothing, relate merely the adventure as it
befell, and how it came about and ended, and what the actors in it said,
and did, and thought. Here, in very brief form, is Mr. Bowling’s own
yarn, told with my pen, of an incident as common pretty nearly in its
way at sea as the sight of froth blowing into a hollow, or of the curve
of the bow-wave flashing green and glass-smooth from the shearing
cutwater.
“We left Calcutta on Sept. 4, 1882, with a full cargo, bound for the
port of London. All went well--if by well you’ll understand nothing
extraordinary outside spells of bothersome head winds, dead calms, and
now and again a twister over the quarter to give us legs--until came
Sunday, Nov. 5, on which date you’ll see by the extract from the
log-book where we were; the glass stood low, and in the morning there
was a kind of wild wet light in the sun when he sprang up from behind
the dull-coloured sea, and the lustre that came along with him seemed to
roll on the top of the swell as if it was burning oil lying there
instead of being the up and down flashing of fair weather, when the
light sounds the very bottom of the ocean with its silver lead-line, as
you may see for yourselves if you’ll watch the break of day under a pure
sky and over clean blue water. We were under topgallant-sails, on the
starboard tack, the wind about west, with weight enough in it to swear
by, and a slow gathering of haze all along the horizon over the port
quarter--south-west the bearings would be about--and a thick,
deep-breathing swell coming out of it, tumbled by the wind into a bit of
a sea that washed with a stormy noise along the bends, and made the ship
as uncomfortable as an old cab on a road full of stones.
“I had charge of the deck, and not liking the look of the weather, I
went below to tell the captain about it. He had been up pretty near all
the night that was gone, and was in his cabin taking some rest. But
there’s very little rest for shipmasters, who need to have as many eyes
as you find in a peacock’s tail, that they might close two or three of
them at a time, if ever they’re to get the amount of sleep that all
other kinds of people, barring nautical men, find needful to keep
themselves alive on. Well, sir, I called the captain and told him that
the weather looked threatening, and straightway he came on deck and took
a squint around. The wind was freshening slowly and surely, and the
topsails and topgallant-sails, out of whose cloths the wet of last
night’s squalls of rain were not yet dried, were stretching as if they
would burst under it; and the water to leeward washed like boiling milk
all along the scuppers as the ship was rushed by the pressure, taking
the seas with a floating jump, and making them roar as she split them
with her sharp stem and sent them seething in white smothers on either
hand. There were clouds crawling up out of the thickness in the west and
south, and passing like smoke over the mastheads, and there was a look
of racing about the whole ocean with the sailing of those bits of
vapour, and the pelting of the ship, and the wild hurrying rolling of
the seas, along which there were sea-birds screeching as they skimmed in
their low flight through the driving spray in pursuit of us.
“Well, sir, the fore topgallant-sail was furled and the watch lay aft to
roll up the mainsail; but not for long did we hold on with the main
topgallant-sail; that was clewed up soon, and the wind freshened as sail
was diminished; so that, although half stripped of canvas, the ship was
heeling to it as before, whilst there was the hard look of a gale of
wind in the sky that you saw grey between the scud; and the thickness
was blowing up nearer and nearer, making a mere biscuit’s-throw of the
horizon, so that the seas looked lumping things as they rolled, all of a
sudden like, out of the haze, and were under the ship and standing up on
either hand of her almost as fast as they seemed to be formed. We were
now under topsails and foresail only--of the square canvas--when on a
sudden there comes a bit of a lull, and a sort of silence aloft that
sounded strange after the roaring, and a great noise of washing waters
all around; and then plump sweeps up the wind in a wild out-fly out of
the south-west, driving the ship forwards until the foam of the cutwater
looked to be smothering her head. All hands were called to shorten sail,
the three upper topsail halliards were let go, the starboard braces
rounded in, and the helm shifted to bring the ship to her course. Four
able seamen and four boys went aloft to furl the upper mizzen-topsail.
