Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Additional
notes will be found near the end of this ebook.
[Illustration: (cover)]
LOST SHIPS AND LONELY SEAS
[Illustration: THE WRECK OF THE “POLLY”]
LOST SHIPS
AND
LONELY SEAS
BY
RALPH D. PAINE
ILLUSTRATED
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
Copyright, 1920, 1921, by
THE CENTURY CO.
PRINTED IN U. S. A.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE SINGULAR FATE OF THE BRIG POLLY 3
II HOW THE SCHOONER EXERTION FELL AMONG THIEVES 25
III THE TRAGEDY OF THE FRIGATE MEDUSA 51
IV THE WRECK OF THE BLENDEN HALL, EAST INDIAMAN 76
V THE ADVENTURES OF DAVID WOODARD, CHIEF MATE 107
VI CAPTAIN PADDOCK ON THE COAST OF BARBARY 131
VII FOUR THOUSAND MILES IN AN OPEN BOAT 160
VIII THE FRIGATES THAT VANISHED IN THE SOUTH SEAS 189
IX WHEN H. M. S. PHOENIX DROVE ASHORE 212
X THE ROARING DAYS OF PIRACY 232
XI THE LOSS OF THE WAGER MAN-OF-WAR 259
XII THE CRUISE OF THE WAGER’S LONG-BOAT 288
XIII THE GRIM TALE OF THE NOTTINGHAM GALLEY 309
XIV THE STORM-SWEPT FLEET OF ADMIRAL GRAVES 330
XV THE BRISK YARN OF THE SPEEDWELL PRIVATEER 350
XVI LUCKLESS SEAMEN LONG IN EXILE 367
XVII THE NOBLE KING OF THE PELEW ISLANDS 393
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
The wreck of the _Polly_ _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
Seamanship was helpless to ward off the attack of the storm
that left the brig a sodden hulk 8
Fresh water trickled from the end of the pistol-barrel, and
they caught it in a tin cup 16
_Volusia_ off Salem, built at Falmouth, Mass., in 1801, and
Wrecked at Cape Cod in 1802 20
The pirate captain boarding the captured _Exertion_ 29
Armed with as many of the aforementioned weapons as they could
well sling about their bodies 33
Boats were filled with men whose only thought was to save their
skins 56
The brig, which had made a long tack and was now steering
straight toward the raft 64
Governor Glass and his residence 97
Woodard raised his empty hands to ask for peace and mercy 112
Wreck of the _Grosvenor_ on the coast of Caffraria 144
Early American ship of the 18th Century 176
Perilous situation of the ship 224
The _Charlemagne_, a New York packet ship 272
Brig _Topaz_ of Newburyport, built in 1807 305
The brig _Olinda_ of Salem, built in 1825 352
Taking on the pilot in the 18th Century 384
LOST SHIPS AND LONELY SEAS
CHAPTER I
THE SINGULAR FATE OF THE BRIG _POLLY_
“Oh, night and day the ships come in,
The ships both great and small,
But never one among them brings
A word of him at all.
From Port o’ Spain and Trinidad,
From Rio or Funchal,
And along the coast of Barbary.”
Steam has not banished from the deep sea the ships that lift tall
spires of canvas to win their way from port to port. The gleam of their
topsails recalls the centuries in which men wrought with stubborn
courage to fashion fabrics of wood and cordage that should survive
the enmity of the implacable ocean and make the winds obedient.
Their genius was unsung, their hard toil forgotten, but with each
generation the sailing ship became nobler and more enduring, until it
was a perfect thing. Its great days live in memory with a peculiar
atmosphere of romance. Its humming shrouds were vibrant with the
eternal call of the sea, and in a phantom fleet pass the towering East
Indiaman, the hard-driven Atlantic packet, and the gracious clipper
that fled before the Southern trades.
