THE GANGES
I've lived since then in calm and strife,
Full fifty summers, a sailor's life;
And Death whenever he come to me
Shall come on the wide unbounded sea.
The rule that gales of wind prevail at the equinoxes is certainly
proved by the exceptions, but October 14, 1881, was an instance of a
gale so close to the autumnal equinox that it belonged rather to the
rule than to the exception. It had been blowing from the west all that
day, and the Downs was full of ships. Others were running back from
down Channel under lower fore top-sails, all ready to let go their
anchors.
Sometimes in stress of weather a ship bringing up will lose her anchors
by not shortening sail sufficiently before she lets them go. She
preserves too much 'way' through the water, and she snaps the great
chain cable by the force of her momentum as if it had been a
pack-thread.
The wind reached the force of a 'great gale,'--the entry I find in my
diary of that date. The boatmen say to the present day that it was
blowing a 'harricane,' and, according to the report of the coxswain of
the lifeboat, 'it was blowing a very heavy gale of wind.' There was,
therefore, no mere capful of wind, but a real, whole, tremendous gale.
Old salts are always ready to pity landsmen, and to overwhelm them with
'Bless you's!' when they venture to talk of a 'storm'; but the harsh,
steady roar of the wind on this day made it plainly and beyond doubt a
storm.
Long lines of heavy dangerous rollers broke on Deal beach, and only the
first-class luggers could launch or live in the Downs, so great was the
sea. These splendid luggers being of five feet draught, and having
therefore a deeper hold of the water, could do better than a lifeboat
in the deep water of the Downs. They could fight to windward better,
and would not be so liable to upset under sail as a lifeboat; but this
only applies to the deep water.
Put the best Deal lugger that ever floated alongside the present Deal
lifeboat, the Mary Somerville, in a furious sea of breakers on the
Goodwin Sands, and the whole state of affairs is altered. The lugger
would be swamped and overwhelmed in five minutes, while the lifeboat
would empty herself and live through it successfully.
The fortunes of the vessels in the Downs on that day were varied. Some
were manfully riding out the gale; others were holding on to their one
remaining anchor, signalling for help, and as sorely in need of fresh
anchors and chains as ever was King Richard of a horse. Some had lost
both anchors and were drifting out to destruction; destruction meaning
the Goodwin Sands, on which a fearful surf was raging about two miles
under their lee.
One of those driving vessels was the Ganges. She had run back from the
Channel to the Downs for shelter, and dropped her anchors running
before a strong tide and a heavy gale; having thus too much 'way' on
her, both the long chain cables parted, snapping close to the anchors,
and trailed from her bows. Her head was thus kept up to the wind,
while there was no sufficient check to her drift astern and outwards
towards the Goodwins.
Efforts, but ineffectual efforts, were made to get rid of the trailing
cables, and therefore the vessel's head could not be got before the
wind, and she could not be steered, but drifted out faster and faster.
It is supposed that there was another anchor on the forecastle head,
which had somehow fouled, or, at any rate, could not be got loose from
some cause or other.
In the confusion, the sails of the great vessel--for she was a
full-rigged ship--having been either neglected or imperfectly furled,
were torn adrift and blew to ribbons. These great strips of heavy
canvas cracked like monstrous whips with deafening noise, thrashing the
masts and rigging, and rendering any attempt to furl them or cut them
away, perilous in the extreme.
The crew consisted of thirty-five hands 'all told,' of whom the
captain, mates, petty officers, and apprentices were English, while the
men before the mast were Lascars. Now I think my readers will agree
with me in believing that 'Jack,' with all his faults, is a more
reliable man to stand 'shoulder to shoulder' with in time of danger
than Ali Mahmood Seng, the Lascar. In cold and storm and peril most of
us would prefer 'our ain folk' alongside of us.
Some years ago a Board of Trade report contained a quotation from the
remarks of a firm of shipowners, to the effect that they largely
employed foreign sailors on board their vessels, because they were
(_a_) more sober, (_b_) more amenable to discipline, and (_c_) cheaper
than British sailors; but they added, 'we always keep a few Englishmen
among the crew to lead the way aloft on dark and stormy nights.'
