and foundered in a storm within three leagues of the Texel, taking down
all hands but six, and £500,000. But it was not necessary that a vessel
should have so much as an ounce of precious metal in her to be a rich
ship. One of the costliest cargoes ever carried was found in 1764 in the
galleon _Santissima Trinidad_; for she had on board the vast collection
of foreign curiosities formed by Governor Pigot and shipped at Madras,
consisting of wild beasts, serpents, and so forth. There was a great
loss in 1773. The Dons again! You would say that the price of four such
Armadas as that of 1588 went down in the last century alone in the shape
of gold, silver, and plate. She was the annual register ship, as the
term then was, and had in her five hundred thousand piastres and ten
thousand ounces of gold on account of the king, and twice that sum on
the merchants’ account, making her a very rich ship. She foundered
during the passage, and no man escaped to tell how and when. In the same
year the Dutch lost the _Antonietta_, an Indiaman, and with her sank
£700,000 sterling, besides jewels of great value.
In 1871 a Scotchman, named Johnston, patented a treasure safe for ships.
His proposal was that the safe should be suspended at the ship’s davits,
ready at an instant’s notice to be lowered into the sea. He contrived
that the safe should detach itself in the event of a sudden calamity,
and float off to be picked up by some passing ship, or washed ashore.
The idea was ingenious; but it is not every captain who would relish the
thought of an unsinkable chest full of gold and jewels hanging at his
davits ready to the hand of the first daring Jack who should depend upon
a black night and the navigable qualities of the chest to come safely
off with a few hundreds of thousands of pounds. Yet what pickings the
deep would have offered—would still offer—if the money and jewels
carried by ships were stowed in contrivances which floated after the
vessel was gone! The mind is oppressed by the splendid possibilities the
fancy suggests. Here we have something beyond the dreams of avarice.
Where might not such chests be sought with large promise of dazzling
discovery? The ocean is a miser. Like some old woman found dead of
starvation, with guineas and bank-notes stitched away in her rags, is
the sea in her beggarly art of concealing treasure among the squalid
weediness of her shores. “Some time ago,” says an old report, “on the
arrival of the _Two Sisters_, Captain O’Neale, of Bristol, at Dominica,
a chest containing upwards of £40,000 in Portugal gold fell overboard as
they were putting it into a boat, and was lost in ten fathoms of water.”
They had nothing but Dr. Halley’s diving-bell in those times, and the
money lies at this hour where it sank, only deeper perhaps, and very
much out of sight. How such a disaster would be dealt with now may be
known by reference to the comparatively recent recovery of some hundred
thousand pounds off the Grand Canary from the hold of a steamer sunk, if
my memory is correct, in about thirty fathoms of water.
There was a curious kind of smuggling practised aboard the old ships,
and there is reason to believe that in many instances the actual value
of the treasure in foundered vessels was never declared. An example is
given of a Spanish register ship falling into the hands of the British.
Certain discoveries determined the captors not to sell her, but to break
her up themselves, believing that by so doing they might find valuables
artfully concealed. The duty on gold was high, and to evade it many of
the bars of that metal had been thinly coated with pewter and
denominated “fine pewter” in the invoice, by order of the Spanish
merchants. The particulars of the freight are worth giving, as
illustrative of the cargoes of that age (1793) and of the great value
entrusted to a single ship. There were six hundred and ninety-four cases
of silver, each containing three thousand dollars; thirty-three cases of
gold, besides plate and jewels of the value of £500,000; seventy-two
hundred of redwood; sixteen cases of silver in bars; two thousand two
hundred and sixty-two quintals of bark of different weights; two
thousand two hundred and forty quintals of cocoa; four thousand eight
hundred and eighty-seven cases of pepper; a great number of cases of
lead, wool, sugar, medical roots, gum of cocoa, together with hides,
skins, barrels of honey, and eleven cases of the various productions of
Peru. “This cargo,” says the account, “has been two years in collecting
from different parts of the coast, and is without exception the richest
that ever was trusted on board of any single ship. It is impossible to
form a just estimate of its value, but it is certainly not overrated
when it is stated as twelve or thirteen hundred thousand pounds. Think
of the costly wreck such a vessel as this would have made! and
certainly, so far as her freighters were concerned, she was as good as
foundered when she was captured.”
The following illustration of the old methods of concealing treasure I
find in a little sea-book published anonymously in 1834: “I once went,
with others, on board a prize we had taken to make the usual search.
After rummaging the sail-room, I got into the store-room, where I saw a
case filled with bran, and thrusting my hand among it, for I thought it
might prove a hiding-place, I found something hard wrapped up in a piece
of blue cloth. Not having leisure to examine it at the moment, I slipped
it into the pocket of my jacket, and was coming away, when I trod upon
something, and looking down at the place, saw a potatoe that I had
crushed with an English guinea peeping from its hiding place. I picked
up all I could and jumped into the boat.... The murphies yielded me
about thirty guineas; and when I undid the parcel there came from its
swaddling clothes a most beautiful gold watch set round with diamonds.”
