The potatoes were new. The beer was the only doubtful feature of the
repast; it was thin, insipid, and flat. I made haste to taste and
approve, for I could see that the old fellows were very hungry. The
governor left me, and went to the top of the room, where, in a loud and
impressive voice, he said grace, bidding the ancient mariners be
thankful for what they were about to receive; they all half rose, and in
one feeble, rustling old pipe, sung out “Amen,” and then, like
schoolboys, made snatches at the dishes, and in a minute were eating
with avidity. It warmed my heart to see them. It made me feel that there
must yet be plenty of goodness left in this world, when--through the
benevolence of strangers and their large-hearted concern for poor
Jack--ninety-three old, very old seamen, tottering on the verge of the
grave, so poor and so destitute, so feeble and so friendless that but
for the benevolence of those whom Providence had brought to their
succour, they must have miserably starved and died, were clothed, and
fed, and sheltered, and tenderly watched over. I know not that I have
ever been so moved as I was in my passage through that dining-room. It
was not only the pathos that lies in the helplessness of old age; I
could not but think of the great compass of time these men’s experiences
embraced, of the changes they had witnessed, of the sorrows and
struggles which had made up the sum of their long lives, and how eighty
and ninety years of privation, endurance, and such pleasures as sailors
take, and such ambitions as sailors have, had ended in these bowed and
toothless shapes, clutching at their plain repast with child-like
selfishness, indifferent as death itself to the great machine of life
that was whirring with its thousand interests outside the silent sphere
of their present existence, and dependent for the bread their trembling
hands raised to their poor old mouths upon the bounty of those who love
the noble profession of the sea, and who will not let the old and
bruised and worn-out seaman want for such help as they can send him.
Here and there were men too infirm to feed themselves; and I took notice
how thoughtfully their aged messmates prepared their meal for them. Some
of those thus occupied were more aged than the men they assisted.
“Bless your honour, he’s but a child to _me_,” said one of them, in
answer to my questions; “he’s but three and seventy, and I shall be
eighty-nine come next September.”
One pitiful sight deeply affected me. It was an old man stone deaf and
stone blind. How is the helplessness in his face to be conveyed?
“He’s losing his appetite fast,” said a seaman of about eighty who sat
near him. “His senses is all locked up. Ye never hear him speak.”
There were sadder sights even than this; but I dare not trust myself to
write of them.
I followed the house-governor out of the dining-rooms into a large
apartment, well stored with books, magazines, etc., the gifts of friends
of the charity. This I was told was the reading-room. It looked on to
the green grounds, and was a most cheerful and delightful chamber.
Further on was another room furnished with bagatelle boards and side
tables for cribbage, etc. There was a particular cleanness and neatness
everywhere visible, and I asked who did the work of the house. The
house-governor answered, “The inmates. The more active among them are
put to washing down and dusting at ten o’clock, and they finish at
twelve. This is all the work required of them. Throughout the rest of
the day they have nothing to do but to lounge about the grounds and
amuse themselves as they please in the bagatelle or reading rooms, or in
the smoking-room, which is a large apartment in the basement.” Mounting
the wide stone staircase, and admiring as I went the singularly handsome
and lavishly-embellished interior of the very fine building, I found
myself on a floor devoted to the sleeping-rooms. These consist of rows
of bulkheads partitioning off little cabins, each with a door and a
number, and furnished with a comfortable bed, and some of them were
movingly decorated by photographs of a mother, a sister, a child, with
humble memorials saved from the wreck of the past; such relics of the
old home as a few china chimneypiece ornaments, a coloured picture, and
the like, with here and there a sea-chest, though, as a rule, these
little cabins, as they are called, were conspicuously empty of all
suggestions of marine life. Now and again the opening of a door would
disclose an old man seated on his bed, darning a sock or mending a
shirt. It might have been that they were used to the visits of
strangers; but I could not help observing in all these old seamen an
utter indifference to our presence and inspection, a look of deep
abstraction, as if their minds were leagues astern of them or far ahead,
and existence were an obligation with which they had no sympathy, and of
which they never took notice unless their attention was compelled to it.