What a heart-stirring comment on the character of the British sailor is
there in the passage above quoted! Is there no remedy, and no
physician for the frailties and degradations of poor Jack, who,
whatever be his faults, 'leads the way aloft on dark and stormy
nights?' 'If the constituents of London mud can be resolved, if the
sand can be transformed into an opal,' to use the noble simile of a
great living writer, 'and the water into a drop of dew or a star of
snow, or a translucent crystal, and the soot into a diamond such as
On the forehead of a queen
Trembles with dewy light,--
if such glorious transformations can be wrought by the laws of Nature
on the commixture of common elements, shall we despair that
transformations yet more glorious may be wrought in human souls now
thwarted and blackened by the malice of the devil, when they are
subjected to the far diviner and far more stupendous alchemy of the
Holy Spirit of God?'
The moral to be drawn from these pages surely must be this--that there
is splendid material to work upon, the most undaunted heroism and the
noblest self-sacrifice, among the seafaring classes of our island.
On this dark, tempestuous night, be the cause what it may, preventible
or otherwise, the Ganges drifted helplessly to her fate. A powerful
tug-boat got hold of her, but the ship dragged the tug-boat astern with
her, towards the Goodwins, until at last the tug-boat snapped her great
15-inch hawser, and then gave up the attempt and returned to land.
The Ganges now burned flares and blue lights for help. Noting her
rapid approach to the Goodwins, on which an awful sea was running, and
the helpless and dishevelled condition of the vessel, the Gull
lightship fired guns and rockets at intervals of five minutes.
This is the proper and recognised summons to the lifeboats, but long
before the lightship fired her signal, the Deal boatmen saw the peril
of the vessel; and one of their number, Tom Adams, ran to the coxswain
of the Deal lifeboat with the news: 'Tug's parted her, and she'll be on
the Goodwins in five minutes!' 'Then we'll go,' said the coxswain, and
he rang the bell and summoned a crew.
As it was one of the wildest nights on which the Deal lifeboat was ever
launched, the very best men on Deal beach came forward to the struggle
for a place in the lifeboat, and out of their number a crew of fifteen
was got.
R. Roberts, at this time the second coxswain, was afloat in his lugger,
putting an anchor and chain on board the Eurydice, and in his absence
Tom Adams helped the coxswain to steer the lifeboat, which literally
flew before the blast, to the rescue.
The squalls of this tempest were regular 'smokers,' a word which
signifies that the crests of the waves were blown into the astonished
air in smoking clouds of spray; and the lifeboat was stripped for the
fight, reefed mizzen and double-reefed storm foresail. I should say
that running out before the wind the mizzen was not set, and they
frequently had to haul down the reefed foresail, and let her run under
bare poles right away from the land into the hurricane.
No one can appraise the nature of this dangerous task who has not run
before a gale off shore for five or six miles to leeward, and then
tried to get back home dead to windwards. No one who has ever tried
it, and got back, will ever forget it, if his voyage, or rather his
escape from death, has been effected in an open boat.
Nor can any one realize how furious and terrible is the aspect of the
sea in a gale off shore, and especially in the surf of the Goodwins,
who has not been personally through such an experience.
The Royal National Lifeboat Institution pay the men who form the
lifeboat crew on each occasion generously and to the utmost limit their
funds will admit. No one who knows the facts of the case and the
management of this splendid Institution can have any doubt on this
subject. Each man is paid L1 for a night service, and 10_s_. for
service in the daytime. If he be engaged night and day, he is paid
30_s_. This single launch cost L18--that is, L15 to the fifteen men
who formed the crew, and L3 to the forty helpers who were engaged in
launching and heaving up the lifeboat on her return.
But no money payment could compensate the men for the risk to their
lives--lives precious to women and children at home; and no money
payment could supply the impulse which fired these men and supported
them in their work of rescue.
One of the men in the lifeboat on this occasion, Henry Marsh, and his
name will end this chapter, was the man referred to in Chapter II, who
had on the day he was going to be married, many years before, rushed
into a lugger bound to the rescue of a ship's crew on the Goodwins.