You know the old story: the light hands well out, the older hands in the
slings and quarters, and the sail swelling up like a sheet of iron to
the wind that blew fair into it in a storm betwixt the two yards. I had
my eye on those men I am speaking of, when a blast like a squall swept
the canvas out of their fists, and in a breath one of them fell with a
twirl and a toss of his clenched hands off the yard, striking the
half-round of the poop a blow that came along with the yell of the wind
in a frightful thud; and with that, rebounding as a ball might, over he
goes into the yeast and froth alongside. It is a horrible thing to
happen; it will stop the breathing of the strongest for a minute. The
fellows on the yard roared out, ‘Man overboard!’ I sprang aft, and had a
life-buoy in my hand in an instant, which I threw fair, as I prayed and
believed, to the yellow patch of sou’wester that I saw dark on the foam
of the side of a sea; but the wind blew the light thing, like a feather,
to leeward of him. But he was swimming--there was life in him, though,
man, you should have heard the thump of his fall, and then thought of
him struggling there with his great sea-boots full of water, and his
heavy oilskins dragging him down, and a rushing of froth over his head
every time that a sea swept him up into the snow of its breaking crest.
Well, sir, we went to work smartly; the hands came tumbling down from
aloft, and the ship was brought to with her main-topsail aback, whilst
half a dozen of us were obeying with mad haste the order to clear away
the quarter-boat ready for lowering.
“Meanwhile a hand remained in the mizzen-topsail yard to keep the poor
fellow in sight, and he was shouting that the man was swimming, and
swimming strong; that he didn’t seem to see the life-buoy, but that he
was struggling bravely; and I, seeing this too, and driven half mad by
the pitiful sight of that sailor and shipmate fighting the whole ocean,
as I may put it, and battling it with an English seaman’s courage, sang
out, ‘Who’s going to volunteer for the boat?’ There was no hanging back;
it was just a leap to see who should be first. As fast as they could
tumble in, there they were, six of them, the pick of the crew--merchant
seamen, sir, whom we’re being taught to despise; there they were, I say,
with the others handling the falls, and every one looking as if the
saving of the life of the man astern was his business and nobody’s else;
for he was a shipmate, and that means a brother at sea, sir, when the
forecastle holds real sailors.
“It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and the mist was driving between
the masts. I was in charge of the boat, but try my dead best I could not
help her being badly stove before we got away, and the water came in
fast as we headed for the spot where the man was last seen. You must go
through it to realize the difference between the deck of a ship pitching
and rolling, no matter how heavily, and the feel of an open boat
released from her side in the same sea. The solid deck you’re fresh from
makes the contrast fearfully sharp, and I can well believe what I
remember reading in your yarn of the wreck of the _Indian Chief_, that
the survivors of her crew when in the lifeboat owned to being more
frightened by the fearful tossing and jumping of the buoyant craft than
they were when in their foretop, with the hull of the ship going to
pieces under them. We could only pull four oars, for two men had all
their work in baling the boat, one with a sou’wester and the other with
a sea-boot, those being our balers. My duty lay at the helm, in watching
for the man and looking out for the seas. Bitterly cold it was, the sun
going down, the haze thick around, and the ship a mere heaving darkness
upon it when we had measured but a few lengths from her. I looked
narrowly about me, but could see nothing of the man. Sometimes a lump of
green water tumbling over the foam would show like his head, and my
heart would leap: but the next moment the clear sea would roll away from
the blowing froth and explain what the deception was. We pulled to the
buoy, but it was empty.
“Then one of the men said, ‘Supposing even Bill had not been hurt by the
fall, surely he couldn’t live in such a sea as this.’ And another said,
‘Think of his wraps and oilskins, sir. The best swimmer in the world
couldn’t hold up all these minutes under such drags.’ But they spoke not
as if they wished to give up, but as if preparing themselves for the
disappointment. Had he hurt himself more than we could know? Was he
broken and dying when he touched the water, and were his struggles there
the despairing efforts of a broken and dying man? We strained our eyes,
but could see nothing save the boiling heads of the seas which came
roaring down upon us and threatened with every desperate swing to fill
the boat. Still we kept up heart. ‘Another pull, boys! impossible to go
back without him!’ I would cry, whilst the two fellows in the bottom
were chucking the water out over the side, and the thickness stood like
a wall around.
“Well, for three-quarters of an hour did we hang about, pulling in all
directions, and thinking only of finding and saving him; and then we
gave up and looked round for the ship. I could not see her. I sung out
to the men, ‘Do you see the ship?’ and they turned their heads upon
their shoulders to look; and the chap in the bow cries out, when we were
standing nearly end on up the side of a sea, ‘There she is, I think.’