“Here,” said the governor, taking me into a room in which three or four
old men were assembled--for dinner had been finished some time, and the
seamen had quitted the tables--“is a veteran who has taught himself how
to write. Show us your copy-book, my man,” said he, giving him his name.
The old fellow produced his book with a great air of pride, and I was
struck by the excellence of the writing.
“Is this all your own doing?” I asked.
“Ay, sir, every stroke. It’s been a bit of a job; for, you see, when a
man’s nearing eighty ye can’t say that his brain’s like a young ’un’s.”
“This would shame many a youngster, nevertheless,” said I.
“I’d be prouder if I could read it, though,” he exclaimed, with the
anxious and yet gentle expression that seemed a characteristic of the
faces in this institution.
“Ah, I see,” said I. “You can copy, but cannot read what you copy. Never
mind! that will come too, presently.”
“I’m afeard not,” said he, shaking his head. “Writin’s one thing,
readin’s another. I have learned to write, but dunno as ever I shall be
able to read it.”
The governor, with an encouraging smile, told him to persevere, and then
led the way to one of the sick wards, where I found a very aged man in
bed, and two others seated at a table.
“That poor old fellow,” said he, pointing to the bed, “begged to be
allowed to attend the funeral of a man who died in the institution a
short time since; he was so much affected that he was struck with
paralysis, and had to be carried back here. He was for years a
shipmaster, had command of several fine ships, and is a man of excellent
education. He has been in this institution some years.” And then,
addressing him, “Well, and how do you feel yourself now?”
“Mending, sir, mending,” answered the old man. “It’s death to me to be
lying here. Why, for seventy-nine years I never had a day’s illness,
never took a ha’porth of physic.”
“You must have patience,” said the governor; “you’ll be up and doing
presently.”
“Ay, the power of forereaching is not taken out of me yet,” he answered,
breaking into a laugh, the heartiness of which somehow pained me more
to hear than had he burst into sobs.
There were more “cabins” upstairs, and in one of them we found an old
Irishman standing, lost in thought, looking out of the window. I
addressed him, and he answered me in a rich brogue. I never remember
meeting a more winning old face, nor being won by a voice more cordial
and pleasant to hear. He told me he had been in the _Kent_, East
Indiaman, when she was burnt. This was so long ago as 1825, and he was
then a hearty, able-bodied man. It was like turning back the pages of
the history of England to hear him talk of that famous and dreadful
disaster.
“There’s another man in the institution who was along with me in the
_Kent_,” said he.
I thought of the description given of the _Kent_ by the master of the
_Caroline_ as I looked at this ancient man. “Her appearance was that of
an immense cauldron or cage of buoyant basketwork, formed of the charred
and blackened ribs, naked, and stripped of every plank, encircling an
uninterrupted mass of flame.” Again and again had I read the story of
that terrible fire at sea, thinking of it always as something
deep-buried in history, and infinitely remote; and now here was a man
who had been an actor in it, talking of it as if it had been but of
yesterday, quavering out his “says I’s” and “says he’s,” and eager to
let me know that if he liked he could tell me something about the
behaviour of certain responsible persons on board that would not redound
to their credit. It was pantaloon with harlequin’s wand in his hand; the
faded old picture was touched, and became a live thing, the seas
rolling, the ship burning, the terror and anguish of nearly sixty years
since growing quick again under the magic of this ancient man’s memory,
and in the presence of a living witness of that long-decayed night of
horror.