Notwithstanding the splendid services of the Deal lifeboatmen in many a
heart-stirring rescue, they seem utterly unconscious of having done
anything heroic. This is a remarkable and most interesting feature in
their character. There is no boasting, no self-consciousness, and not
the faintest word of self-praise ever crosses their lips. The noblest,
the purest motives and impulses that can actuate man glow within their
breasts, as they risk their lives for others, and they nevertheless are
dumb respecting their deeds. They die, they dare, and they suffer in
silence.
A lifeboat rescue killed poor Robert Wilds, the coxswain of the Deal
lifeboat. The present second coxswain of the same lifeboat, E. Hanger,
was struck down after a rescue by pneumonia. J. Mackins, the coxswain
of the Walmer lifeboat, was also seized by pneumonia after a splendid
service across the Goodwins, when his lifeboat was buried thirty times
in raging seas; S. Pearson, once coxswain of the Walmer lifeboat, died
of Bright's disease, the result of exposure; and on the occasion of the
rescue of the Ganges, one of the crew, R. Betts, had his little finger
torn off. The Lifeboat Institution gave him a generous donation. But
the rescues by the Deal lifeboatmen are done at the risk, and sometimes
at the cost, of their health, their limbs and their lives.
There is a Kentish proverb that 'there are more fools in Kent than in
any other county of England,' because more men go to sea from Kent than
from any other county in England, Devon coming next; but Kent on this
wild night need not have blushed for the folly of her sailor sons,
until it be proved folly to succour and to save.
The Ganges had by this time struck on the middle part of the Goodwins,
and the sea was breaking mast-high over her. Her lights and flares had
gone out, and the lifeboat had the greatest difficulty in finding her.
Just when the lifeboatmen were in perplexity, she again burned blue
lights, and these guided the advancing boat. When they came close to
the wreck they found her head was lying about north, so that the great
wind and sea were beating right on her broadside, and a strong tide was
also running in the same direction right across the ship.
Just before the arrival of the lifeboat, in the bewilderment of terror,
one of the boats of the wrecked vessel was lowered, and one English
apprentice and four Lascars sprang into it. In the boiling surf which
raged alongside, the boat was upset in an instant, and with the
exception of one Lascar, who grasped a chain-plate, all were lost,
their drowning shrieks being only faintly heard as they were swept into
the caldron of the Goodwins to leeward. There can be no doubt that a
merciful insensibility came soon to their relief. To swim was
impossible in raging surf, and there would be little suffering in the
speedy death of those poor fellows. I once heard a sailor say to
another one moonlight night in the Mediterranean, 'Death is nothing, if
you are ready for it;' and if there be a good clear view of the country
beyond the river, and of the King of that land, as Shepherd, Saviour,
Friend, the writer firmly holds with his sailor friend, long since lost
at sea, and now with God, that 'Death is nothing, if you are ready for
it.'
The position of the lifeboat had to be now chosen with reference to
tide, wind and sea. Had the lifeboat anchored close outside the
vessel, there would have been the fearful danger of falling masts; and,
besides this, the tide would have swept her completely away from the
wreck, and would have prevented her getting back, had she once been
driven to leeward; hence, as shown in the diagram, they were driven to
anchor to windward of the vessel, or right between her and the land.
[Illustration: Position of the Ganges on the Sands.]
They first tried to get to the stern of the vessel, but they found this
position unsuitable, and being baffled, they hauled up to their anchor
with great trouble, and approached the bows of the wreck, having veered
out their cable again.
There was, be it remembered, an enormous sea, which during all the
struggles of the men broke with fury over the lifeboat, and kept her
full to her thwarts all the night, bursting in clouds of spray, and of
course drenching the lifeboatmen.
They now got to the bows of the wreck, where the strong off-tide
drifted them right under the jib-boom and bowsprit. Looking up, they
could just dimly see the jib-boom and bowsprit covered with men, who
had, in their terror, swarmed out there to drop into the lifeboat.