A hundred years ago every bay and inlet of the New England coast was
building ships which fared bravely forth to the West Indies, to the
roadsteads of Europe, to the mysterious havens of the Far East. They
sailed in peril of pirate and privateer, and fought these rascals as
sturdily as they battled with wicked weather. Coasts were unlighted,
the seas uncharted, and navigation was mostly by guesswork, but these
seamen were the flower of an American merchant marine whose deeds are
heroic in the nation’s story. Great hearts in little ships, they dared
and suffered with simple, uncomplaining fortitude. Shipwreck was an
incident, and to be adrift in lonely seas or cast upon a barbarous
shore was sadly commonplace. They lived the stuff that made fiction
after they were gone.
Your fancy may be able to picture the brig _Polly_ as she steered down
Boston harbor in December, 1811, bound out to Santa Cruz with lumber
and salted provisions for the slaves of the sugar plantations. She was
only a hundred and thirty tons burden and perhaps eighty feet long.
Rather clumsy to look at and roughly built was the _Polly_ as compared
with the larger ships that brought home the China tea and silks to
the warehouses of Salem. Such a vessel was a community venture. The
blacksmith, the rigger, and the calker took their pay in shares, or
“pieces.” They became part owners, as did likewise the merchant who
supplied stores and material; and when the brig was afloat, the master,
the mate, and even the seamen were allowed cargo space for commodities
that they might buy and sell to their own advantage. A voyage directly
concerned a whole neighborhood.
Every coastwise village had a row of keel-blocks sloping to the tide.
In winter weather too rough for fishing, when the farms lay idle, the
Yankee Jack of all trades plied his axe and adz to shape the timbers
and peg together such a little vessel as the _Polly_, in which to trade
to London or Cadiz or the Windward Islands. Hampered by an unfriendly
climate, hard put to it to grow sufficient food, with land immensely
difficult to clear, the New-Englander was between the devil and the
deep sea, and he sagaciously chose the latter. Elsewhere, in the early
days, the forest was an enemy, to be destroyed with great pains. The
pioneers of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine regarded it with
favor as the stuff with which to make stout ships and the straight
masts they “stepped” in them.
Nowadays, such a little craft as the _Polly_ would be rigged as
a schooner. The brig is obsolete, along with the quaint array of
scows, ketches, pinks, brigantines, and sloops which once filled the
harbors and hove their hempen cables short to the clank of windlass or
capstan-pawl, while the brisk seamen sang a chantey to help the work
along. The _Polly_ had yards on both masts, and it was a bitter task to
lie out in a gale of wind and reef the unwieldy single topsails. She
would try for no record passages, but jogged sedately, and snugged down
when the weather threatened.
On this tragic voyage she carried a small crew, Captain W. L. Cazneau,
a mate, four sailors, and a cook who was a native Indian. No mention
is to be found of any ill omens that forecasted disaster, such as a
black cat, or a cross-eyed Finn in the forecastle. Two passengers were
on board, “Mr. J. S. Hunt and a negro girl nine years old.” We know
nothing whatever about Mr. Hunt, who may have been engaged in some
trading “adventure” of his own. Perhaps his kinsfolk had waved him a
fare-ye-well from the pier-head when the _Polly_ warped out of her
berth.
The lone piccaninny is more intriguing. She appeals to the imagination
and inspires conjecture. Was she a waif of the slave traffic whom some
benevolent merchant of Boston was sending to Santa Cruz to find a home
beneath kindlier skies? Had she been entrusted to the care of Mr. Hunt?
She is unexplained, a pitiful atom visible for an instant on the tide
of human destiny. She amused the sailors, no doubt, and that austere,
copper-hued cook may have unbent to give her a doughnut when she
grinned at the galley-door.
Four days out from Boston, on December 15, the _Polly_ had cleared
the perilous sands of Cape Cod and the hidden shoals of the Georges.
Mariners were profoundly grateful when they had safely worked offshore
in the winter-time and were past Cape Cod, which bore a very evil
repute in those days of square-rigged vessels. Captain Cazneau could
recall that somber day of 1802 when three fine ships, the _Ulysses_,
_Brutus_, and _Volusia_, sailing together from Salem for European
ports, were wrecked next day on Cape Cod. The fate of those who were
washed ashore alive was most melancholy. Several died of the cold, or
were choked by the sand which covered them after they fell exhausted.