Of such a charity as this of the Royal Alfred Aged Merchant Seamen’s
Institution how can any man who honours the English sailor and values
his calling hope to speak in such terms of praise as shall not seem
hyperbolical? Not for one instant will I say that as a charity it is
superior to others which deal with the sick, with the destitute, with
the infirm, with little children. “There is misery enough in every
corner of the world as well as within our convent,” Sterne’s monk is
made to imply by his cordial wave of the hand. But I do claim for this
institution the possession of a peculiar element of pathos such as no
man who has not beheld the aged, the stricken, the helpless, the
broken-down men congregated within its walls can form any idea of. As
you survey them their past arises; you think of the black and stormy
night, the frost and snow, the famine and the shipwreck--all the perils
which sailors encounter in their quest or carriage of that which makes
us great and prosperous as a nation; and then reflections on the dire
ending which must have befallen these tempest-beaten, time-laden men but
for the charity that provides them with a refuge break in upon you, and
you feel that no words of praise can be too high for such an
institution, and that no money dedicated by generous hearts to the
alleviation of human suffering can be better directed than to the
exchequer of this aged seamen’s home. Ninety-three old sailors are at
present lodged in the institution. The house is big enough to
accommodate two hundred, but the funds of the charity are already
stretched to their last limits, and many an old and broken-down seaman
whom this home would otherwise receive, and whose closing days would be
rendered happy by all that tender ministration, by all that pious
kindness can effect, must die in the cold and cheerless silence of the
Union unless the charity that is prayerfully entreated for him is
given.
_ON THE GOODWINS_.
On a fine, calm day from the height of the cliffs betwixt Ramsgate and
Broadstairs you may spy at low-water time a yellow vein, like a thin
winding of pale gold, a hand’s breath this side of the horizon--the
famous and fatal Goodwin Sands. I suppose there is no shoal in the whole
world that a man whose sympathies are with sailors can view with more
interest. Starting from the North Sand Head, which is almost abreast of
Ramsgate, and looking east, the eye follows the south-westerly sweep of
the Goodwins until the Downs are embraced with all their dim tracery of
spars and rigging and faint sinuous lines of steamers’ smoke beyond,
whilst the giant South Foreland acclivity stares down upon the lightship
abreast of St. Margaret’s Bay, marking the extreme limits in the south
and west of the deadliest stretch of sands upon the face of the globe.
“Who can view the Goodwins without thinking of the treasures which lie
buried in their heart, of the hundreds of ships which have gone to
pieces upon them, of the thousands of human corpses which have floated
out of their flashing surf to be stranded upon some distant beach, or to
drift, maybe for days, upon the bosom of the tides, looking up with
blind faces to heaven through the green transparent lid of their sea
coffin? There is no spot that has ever been the theatre of wilder human
suffering. Again and again as you sail past you see forking up out of
them some black gibbet-like relic of a wreck a week, a fortnight, a
month old. Something of the kind is always visible, as though even on
the tenderest of summer days, when the blue water sleeps around, and the
heavens are a violet hollow, with a rayless sun making gold of the sea
in the west, the deadly suggestiveness of that long sweep of yellow sand
should be as plain as when its presence is denoted amid the black
tempestuous night by the ghastly gleam of boiling white waters.
I remember once passing these Goodwins and seeing a number of little
black figures running about them. A pleasure vessel from one of the
adjacent ports was lying at anchor a short distance off, and her boat
was against the slope of the shoal. It was a very calm day indeed, the
sea just blurred here and there with small draughts of air that gave the
water in those places a look of ice, with a pallid streak of the French
coast beyond the white mainsail of the pleasure-cutter, hove up by the
refraction of the light above the sea-line. I brought a small pocket
telescope to bear, and observed that those little black figures running
about like the savages Robinson Crusoe saw were Cockney excursionists,
engaged in playing cricket. They played as if they wanted to be able to
talk of having played rather than as if they enjoyed the game. Talk of
contrasts! A man may be rendered pensive by watching children sporting
in a graveyard, by mingling in a festivity held upon a space of ground
where once a famous battle was fought, and where the feet of the
merrymakers are separated from the bones and skulls of warriors by a
couple of spades’ length of earth. But to see those little black-coated
creatures running about after a ball on top of such an ocean
burial-place that the like of it for the horror of its annals and for
the number of those it has sepulchred is not to be found in this
habitable world, might well have made the gayest heart sad and
thoughtful for a spell.