As they were hoisted up on the crest of a great breaker, which also
filled them, the great iron martingale or dolphin striker of the
vessel, pointed like an arrow, came so near the lifeboat that the men
saw that a little heavier sea would have driven the spear head of the
martingale through the lifeboat. One of the crew had a very narrow
escape of being impaled. This novel danger drove them back again
therefore to their anchor, to which they had with great difficulty
again to haul the lifeboat; and in reply to the imploring cries and
shouts of those on the jib-boom, they shouted back, 'We're not going to
leave you!'
The lifeboat now lay to windward of the vessel, in the full blast of
the tempest, and exposed to the full sweep of the breakers. The
official report of the coxswain was: 'We succeeded in getting alongside
after a long time and with great difficulty, through a very heavy sea
and at great risk of life, as the sea was breaking over the ship.'
As the lifeboat rode to windward of the wreck, the shouts of those on
board were inaudible, and their gestures and signs in the dim lantern
light could not be understood by the lifeboatmen. Having thrown their
line to the vessel, a weightier line was now passed and made fast on
board the Ganges, and in order to remedy the confusion and give the
necessary directions to save the lives of the distressed sailors, one
of the lifeboatmen, Henry Marsh, volunteered to jump into the sea with
a line round his waist, to be dragged through the breakers on board the
wreck. Heavy seas were bursting on the broadside and breaking over the
vessel, so that it was a marvel he escaped with his life.
He fastened a jamming hitch round his waist and then with a shout of
'Haul away!' sprang into the midnight surf. Some said, 'He's mad!'
others said, 'He's gone!' and then, 'Haul away, hard!' He fought
through the sea, he struggled, he worked up the ship's side, against
which he was once heavily dashed, and he gained the deck, giving
confidence to all on board: the brave fellow being sixty-five years of
age at the time.
The vessel was during this event thumping and beating out over the
Goodwins, and was at last, when finally wrecked and stuck fast, not
more than one hundred yards from safety and deep water, having thumped
for miles across the Sands. The lifeboat had to follow her on her
awful journey and almost to the outer edge of the Goodwins.
Her masts had stood up to this time, and she had been listing over to
the east, or away from the wind and the sea, but now all over and
within the ship were heard loud noises of cracking beams and the sharp
harsh snap of timbers breaking. The crew of the wreck, in dread of
instant death, now again burned blue lights. Just before the lifeboat
approached, as if in a death-throe, the ship reeled inwards, and her
tottering masts leaned to port, or towards the lifeboat and against the
wind--thus adding great peril to the work of rescue.
By the directions of the coxswain and the lifeboatmen the exhausted
crew were at last got down life-lines into the lifeboat, seventeen in
number, including the captain, mates and apprentices; while twelve
Lascars got into the Ramsgate lifeboat, which had about this time
arrived to help in the work of rescue.
One of the features of this terrible night which perhaps impressed the
memories of the lifeboat crew most of all, was the noise of the torn
sails above their heads as they fought the sea below. Just before
shoving off with the rescued crew, the words of the lifeboatmen were,
'We'll all go mad with that awful noise.'
At last all were on board, thirty-two souls in all, and at two o'clock
a.m. the lifeboat got up sail for home, which lay seven miles off dead
to windward.
The canvas they set will give some idea of the nature of the
struggle--a reefed mizzen and two reefs in the storm foresail. Thus
reefed down, they struggled to get hold of the land, which they finally
did at four o'clock on that dark wintry morning, landing the rescued
men on Deal beach, when boatmen generously took them to their houses[1].
Not the faintest publicity has ever before been given to the details of
this gallant achievement, which I now rescue from obscurity and
oblivion.
I cannot refrain from recording a previous gallant deed of Henry Marsh,
before mentioned. On February 13, 1870, there was a furious tempest
blowing, with the wind from E.N.E. All the vessels at anchor in the
Downs had been, with one exception, blown ashore and shattered into
fragments.
A Dutch brig, sugar-laden, went ashore in the afternoon opposite Deal
Castle, and was broken up and vanished in ten minutes; others went
ashore at Kingsdown, and late in the evening, opposite Walmer Castle,
another brig came ashore, also sugar-laden--a French vessel with an
English pilot on board.