As in other regions where shipwrecks were common, some of the natives
of Cape Cod regarded a ship on the beach as their rightful plunder.
It was old Parson Lewis of Wellfleet, who, from his pulpit window,
saw a vessel drive ashore on a stormy Sunday morning. “He closed his
Bible, put on his outside garment, and descended from the pulpit, not
explaining his intention until he was in the aisle, and then he cried
out, ‘_Start fair_’ and took to his legs. The congregation understood
and chased pell-mell after him.”
The brig _Polly_ laid her course to the southward and sailed into the
safer, milder waters of the Gulf Stream. The skipper’s load of anxiety
was lightened. He had not been sighted and molested by the British
men-of-war that cruised off Boston and New York to hold up Yankee
merchantmen and impress stout seamen. This grievance was to flame in a
righteous war only a few months later. Many a voyage was ruined, and
ships had to limp back to port short-handed, because their best men had
been kidnapped to serve in British ships. It was an age when might was
right on the sea.
[Illustration: SEAMANSHIP WAS HELPLESS TO WARD OFF THE ATTACK OF THE
STORM THAT LEFT THE BRIG A SODDEN HULK]
The storm which overwhelmed the brig _Polly_ came out of the
southeast, when she was less than a week on the road to Santa Cruz.
To be dismasted and waterlogged was no uncommon fate. It happens
often nowadays, when the little schooners creep along the coast, from
Maine and Nova Scotia ports, and dare the winter blows to earn their
bread. Men suffer in open boats, as has been the seafarer’s hard lot
for ages, and they drown with none to hear their cries, but they are
seldom adrift more than a few days. The story of the _Polly_ deserves
to be rescued from oblivion because, so far as I am able to discover,
it is unique in the spray-swept annals of maritime disaster.
Seamanship was helpless to ward off the attack of the storm that left
the brig a sodden hulk. Courageously her crew shortened sail and made
all secure when the sea and sky presaged a change of weather. These
were no green hands, but men seasoned by the continual hazards of their
calling. The wild gale smote them in the darkness of night. They tried
to heave the vessel to, but she was battered and wrenched without
mercy. Stout canvas was whirled away in fragments. The seams of the
hull opened as she labored, and six feet of water flooded the hold.
Leaking like a sieve, the _Polly_ would never see port again.
Worse was to befall her. At midnight she was capsized, or thrown on her
beam-ends, as the sailor’s lingo has it. She lay on her side while the
clamorous seas washed clean over her. The skipper, the mate, the four
seamen, and the cook somehow clung to the rigging and grimly refused to
be drowned. They were of the old breed, “every hair a rope-yarn and
every finger a fish-hook.” They even managed to find an ax and grope
their way to the shrouds in the faint hope that the brig might right
if the masts went overside. They hacked away, and came up to breathe
now and then, until foremast and mainmast fell with a crash, and the
wreck rolled level. Then they slashed with their knives at the tangle
of spars and ropes until they drifted clear. As the waves rush across
a half-tide rock, so they broke over the shattered brig, but she no
longer wallowed on her side.
At last the stormy daylight broke. The mariners had survived, and they
looked to find their two passengers, who had no other refuge than
the cabin. Mr. Hunt was gone, blotted out with his affairs and his
ambitions, whatever they were. The colored child they had vainly tried
to find in the night. When the sea boiled into the cabin and filled it,
she had climbed to the skylight in the roof, and there she clung like a
bat. They hauled her out through a splintered gap, and sought tenderly
to shelter her in a corner of the streaming deck, but she lived no more
than a few hours. It was better that this bit of human flotsam should
flutter out in this way than to linger a little longer in this forlorn
derelict of a ship. The _Polly_ could not sink, but she drifted as a
mere bundle of boards with the ocean winds and currents, while seven
men tenaciously fought off death and prayed for rescue.