“Well, to be sure, I could see her, but it might as well have been the
thickening of the mist that way as the ship, for she made a shadow
scarcely noticeable, and I looked with dismay at the distance that lay
before us to row over, and at the water that was coming into the boat as
fast as the two men could bale it out, and at the terrible sea around
us. We had got into such a situation that the seas ran right abeam, and
every send drove us to leeward, and sometimes the mist swept down so
thick that there was never a man of us all who could see the ship,
though, thanks be to Heaven, it did not come to our losing sight of her
for good. It was a bad job for us that the heaving and straining of the
boat caused her to leak worse and worse. But for her leaking I could
have put the two men who were baling her to the oars, and they would
have been just the sort of help we wanted; instead of which they were
scarcely able to prevent the boat from filling. It would, however, have
been destruction to us to have set more men than those two at the job
they were on. Every moment was precious; the afternoon was fast waning;
in a short while the night would be upon us, and I knew quite surely
that if it came before we fetched the ship we were doomed men. Oh, sir,
it was a fierce bit of labour. In the midst of our struggles a squall of
sleet blew down and hid the whole surface of the ocean to within our own
length of us; but it cleared off, and when it was gone the mist thinned
somewhat, and gave us a better view of the ship, at whose peak we could
see a colour streaming as a signal of recall. Never was any man of us
nearer to death in his life than he was during the time we occupied in
reaching the vessel. That we did reach her you may reckon, or I should
not be here to tell you this story. But by the hour we had pulled across
her head and dropped along the port side of her, the water in the boat
was up to the thwarts, we showed scarce more than our gunwale, it was
almost dark, the sea had increased in volume, and the wind was blowing
half a hurricane. We were fairly exhausted when we gained the deck, but
humbly grateful as we were for the preservation of our lives, ne’er a
one of us could cast a look over the quarter in the place where our
shipmate had gone down, and where the darkness of the evening now lay,
with the white foam showing with startling clearness upon the sides of
those black rushing hills, without feeling that our thankfulness would
have been deeper had we been allowed to rescue the man whom we had been
very near to losing our lives to save.”
_IN AN OPEN BOAT._
Loneliness has many forms. It is Selkirk, imprisoned in an island, with
nothing but the wash of the surf to break the shocking stillness; it is
the mountain-climber missing his way, and passing the long night amid
the tremendous silence of towering hills and black valleys; or it is the
loneliness described by Byron, that of a man solitary in crowds. But
what sense of solitude can equal that felt by shipwrecked men in a small
open boat, surrounded by a universe of waters, with no other chance for
their lives than such as a passing ship may bring? It is not the first
hour, nor yet the first day; the agony of such a trial lies in the slow
maddening of the mind by fruitless expectation; the deception of the
white shoulders of clouds, which look like ships as they seem to linger
a moment upon the horizon before sailing above it; the straining of the
aching sight against the pitiless, vacant sea-line; the sense that death
is close at hand, though a hundred deaths may have been suffered before
the skeleton’s clutch is upon the sufferers.
No kind of human anguish is more terrible, and no stories catch a
tighter hold of the imagination than those which relate it. Generations
have shuddered, and generations will yet shudder over the grand and
soul-moving description in “Don Juan.” The raft of the _Medusa_ is an
immortal horror. The narratives which are at once the most fascinating
and depressing in the marine records are always those which concern the
sufferings of human beings adrift in an open boat in the midst of a
great ocean. The deep is unchanging in the misery it works. Our ships
are of iron; they are propelled through the calm sea by an irresistible
power faster than a gale of wind would drive them; they are of
proportions so colossal that many of them could sling the “tall
schippes” of our forefathers over their sides, and stow them on skids as
they stow their boats; and yet just the same sort of sufferings are
endured now by mariners as were experienced by them in the days when a
vessel of thirty tons was reckoned big enough not only to seek the
North-West Passage but to hunt the unnavigated oceans after continents.
I heard once a story that seemed fitter for the lips of an ancient
mariner, like Coleridge’s, than the mouth of a seaman who lives in an
age in which the Atlantic is crossed in eight days, and in which the
Cape of Good Hope has been pretty nearly extinguished by a narrow
water-way across a hundred miles of sand. The hearing it took me back in
imagination to the days of the ship _Thomas_ of Liverpool, the _Lady
Hobart_ packet, the Yankee ship _Peggy_, the French East India Company’s
_Prince_, and I know not how many more old craft which ages since became
phantom vessels, to be wrecked again and again upon the dark and
noiseless oceans of tradition.