The gale was accompanied with snow squalls, and Marsh, hearing of the
wrecks along Deal and Walmer beach, determined to go and see for
himself. His wife, as is the manner of wives, repressed his rash and
impulsive intentions, and said, 'Don't you go up near them!' But Marsh
said, 'I'll just take a bit of bread and cheese in my pocket, and I'll
take my short pipe with me, and I'll be back soon.' He laid great
stress and emphasis on having 'his short pipe' with him, probably
reserving a regular long-shanked 'churchwarden' for home use.
He found the beach crowded with spectators, and the sea breaking blue
water over the French brig. Her rigging was thick with ice, and the
snow froze as it fell. She was rocking wildly in and out, exposing her
deck as she swung outwards to the full sweep of the tremendous easterly
sea. Between her and the beach there were about ten feet deep of
water, which with each giant recoil swept round her in fury.
Marsh asked, 'Are all the people out of that there brig?' 'All but
two,' said the bystanders, 'and we can't get no answer from them.
They're gone, they are!'
Said Marsh, 'Won't nobody go to save them?'
'Which way are you going to save them?' said one; and all said the
same. 'I'm a-going,' said Marsh. 'Harry, don't go!' cried many an old
sailor on the beach. 'Here, hold my jacket!' said Marsh. And I verily
believe he was thinking chiefly of the preservation of his short pipe.
'Don't you hold me back! I'm a-going to try! Let go of me!' and
seizing the line which led from the rocking brig to the shore, Marsh
rushed neck deep in a moment into the surf. Swept the next instant off
his feet, on, hand over hand, he went; swayed out under her counter,
back towards the shore, still he lives! Dashed against the ship's
side, while some shout 'He's killed,' up he clambers still, hand over
hand; and as the vessel reels inwards, down, down the rope Marsh slips
into the water and the awful recoil. 'He is gone!' they cry. No! up
again! with true bull-dog tenacity, Marsh struggles. And at last,
nearly exhausted, he wins the deck amid such shouting as seldom rings
on Deal beach.
Taking breath, he first fastens a line round his waist and to a
belaying pin; and then he discovers a senseless form, Holbrooke, the
pilot, a friend of his own, who, fast dying with the cold and drenching
freezing spray, was muttering, 'The poor boy! the poor boy!'
'William!' said Marsh. 'Who are you?' was the reply. 'I'm Henry
Marsh, and I'm come to save you.' 'No, I'll be lost; I'll be lost!'
'No you won't,' said Marsh, 'I'll send you ashore on the rope.' 'No,
you'll drown me! you'll drown me!'
And then finding the poor French boy was indeed lost and swept
overboard, alone he passed the rope round the nearly insensible man,
protecting and holding him as the seas came; and finally watching when
the vessel listed in, alone he got him on the toprail of the bulwarks,
with an exertion of superhuman strength, and then, with shouts to the
people ashore, 'Are you ready?' and 'I'm a-coming!' threw Holbrooke, in
spite of himself, into the sea; and both were safely drawn ashore.
The people nearly smothered Marsh when he got ashore, but he ran home,
his clothes frozen stiff when he got in; and I have no doubt that the
'short pipe' played no insignificant part in his recovery.
Eleven years afterwards, this same Henry Marsh was dragged by a rope
from the lifeboat to the Ganges, as described in the beginning of this
chapter, through the breakers on the Goodwin Sands at midnight; and he
is now (1892), my readers will be glad to hear, alive and hearty, at
the age of seventy-five, and I rejoice to say 'looking for and hasting
unto that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the Great God,
and our Saviour Jesus Christ.'
There can be few, I think, of my readers who will not find their hearts
beat faster as they read this story, and few will hesitate to say,
'Bravely done!'
[1] The names of the crew of the lifeboat on this occasion were--R.
Wilds (coxswain), Thomas Adams, Henry Marsh, T. Holbourn, Henry
Roberts, James Snoswell, T. Cribben, J. May, T. May, George Marsh, H.
Marsh, R. Betts, and Frank Roberts.