The gale blew itself out, the sea rolled blue and gentle, and the wreck
moved out into the Atlantic, having veered beyond the eastern edge
of the Gulf Stream. There was raw salt pork and beef to eat, nothing
else, barrels of which they fished out of the cargo. A keg of water
which had been lashed to the quarter-deck was found to contain thirty
gallons. This was all there was to drink, for the other water-casks
had been smashed or carried away. The diet of meat pickled in brine
aggravated the thirst of these castaways. For twelve days they chewed
on this salty raw stuff, and then the Indian cook, Moho by name,
actually succeeded in kindling a fire by rubbing two sticks together
in some abstruse manner handed down by his ancestors. By splitting
pine spars and a bit of oaken rail he was able to find in the heart
of them wood which had not been dampened by the sea, and he sweated
and grunted until the great deed was done. It was a trick which he was
not at all sure of repeating unless the conditions were singularly
favorable. Fortunately for the hapless crew of the _Polly_, their
Puritan grandsires had failed in their amiable endeavor to exterminate
the aborigine.
The tiny galley, or “camboose,” as they called it, was lashed to
ring-bolts in the deck, and had not been washed into the sea when the
brig was swept clean. So now they patched it up and got a blaze going
in the brick oven. The meat could be boiled, and they ate it without
stint, assuming that a hundred barrels of it remained in the hold. It
had not been discovered that the stern-post of the vessel was staved
in under water and all of the cargo excepting some of the lumber had
floated out.
The cask of water was made to last eighteen days by serving out a quart
a day to each man. Then an occasional rain-squall saved them for a
little longer from perishing of thirst. At the end of forty days they
had come to the last morsel of salt meat. The _Polly_ was following an
aimless course to the eastward, drifting slowly under the influence of
the ocean winds and currents. These gave her also a southerly slant,
so that she was caught by that vast movement of water which is known
as the Gulf Stream Drift. It sets over toward the coast of Africa and
sweeps into the Gulf of Guinea.
The derelict was moving away from the routes of trade to Europe into
the almost trackless spaces beneath the tropic sun, where the sea
glittered empty to the horizon. There was a remote chance that she
might be descried by a low-hulled slaver crowding for the West Indies
under a mighty press of sail, with her human freightage jammed between
decks to endure the unspeakable horrors of the Middle Passage. Although
the oceans were populous with ships a hundred years ago, trade flowed
on habitual routes. Moreover, a wreck might pass unseen two or three
miles away. From the quarter-deck of a small sailing ship there was
no such circle of vision as extends from the bridge of a steamer
forty or sixty feet above the water, where the officers gaze through
high-powered binoculars.
The crew of the _Polly_ stared at skies which yielded not the merciful
gift of rain. They had strength to build them a sort of shelter of
lumber, but whenever the weather was rough, they were drenched by the
waves which played over the wreck. At the end of fifty days of this
hardship and torment the seven were still alive, but then the mate, Mr.
Paddock, languished and died. It surprised his companions, for, as the
old record runs,
he was a man of robust constitution who had spent his life in
fishing on the Grand Banks, was accustomed to endure privations,
and appeared the most capable of standing the shocks of misfortune
of any of the crew. In the meridian of life, being about
thirty-five years old, it was reasonable to suppose that, instead
of the first, he would have been the last to fall a sacrifice to
hunger and thirst and exposure, but Heaven ordered it otherwise.
Singularly enough, the next to go was a young seaman, spare and active,
who was also a fisherman by trade. His name was Howe. He survived six
days longer than the mate, and “likewise died delirious and in dreadful
distress.” Fleeting thunder-showers had come to save the others, and
they had caught a large shark by means of a running bowline slipped
over his tail while he nosed about the weedy hull. This they cut up
and doled out for many days. It was certain, however, that unless they
could obtain water to drink they would soon be all dead men on the
_Polly_.
