THE _Times_, after some preliminary observations on the gale of
Wednesday, contents itself with a general record of the calamity:--
'The "Royal Charter" was built about four years ago; she was of
2,719 tons register, and 200 horse power. Her owners were Messrs.
Gibb, Brights, and Co., of Liverpool. She was an iron vessel, worked
by a screw. On the 26th of August last she sailed from Melbourne,
having on board 388 passengers, and a crew, including officers, of
112 persons. She accomplished her passage in two months as near as
may be. On Monday morning she passed Queenstown, and thirteen of the
passengers landed in a pilot-boat. The next day the "Royal Charter"
took on board from a steam-tug eleven riggers who had been assisting
in working a ship to Cardiff. Thus, at the time of the calamity
there were on board 498 persons, and of these only 39 were saved.
The ship, as we are informed, had on board but a small cargo, mainly
of wool and skins. A more important item of her freight was gold and
specie, which at the lowest estimate is put at 500,000_l._ On
Tuesday evening there was blowing from the E.N.E. a violent gale,
which fell with full force on the ill-fated ship. She arrived off
Point Lynas at six o'clock in the evening of Tuesday, and for
several hours Captain Taylor continued throwing up signal rockets,
in the hope of attracting the attention of a pilot. None made his
appearance. The gale increased in violence; the ship was making
leeway, and drifting gradually towards the beach. It was pitch dark;
no help was at hand. The captain let go both anchors, but the gale
had now increased to a hurricane, and had lashed the sea up to
madness. The chains parted, and, notwithstanding that the engines
were worked at their full power, the "Royal Charter" continued to
drift towards the shore. At three A.M. she struck the rocks in four
fathoms of water. The passengers till this moment had no idea of the
imminence of their peril. The masts and rigging were cut adrift, but
this gave no relief. The ship continued to grind and dash upon the
rocks. The screw became foul with the drift spars and rigging, and
ceased to act. The consequence was, that the ship was thrown
broadside on to the rocks, and now the terror began. The officers of
the ship either hoped against hope, or endeavoured to alleviate the
agony of the passengers by assuring them there was no immediate
danger. A Portuguese sailor, Joseph Rogers--his name deserves to be
recorded--volunteered to convey a rope on shore through the heavy
surf, and succeeded in his attempt. Had time been given no doubt
every person on board could now have been safely conveyed on shore;
but it was fated that the end should be otherwise. One tremendous
wave came after another, playing with the "Royal Charter" like a
toy, and swinging her about on the rocks. She divided amidships, and
wellnigh all on board were swept into the furious sea. A few minutes
afterwards she also parted at the forehatch, and then there was an
end. Those who were not killed by the sea were killed by the
breaking up of the ship. In the course of a very few moments the
work was done, and four hundred and fifty-nine persons were numbered
among the dead. It was about seven A.M. on Wednesday that she broke
up.
'It is said by those who have visited the scene of the calamity that
never was destruction more complete. The ironwork of the vessel is
in mere shreds; the woodwork is in chips. The coast and the fields
above the cliffs are strewn with fragments of the cargo and of the
bedding and clothing. In the words of one of our reports, "A more
complete annihilation of a noble vessel never occurred on our
coast." Worse still, the rocks are covered with corpses of men and
women frightfully mutilated, and strewn with the sovereigns which
the poor creatures had gone so far to seek, and which were now torn
from them in so pitiful a way. Of course, as is usual in all such
cases, the reasons given for the occurrence of the calamity are
various. In one account we see it attributed to the order given
before midnight to veer out on the starboard cable. This, as it is
said, brought too much strain upon the port cable, which parted, and
then the other parted also, and then the ship drifted ashore. Others
tell us that if the screw had not been fouled by the drift rigging
and spars, the "Royal Charter" might have been saved. These,
however, could have been but secondary and minor causes. The origin
of the calamity seems to have been that in a wild night, with a
gale blowing that soon became a hurricane, the ship was brought up
dangerously near a lee shore. Let it be remembered, however, that
Captain Taylor was the last man seen alive on board.'
The _Morning Herald_, after chronicling the disaster, concludes with
this valuable paragraph:--
'This greatest and most terrible of the results of the late
hurricane--for it cannot be otherwise described--will argue strongly
either on behalf of those who demand ports of departure less
channel-bound than Liverpool, or for those who urge the great
necessity for a national system of providing life-boats which shall
give, even in such wild bays as this where the "Royal Charter" went
to pieces, a chance to some of the passengers of ill-fated ships
that may be driven into them in such a storm as that of Tuesday
night or Wednesday morning. Unfortunately the outcry on these
subjects rises only while the mind of the public is resting on such
a disaster as that which has just befallen the "Royal Charter," or
at a time when the whole country is deploring such a series of
wrecks as those which have strewn our coasts within the last three
days. The life-boat question should certainly not be left to private
benevolence, or to the efforts of companies. Governments have gone
too far in their neglect of such subjects or their refusal to
interfere, and we are certain that there is no other mode of using
the public money which would meet with more hearty popular assent
than that which would devote it to the provision of life-boats and
harbours of refuge.'