As I leaned over the rail, looking at those happy pigmies--those lords
of creation who, viewed half a mile further away, might have passed for
a handful of black crabs crawling about--the scene in imagination
changed, the darkness came rushing out of the east with a moan of
approaching storm, the three lanterns winked like stars beyond the North
Sand Head, and there was a sound of weltering waters and the seething
and hissing of surf rising up through the gloom out from the whole
length of the shoals. The wind rose fresh and eagerly, with a raw edge
in it; the ebony of the swelling water was broken by the glimmer of the
froth of breaking seas. I could hear the muffled thunder of the confused
play to windward of the surf, with the shrieking of the blast overhead,
whilst a deeper shadow yet gathered in the air. Then, with a blinking of
my eyes, back would come the facts of the thing again, and yonder were
the little figures merrily chasing the ball, the sea spreading like a
sheet of silk to the yellow rim of the hard sand, and the blue sky
bright overhead. Yet another touch of the magician Fancy’s wand, and it
was all howling storm and flying blackness and the steam of hurling
spume again, with a sudden glare of lightning between, flinging out the
shapes of the piles of whirling clouds like monstrous brandished wings
going to pieces in the hurricane, and throwing up the black fabric of a
big ship on her beam ends, her masts gone, and a fury of white water
veiling her.
There are lifeboat coxswains who need but close their eyes to see
fearfuller things. Just where those little creatures are brandishing
their tiny bats and flourishing their shrimp-like legs, the great ship
struck, and four hundred men and women shrieked out to God for mercy in
one breath. A man’s fancy must be feeble even on the softest of summer
days not to hear the crash of her timbers, the thunder-shocks of the
smiting seas, the rending noises of hemp and wire and spar torn by the
tempest from their strong fastenings; not to see the ghastly picture she
makes in the wild gleam of the signal flare whose tongues of fire are
blown horizontal, like streaming flags, by the furious breath of the
storm, illuminating with a dull horrible crimson light the throngs of
human beings who cry and struggle upon her decks, or hang, like
streaming suits of clothes, in what remains of her rigging.
Is this an exaggerated picture? Alas! the pen never yet was wielded that
could pourtray, in the barest form, any one of the countless horrible
scenes which have taken place on that stretch of sands where one summer
day I watched, leaning over the rail of a vessel, a number of
light-hearted excursionists playing cricket.
Among the things which never can be known may be placed the thoughts
which possess a man in the moment of shipwreck. Of the hundreds of
published narratives none satisfies the reader; and of those who relate
their experiences, how infinitely remote from the truth do their
statements strike them as being when they put what they have written
side by side with what they remember having felt! The reason is, I take
it, because in no other situation is death more awful than upon the sea.
It is commonly slow--at least, it gives time for anguish to become
full-blown--and the hope of rescue must be very strong indeed, and well
founded, to qualify that agony of expectation, sinking into paralyzing
despair, which confounds and in a manner stuns a person stranded far out
upon the water in a black night, seeing nothing but the glare of
lightning or the spectral flashing of froth flying past, hearing nothing
but the grinding and trembling and dislocating noises of the hull upon
the ground.
It is supposed because sailors cannot or do not describe the horrors
they pass through that they lack the capacity of expression. But you may
put the most eloquent writer now living, call him by what name you
please, on board a ship foundering amid a tempest or going to pieces in
a storm on such a shoal as the Goodwins or the Sunk Sand, and when he
has been long enough rescued and ashore to recover the use of his
brains, you may defy him to write such a narrative of the disaster as
will come, to his own conscience and memory, one jot nearer to the truth
than the newspaper paragraph of five lines in which the wreck was
chronicled. A man can describe what he has suffered in a railway
collision, in a house on fire, down in a mine where there has been an
explosion, in a theatre where there has been a panic; but put him aboard
a ship and let him clearly understand that he is going to be drowned,
and when succoured he can tell you little more than that the waves ran
mountains high, that some people were brave, and that some people
shrieked, and that what he best remembers is catching hold of something,
and hearing the water in his ears, and being dragged into a boat.