Captain Cazneau seems to have been a sailor of extraordinary resource
and resolution. His was the unbreakable will to live and to endure
which kept the vital spark flickering in his shipmates. Whenever there
was strength enough among them, they groped in the water in the hold
and cabin in the desperate hope of finding something to serve their
needs. In this manner they salvaged an iron tea-kettle and one of the
captain’s flint-lock pistols. Instead of flinging them away, he sat
down to cogitate, a gaunt, famished wraith of a man who had kept his
wits and knew what to do with them.
At length he took an iron pot from the galley, turned the tea-kettle
upside down on it, and found that the rims failed to fit together.
Undismayed, the skipper whittled a wooden collar with a seaman’s
sheath-knife, and so joined the pot and the kettle. With strips of
cloth and pitch scraped from the deck-beams, he was able to make a
tight union where his round wooden frame set into the flaring rim
of the pot. Then he knocked off the stock of the pistol and had the
long barrel to use for a tube. This he rammed into the nozzle of the
tea-kettle, and calked them as well as he could. The result was a crude
apparatus for distilling seawater, when placed upon the bricked oven of
the galley.
Imagine those three surviving seamen and the stolid redskin of a cook
watching the skipper while he methodically tinkered and puttered! It
was absolutely the one and final chance of salvation. Their lips were
black and cracked and swollen, their tongues lolled, and they could
no more than wheeze when they tried to talk. There was now a less
precarious way of making fire than by rubbing dry sticks together. This
had failed them most of the time. The captain had saved the flint and
steel from the stock of his pistol. There was tow or tarry oakum to be
shredded fine and used for tinder. This smoldered and then burst into a
tiny blaze when the sparks flew from the flint, and they knew that they
would not lack the blessed boon of fire.
Together they lifted the precious contrivance of the pot and the kettle
and tottered with it to the galley. There was an abundance of fuel from
the lumber, which was hauled through a hatch and dried on deck. Soon
the steam was gushing from the pistol-barrel, and they poured cool salt
water over the upturned spout of the tea-kettle to cause condensation.
Fresh water trickled from the end of the pistol-barrel, and they caught
it in a tin cup. It was scarcely more than a drop at a time, but they
stoked the oven and lugged buckets of salt water, watch and watch, by
night and day. They roused in their sleep to go on with the task with a
sort of dumb instinct. They were like wretched automatons.
So scanty was the allowance of water obtained that each man was limited
to “four small wine glasses” a day, perhaps a pint. It was enough to
permit them to live and suffer and hope. In the warm seas which now
cradled the _Polly_ the barnacles grew fast. The captain, the cook, and
the three seamen scraped them off and for some time had no other food.
They ate these shell-fish mostly raw, because cooking interfered with
that tiny trickle of condensed water.
[Illustration: FRESH WATER TRICKLED FROM THE END OF THE PISTOL-BARREL,
AND THEY CAUGHT IT IN A TIN CUP]
The faithful cook was the next of the five to succumb. He expired in
March, after they had been three months adrift, and the manner of his
death was quiet and dignified, as befitted one who might have been a
painted warrior in an earlier day. The account says of him:
On the 15th of March, according to their computation, poor Moho
gave up the ghost, evidently from want of water, though with much
less distress than the others, and in the full exercise of his
reason. He very devoutly prayed and appeared perfectly resigned to
the will of God who had so sorely afflicted him.
The story of the _Polly_ is unstained by any horrid episode of
cannibalism, which occurs now and then in the old chronicles of
shipwreck. In more than one seaport the people used to point at some
weather-beaten mariner who was reputed to have eaten the flesh of a
comrade. It made a marked man of him, he was shunned, and the unholy
notoriety followed him to other ships and ports. The sailors of the
_Polly_ did cut off a leg of the poor, departed Moho, and used it as
bait for sharks, and they actually caught a huge shark by so doing.
It was soon after this that they found the other pistol of the pair,
and employed the barrel to increase the capacity of the still. By
lengthening the tube attached to the spout of the tea-kettle, they
gained more cooling surface for condensation, and the flow of fresh
water now amounted to “eight junk bottles full” every twenty-four
hours. Besides this, wooden gutters were hung at the eaves of the
galley and of the rough shed in which they lived, and whenever rain
fell, it ran into empty casks.