“My name,” began my informant, “is William Pearce. I have used the sea
for above eight and twenty year, have sailed in all kinds of ships in
all sorts of capacities--boy, ordinary seamen, sailmaker, bo’sun’s mate;
crossed the Atlantic seventeen times, and been round the world eight;
been shipwrecked thrice; likewise overboard during seven hours of
darkness, and picked up at daybreak with my head in a lifebuoy; know
pretty nigh the best and the worst of the weather that’s to be found at
sea; and am, therefore, capable of taking my oath to this, that of all
the bad jobs that ever I was in or that ever I heard of any other sailor
being in, there’s nothing to beat the sufferings us men of the schooner
_Richard Warbrick_ had to endure when the foundering of that vessel
obliged us to take to the boat.
“The schooner sailed from Runcorn with a cargo of coals for Plymouth.
She was twenty years old, and a trifle over a hundred tons burden. There
were five of a crew, and nothing particular happened until we were
abreast of the Bristol Channel, when there blew up a heavy gale of wind
from the east’ard. There’s no call to describe it; it was of the regular
kind, full of wet, and raising a sea a sight too big for a vessel of one
hundred tons pretty nigh chock-a-block with coal and with twenty years
of hard use in her hull. However, we scraped through the gale and two or
three more that followed fast, until one morning we were somewhere
betwixt the Scilly Isles and the Cornish coast. It was dark, thick
weather, blowing and raining hard, the sea rough, bitter cold--as you
may calculate it was, the month being January--and everything invisible
that was more than half a mile off. The wind was east and north, and we
were ratching along under very small canvas, when, being turned in, as
it was my watch below, and the land o’ Nod close aboard, I was roused up
by a loud cry on deck and a tremendous crash. I tumbled up as fast as
ever I could pelt, and found the schooner going down and the men getting
the only boat we carried overboard. It was no time for questions. You
could feel the vessel settling under your feet, just like standing on
soft mud and sinking in it. The seas were washing over the deck, and
growing heavier as her bulwarks sank lower. There was nothing but white
water to be seen on the starboard bow--no rocks, nothing showing above
the froth; but I didn’t want any one to tell me that we had run foul of
the Seven Stones. There was no time to do more than launch the boat and
roll into her. Daly was the last man in, and scarce had he jumped when
the schooner plumped clean out of sight, going down like a deep-sea
lead, so suddenly that it took my breath away.
“There’s no sensation worse than that a man feels when he looks for the
ship he’s been forced to abandon and finds her vanished under the sea.
The ocean never seems so wide as then. The whole world appears to be
made of water. Sailors are a class of men little given to talking, and
when they come clear of such jobs as this they say next to nothing about
it, and so people think that either they’re men without the capacity of
feeling, or else their sufferings were not equal to what might be
supposed. Had people who take these views been in that boat along with
us, they’d look sharp in altering their opinions. The suddenness of the
disaster--our being one moment safe, and the next tossing on the sea in
a small boat, with the schooner gone, nothing saved but what we stood
in, not a morsel of food nor a drop of drink of any kind, the wind
blowing fit to freeze the eyes out of our heads, every mother’s son of
us soaked to the skin, and drifting fast away towards the Atlantic--took
our senses away for a spell. We sat holding on and staring like daft
men. The captain was the first to rally.
“He called out, ‘A bad job; it’s a bad job, lads!’ several times, and
then said, ‘No use letting her drive too fast. We mustn’t let her blow
away into the ocean;’ and with that we lashed the two oars to the
painter and flung ’em overboard.
“This brought her head to wind and slowed her drift; but, for all that,
every hour was carrying us further and further towards the open sea, and
away from the Scilly Isles and the Cornish coast, which were our best
chance, so that all the hope that was left us was being picked up by a
passing vessel. Yet there could be no worse month in the year than
January for that likelihood. How long were the gales and the frost going
to let us last? We were far to the nor’ard of the fairway, in a part of
the sea that every vessel was bound to give a wide berth to. The
weather, as I have said, was so thick that you couldn’t see half a mile
off, and though of course it was sure to clear in time and open out the
horizon, so that vessels could have a view around them, the question was
where should we be when it came on fine?