The colony may study these words with equal advantage to ourselves.
The _Daily News_ is none the less able on the subject, because for
once disposed to be smart. Does "Singleton Fontenoy" speak in the
following?--
'There is a true savour of sea-salt in the grim irony of that
couplet in one of Dibdin's sea-songs, where Jack is contrasting the
freedom and security of life aboard ship with the continual jeopardy
to which landsmen who walk about streets and dwell in houses are
exposed:--
"While you and I, Bill, on the deck
Are comfortably lying,
My eyes! what tiles and chimbly pots
Around their heads are flying!"
'The recklessness of temperament which sends a lad to sea, and
which, hardened and confirmed by conflict with the elements, laughs
at real danger, and yet is apt to shrink with a sort of dismayed
disgust from the vulgar inconveniences of artificial existence, is
happily and humorously expressed. The dweller in cities, on the
other hand, with all his habitual scepticism and indifference, who
peeps at the moon as at a raree show, and takes a return ticket to
go and gape at an eclipse from some distant hill in the
country--your acute, hard-headed, practical man on Change, in the
Law-court, in the Club, stares and marvels like a mere baby when he
is brought face to face with the terror and mystery of Nature in any
of her sublimer moods. A fashionable public at Brighton running out
to see the effects of a gale of wind upon real "water" is surely as
sorry and ludicrous a combination as the genius of mockery can
devise for the laughter of the stars. Accidents and offences, fires
and murders, burglaries and poisonings, are as dull and stale as
taxation, or as births, deaths, and marriages; they are the "useful
and the beautiful" of well-regulated society; and who but a dry
statistical philanthropist reads the wreck-list, or ponders the
significance of the annual catalogue of casualties among merchantmen
and coasters? It is only when the great meteorological staple of
English conversation derives a certain freshness and novelty from a
sudden attack of winter upon the rear of autumn, or when a hurricane
has torn up a tree in the park and blown an old woman into the river
or a child into the canal, that our inland world begins to feel that
the universe is not absolutely done to order yet.
'Last Tuesday night, when town and country were well abed, and let
us hope not without thankfulness of heart, nor without having taken
thought of "all those who travel by land or sea;"--when even the
rancid haunts of vice in London were emptying, and the homeless were
slinking off to snatch forgetfulness somewhere out of reach of wind
and rain:--in the dead hour of a desolate night, desolate enough
among street lamps flickering in a clammy fog, more desolate still
when a sickly moon peered dimly through a drift of ragged cloud, and
the wind howled and moaned with a roar of rage and anguish--in that
desolate night and that dead hour one of those terrible calamities
which are remembered for centuries was hurrying near five hundred of
our fellow-creatures to sudden death at sea, after a safe and
prosperous voyage of twelve thousand miles, within six hours of
port, and within stonethrow of the long-wished-for land.
Heartrending and disastrous is the shipping intelligence of this
week all round our coasts, but the wreck of the "Royal Charter"
will be a melancholy fireside tale among our children's children.
If, indeed, what is called "progress" be truly defined as an
increasing dominion over time and space, then England, marching at
the van, atones for her pre-eminence by many a hostage. We talk of
bridging seas by the size and speed of our ships, but every now and
then we offer up costly sacrifices to avenge our triumphs, and
correct our pride.
'It would be easy for some glib interpreters of Providence to
pronounce homilies on the fate of a ship laden with the root of all
evil, and of men hasting to be rich; for it is certain that the
"Royal Charter" had at least 500,000_l._ on board, and that many of
her passengers were returning from Australia with fortunes in their
hands. But this catastrophe may point, we think, a safer and more
serviceable moral. To mortal sight human destinies are at best a
chaos, and it is not for mortal wisdom to presume to fabricate out
of inexplicable chances a providential order of its own. Here, for
instance, was a ship touching at Queenstown, and landing thirteen
passengers, one of whom left his wife on board to pursue her voyage
to Liverpool, and, as it turned out, to meet death on the way; here
were ten poor riggers, just returned from working a vessel to
Cardiff, taken on board from a steam-tug in the Channel, and five of
them condemned to perish with a ship that had come all the way from
Australia in safety. Who will presume to judge? "The one was taken
and the other left." Let us be content to moralize more humbly and
humanely on the fate of our fellow-creatures. It were a miserable
task, while the bodies of the poor castaway people are still
awaiting Christian burial, to look about for whom to blame, when all
but a score are beyond the reach of blame or praise. It is easy for
us to wonder and regret that the "Royal Charter" should ever have
passed on from Queenstown and sailed up the Irish Channel without a
pilot in wild and threatening weather--that without a pilot, and
with a northerly gale coming on, she should have passed by Holyhead,
and kept hugging a dead lee shore at night along the most dangerous
line of all our coast. Any one who knows that coast, or who has even
glanced at a chart, cannot fail to be struck with consternation at
the bare thought of such a ship as the "Royal Charter" keeping that
Welsh land close on board in the worst of weather, night coming on,
without a pilot, in the hope of finding one, and for the sake of
saving a few hours at the close of an astonishingly rapid and
successful passage.