The crew was dwindling fast. In April, another seaman, Johnson by name,
slipped his moorings and passed on to the haven of Fiddler’s Green,
where the souls of all dead mariners may sip their grog and spin their
yarns and rest from the weariness of the sea. Three men were left
aboard the _Polly_, the captain and two sailors.
The brig drifted into that fabled area of the Atlantic that is known as
the Sargasso Sea, which extends between latitudes 16° and 38° North,
between the Azores and the Antilles. Here the ocean currents are
confused and seem to move in circles, with a great expanse of stagnant
ocean, where the seaweed floats in tangled patches of red and brown and
green. It was an old legend that ships once caught in the Sargasso Sea
were unable to extricate themselves, and so rotted miserably and were
never heard of again. Columbus knew better, for his caravels sailed
through these broken carpets of weed, where the winds were so small and
fitful that the Genoese sailors despaired of reaching anywhere. The
myth persisted and it was not dispelled until the age of steam. The
doldrums of the Sargasso Sea were the dread of sailing ships.
The days and weeks of blazing calms in this strange wilderness of ocean
mattered not to the blindly errant wreck of the _Polly_. She was a
dead ship that had outwitted her destiny. She had no masts and sails
to push her through these acres of leathery kelp and bright masses
of weed which had drifted from the Gulf and the Caribbean to come to
rest in this solitary, watery waste. And yet to the captain and his
two seamen this dreaded Sargasso Sea was beneficent. The stagnant weed
swarmed with fish and gaudy crabs and mollusks. Here was food to be
had for the mere harvesting of it. They hauled masses of weed over the
broken bulwarks and picked off the crabs by hundreds. Fishing gear was
an easy problem for these handy sailormen. They had found nails enough;
hand-forged and malleable. In the galley they heated and hammered them
to make fish-hooks, and the lines were of small stuff “unrove” from
a length of halyard. And so they caught fish, and cooked them when
the oven could be spared. Otherwise they ate them raw, which was not
distasteful after they had become accustomed to it. The natives of the
Hawaiian Islands prefer their fish that way. Besides this, they split
a large number of small fish and dried them in the hot sun upon the
roof of their shelter. The sea-salt which collected in the bottom of
the still was rubbed into the fish. It was a bitter condiment, but it
helped to preserve them against spoiling.
The season of spring advanced until the derelict _Polly_ had been four
months afloat and wandering, and the end of the voyage was a long way
off. The minds and bodies of the castaways had adjusted themselves to
the intolerable situation. The most amazing aspect of the experience is
that these men remained sane. They must have maintained a certain order
and routine of distilling water, of catching fish, of keeping track
of the indistinguishable procession of the days and weeks. Captain
Cazneau’s recollection was quite clear when he came to write down his
account of what had happened. The one notable omission is the death of
another sailor, name unknown, which must have occurred after April. The
only seaman who survived to keep the skipper company was Samuel Badger.
[Illustration: “VOLUSIA” OFF SALEM, BUILT AT FALMOUTH, MASS., IN 1801,
AND WRECKED AT CAPE COD IN 1802
From a painting in Marine Room, Peabody Museum, Salem]
By way of making the best of it, these two indomitable seafarers
continued to work on their rough deck-house, “which by constant
improvement had become much more commodious.” A few bundles of hewn
shingles were discovered in the hold, and a keg of nails was found
lodged in a corner of the forecastle. The shelter was finally made
tight and weather-proof, but, alas! there was no need of having
it “more commodious.” It is obvious, also, that “when reduced to two
only, they had a better supply of water.” How long they remained in
the Sargasso Sea it is impossible to ascertain. Late in April it is
recounted that “no friendly breeze wafted to their side the seaweed
from which they could obtain crabs or insects.” The mysterious impulse
of the currents plucked at the keel of the _Polly_ and drew her clear
of this region of calms and of ancient, fantastic sea-tales. She moved
in the open Atlantic again, without guidance or destination, and yet
she seemed inexplicably to be following an appointed course, as though
fate decreed that she should find rescue waiting somewhere beyond the
horizon.