Very true is the old saying, “If you want to learn how to pray, you must
go to sea.” So distracting, so paralyzing, so utterly despairful are all
the conditions of shipwreck in its worst forms, that I cannot but
think, when a man is known to act bravely and coolly in that situation,
unmindful of himself, thinking of others, encouraging and heartening
them, the heroism he exhibits is of a kind not to be matched by any kind
of courage a man may show in a position that lacks the overwhelming
features which distinguish the foundering or the stranding of a ship.
Some days ago I met a seaman who had made one of the crew of a brig that
a few months since was stranded on the Goodwin Sands, and went to pieces
there. The circumstances of the wreck were so recent that I was sure it
could not but be a very sharp, clear memory in this sailor; and, wanting
to hear what sort of thoughts come into a man’s head at such a time, and
how he will act, what kind of impulses govern him, and the like, I
carried this mariner to where a seat and a glass of beer were to be had,
and conversed with him.
“She was a wessel,” said he, “of 220 ton, and we was in ballast, bound
from Can (Caen) to Seaham. All went well, nothen particular happening, I
mean, till we comes abreast o’ the South Foreland. It might then be
twelve o’clock in the middle o’ the night. The weather was as thick as
mud, plenty of rain driving along, and the wind west, blowin’ a fresh
breeze. We was under upper and lower main-tops’l, lower fore-tops’l, and
foresail.”
Here he took a drink.
“And the weather as thick as mud, you say?”
“Ay, thick as mud in a wine-glass. The Sou’ San’head light was on our
starboard beam, and ye may guess how clear it was when I tell you that
that light took a deal of peering at to make out. As to the East
Good’in, why, all that way was black as my boot: not the merest glimmer
to betoken a lightwessel _there_. I was at the side, heavin’ the lead,
getting nine fathom, and then seven, and then eight, and then seven
again. Eight fair betwixt the Callipers and the Deal coast I’ll allow
ye’ll get eleven and twelve fathom good till you come on to past the
Downs--headin’ up, I mean--and then it shoals down to height and seven
and five and a ’arf. So in a night as black as a dead wall, when there’s
no moon, who’s to know, when the last light seen has drawed out of view,
and there’s ne’er another to be sighted, where you are in that water? We
was going along tidy fast, when a squall of rain drives right up over
our starn in a wild smother, and I had just made seven fathom by the
lead when the wessel took the ground, chucking me off the rail on to the
deck. The skipper begins to bawl out like mad, ‘Let go the main-torps’l
halliards! Haul up the foresail! Let go the ----’ Wash at that moment
comes a lump of sea right over the port quarter, cantin’ our starn to
the south’ard and smotherin’ the decks. You didn’t want to see--you
could feel that the brig was hard and fast, though as the sea thumped
her she’d kinder sway on her keel.”
Here he took another drink.
“Well?” said I.
“Well,” he continued, “what was to do now, master? Everything being let
go aloft, the canvas was slatting like thunder up there, and though I’m
not goin’ to tell you it was blowing a gale of wind, yet it seemed to
come twice as hard the moment we took the ground, and the seas to rise
as if our falling helpless on a sudden had swelled ’em up with joy. We
lay with our head about nor’-nor’-east, and over the starboard bow you
could see the white water jumping. But that was all that was visible.
The wind seemed to blow up the thickness all round us, there was not a
light to be seen, and looking around anywhere away from the white water
was like putting your head in a pitch-kettle. Cold! master, that was the
worst part of it. I’ll allow that in all sitivations of this kind the
cold’s the part that’s hardest to bear. Somehow clanger ain’t so
frightful when it’s warm. Can’t explain it, I’m sure; matter o’
constitootion, perhaps: but I doubt if ye’d find much bravery among the
Hesquimos and the Roosians up near the pole, and the likes o’ them.
Can’t see how it’s possible; but it’s only my ’pinion.”
Another drink.