'How the "Royal Charter" ever had the right to get into that
atrocious Dulas Bay, where the rocks stick up like jagged teeth, is
a question quite as easy to ask as it is difficult to understand
how the "Royal Charter" should have ventured to pass Holyhead in a
gale without a pilot. From Holyhead to the point where the ship
struck is _all danger_; and though with the wind off the land and a
pilot on board the course for a ship bound to the Mersey may be in
shore, was it the safe course, it may be asked, under opposite
circumstances? Yet it is not to be presumed for a moment that the
common signs of weather, or the rules for approaching land, were
deliberately set at nought, or that the weather-glasses were not
consulted, or that the tidal currents and the notorious indraught on
the Welsh coast were forgotten or neglected by the lamented
commander of the "Royal Charter" and his officers, none of whom,
alas! remain to tell the story. From the moment when it was found
that the ship could not make head against the hurricane and the
indraught, and that it was impossible to make the Mersey, the fate
of the ship needs no explanation. Blue lights and rockets were burnt
for a pilot; but, as no one who knows Welsh pilots will be surprised
to hear, no pilot appeared; and, pilot or no pilot, it was now too
late. The ship was hove to, and drifting helplessly into Dulas Bay.
Here she let go her anchors, "keeping her screw working to ease the
cables." One after the other the cables parted with the strain; at
half-past two she struck, the tide ebbing, and with the flood she
went broadside on to the shelving beach, literally split in two
amidships, and was smashed to pieces on the rocks. We are guilty of
no presumption in drawing one conclusion, and that is, the worse
than uselessness, the absolutely fatal mischief of the so-called
"auxiliary" screw. The "Royal Charter" was, it should be remembered,
an iron ship of 2,749 tons, "originally intended for a sailing
vessel," but transformed into a screw steamer, "with engines of 300
horse power." The value of these screw engines to a ship of this
size and quality seems to us at least problematical; at best it
could only serve her in making way across the "calm belts;" and as a
set off to this exceptional service, there was the dead weight of
the engines and the space they occupied, often to no purpose.
Whatever may have been the use of the auxiliary screw in calms, it
is too certain that in working off a lee shore it was not only not
serviceable, but disastrous; it not only failed to claw the ship
off, but it failed to ease the cables, and when the spars were cut
away, the screw got fouled, and ceased to work. Is it absurd or
unjust to suppose that had there been no auxiliary steam power in
the "Royal Charter" she would never have been permitted to hug a lee
shore at night in search of a pilot, with a hurricane dead on her
weather bow, and strong indraught to the shore? Had she trusted to
her sailing powers only, would she not have consulted her
weather-glasses more anxiously, and kept well out to sea? We do not
attempt to answer these questions, but we ask them deferentially,
sorrowfully, and under a due sense of responsibility.
'The "Royal Charter," like others of her class, was probably built
for speed rather than for strength; and it is no secret that these
Australian clippers are severely strained by "carrying on." It is no
matter of surprise, then, that the ship "split amidships" after she
struck, "letting her engines and passengers through," and afterwards
parted longitudinally "at the forehatch." Even the "Great Eastern"
would have been' [was] 'sorely tried by such a sea on such a shore.
Let us draw a veil of pity over the horrors of that scene. The poet
of "The Shipwreck," with all his imagination, aided by all his terms
of art, has not conceived anything more terrible than the sudden,
complete and indiscriminate destruction of the "Royal Charter" with
her four hundred and seventy souls on board, and her chests of
gold--all going down together in that hungry sea, and torn to pieces
by those cruel rocks. Yet even a calamity like this has its
compensations; for all on board, from Captain Taylor--who by his
stedfast devotedness and unalterable courage preserved discipline to
the last, and died like a British seaman at his post of duty--to the
poor seaman who volunteered to carry through the blinding hurricane
and the foaming surf a hawser to the rocks, and the good clergyman
who calmly said the last prayers for the dying, all met death
unflinchingly, and in their last moments left an example to the few
who survive, and to all who mourn them.'
The above is the most notable article which has appeared on this
disaster. It deals with gale, ship, captain, causes, and results. Its
penultimate paragraph seems to me to hit the secret of the casualty
direct.