The brig was drifting toward an ocean more frequented, where the Yankee
ships bound out to the River Plate sailed in a long slant far over to
the African coast to take advantage of the booming trade-winds. She
was also wallowing in the direction of the route of the East Indiamen,
which departed from English ports to make the far-distant voyage
around the Cape of Good Hope. None of them sighted the speck of a
derelict, which floated almost level with the sea and had no spars to
make her visible. Captain Cazneau and his companion saw sails glimmer
against the sky-line during the last thousand miles of drift, but
they vanished like bits of cloud, and none passed near enough to bring
salvation.
June found the _Polly_ approaching the Canary Islands. The distance of
her journey had been about two thousand miles, which would make the
average rate of drift something more than three hundred miles a month,
or ten miles per day. The season of spring and its apple blossoms had
come and gone in New England, and the brig had long since been mourned
as missing with all hands. It was on the twentieth of June that the
skipper and his companion--two hairy, ragged apparitions--saw three
ships which appeared to be heading in their direction. This was in
latitude 28° North and longitude 13° West, and if you will look at a
chart you will note that the wreck would soon have stranded on the
coast of Africa. The three ships, in company, bore straight down at
the pitiful little brig, which trailed fathoms of sea-growth along her
hull. She must have seemed uncanny to those who beheld her and wondered
at the living figures that moved upon the weather-scarred deck. She
might have inspired “The Ancient Mariner.”
Not one ship, but three, came bowling down to hail the derelict. They
manned the braces and swung the main-yards aback, beautiful, tall
ships and smartly handled, and presently they lay hove to. The captain
of the nearest one shouted a hail through his brass trumpet, but the
skipper of the _Polly_ had no voice to answer back. He sat weeping
upon the coaming of a hatch. Although not given to emotion, he would
have told you that it had been a hard voyage. A boat was dropped from
the davits of this nearest ship, which flew the red ensign from her
spanker-gaff. A few minutes later Captain Cazneau and Samuel Badger,
able seaman, were alongside the good ship _Fame_ of Hull, Captain
Featherstone, and lusty arms pulled them up the ladder. It was six
months to a day since the _Polly_ had been thrown on her beam-ends and
dismasted.
The three ships had been near together in light winds for several days,
it seemed, and it occurred to their captains to dine together on board
the _Fame_. And so the three skippers were there to give the survivors
of the _Polly_ a welcome and to marvel at the yarn they spun. The
_Fame_ was homeward bound from Rio Janeiro. It is pleasant to learn
that Captain Cazneau and Samuel Badger “were received by these humane
Englishmen with expressions of the most exalted sensibility.” The musty
old narrative concludes:
Thus was ended the most shocking catastrophe which our seafaring
history has recorded for many years, after a series of distresses
from December 20 to the 20th of June, a period of one hundred and
ninety-two days. Every attention was paid to the sufferers that
generosity warmed with pity and fellow-feeling could dictate, on
board the _Fame_. They were transferred from this ship to the brig
_Dromio_ and arrived in the United States in safety.
Here the curtain falls. I for one should like to hear more incidents of
this astonishing cruise of the derelict _Polly_ and also to know what
happened to Captain Cazneau and Samuel Badger after they reached the
port of Boston. Probably they went to sea again, and more than likely
in a privateer to harry British merchantmen, for the recruiting officer
was beating them up to the rendezvous with fife and drum, and in August
of 1812 the frigate _Constitution_, with ruddy Captain Isaac Hull
walking the poop in a gold-laced coat, was pounding the _Guerrière_ to
pieces in thirty minutes, with broadsides whose thunder echoed round
the world.
“Ships are all right. It is the men in them,” said one of Joseph
Conrad’s wise old mariners. This was supremely true of the little brig
that endured and suffered so much, and among the humble heroes of blue
water by no means the least worthy to be remembered are Captain Cazneau
and Samuel Badger, able seaman, and Moho, the Indian cook.