Great in its way was that treasure of seven million five hundred
thousand dollars and the value of a million and a half in cochineal and
other effects which five men-of-war, under the command of Rear-Admiral
Don Adrian Caudron Cantin, brought to Cadiz in 1775, and the one
thousand five hundred octaves of gold, two hundred thousand crusades of
silver, and the eighty serons of cochineal which, in the same year, were
brought by a ship to Lisbon from the Brazils. In more modern times the
costliness of shipwreck is to be found in the destruction of the fabric
and her cargo rather than in the loss of the treasure on board. Whatever
may have been the worth of a galleon, as a ship, there need be no
scruple in concluding that when brand-new her value would be but that of
a toy in comparison with such ocean mail boats as now convey specie and
“valuables.” The sinking of an Atlantic, Indian, or Australian
liner—even with a clean hold—would represent an immense treasure if told
in dollars, ducats, or piastres; and when you add the cargo of such a
craft along with the passengers’ luggage, which must often include a
quantity of jewellery expressing many thousands of pounds alone, some
astonishing figures would be the result. As a matter of fact, our later
shipwrecks do not point to the same heavy losses in specie and articles
manufactured out of the precious metals as were sustained in former
times. The destruction or capture of a single ship in the last and in
preceding centuries would frequently signify the sinking of a million to
a million and a half of pounds sterling in chests of pieces of eight, in
ingots and bars, and in religious decorations, and this without
reference to the cargo, the value of which may be inferred when we hear
of tea selling at two guineas a pound.[53]
Footnote 53:
“Tea was first imported from Holland by the Earls of Arlington and
Ossory in 1666; from their ladies the women of quality learned its
use. Its price was then £3 a pound, and continued the same to 1707. In
1715 we began to use green tea, and the practice of drinking it
descended to the lower class of the people.” “Johnson’s Works,” vol.
ii. p. 335. At the beginning of this century tea was 25_s._ a pound.
The _Royal Charter_ is the most notable modern instance of the wreck of
a “treasure” ship that I can just now call to mind. She left Australia
with £350,000 in her. Of this sum, says Charles Dickens in his chapter
on this dreadful shipwreck in the “Uncommercial Traveller,” £300,000
worth were recovered. At the time of the novelist’s visit to the spot
where she had driven ashore, “the great bulk of the remainder,” writes
he, “was surely and steadily coming up. Some loss of sovereigns there
would be, of course; indeed, at first sovereigns had drifted in with the
sand, and been scattered far and wide over the beach like sea shells,
but most other golden treasure would be found. So tremendous had the
force of the sea been when it broke the ship that it had beaten one
great ingot of gold deep into a strong and heavy piece of her solid iron
work, in which also several loose sovereigns, that the ingot had swept
in before it, had been found as firmly embedded as though the iron had
been liquid when they had been forced there.” This is a curiosity of
disaster, but mightily suggestive of the sea’s miserly trick of
concealing her plunder. Meanwhile, how much gold and silver, minted and
otherwise, is annually afloat? How many millions are yearly borne over
the deep to and from India, America, Australia, China, and South Africa,
by English steamers alone? There should be no difficulty in making the
calculation, which, when arrived at, must surely yield a fine idea of
the treasure over which the red flag flies, and an excellent notion of
the trust that is reposed in the British shipmaster, and of the high and
sterling qualities which go to the fulfilment of it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_CURIOSITIES OF DISASTERS AT SEA._
An old sailor once said to me, “If I were to write down one quarter of
what I’ve seen, heard, and gone through, the reader would throw away the
book, calling me all the evil names he could put his tongue to, afore he
had read half of what I’d writ.” I remember an ingenious reviewer of a
nautical romance affirming that it was impossible the author could be
correct in representing such a sea as he described as running off
Agulhas in a gale from the north-west, because, said the critic, “we
have repeatedly crossed the Channel between Folkestone and Boulogne, in
all sorts of weather, without ever having witnessed such waves as we are
here told about.” Yes, sailors see and do strange things; they spend
their lives on a wild and wonderful element, and are a community who
generate gnats at which the landsman is prone to strain. We hear of
amazing escapes on shore, but, surely, they cannot be so astonishing as
the perils which men encounter at sea, or we should hearken with less
incredulous souls when Jack coils his legs up under him and relates his
experiences.
Some time ago I read what the newspapers called “a terrible story of
shipwreck.” An American schooner came across six men washing about on
the top of a deck-house. They were the survivors of a crew of Spaniards
whose barque had foundered six days before. When the captain of her
found that his vessel was bound to sink he set his men to work to make a
raft. They were thus employed when the barque all on a sudden turned
over and sank. Seven of the poor fellows were sucked down with the hull;
the rest, finding the deck-house afloat, crawled on to it. For five days
and nights they were beaten here and there by the seas, without drink
and without food. Ashore the dangers a man confronts and escapes may be
terrible; but the ground he treads is what he is born to: peril is
localized or limited. He is imprisoned in a mine; he is menaced by
suffocation or starvation. He loses his way on a mountain; he is
threatened by death from exhaustion or by stumbling over the edge of a
height. He is in the heart of a panic-stricken crowd; he stands to have
his ribs crushed in and his lungs choked. He is in a house on fire; he
must be burnt if he cannot escape. To be sure, danger on shore is as
little agreeable as it would be in the air or under the waters; but a
man may commonly say of peril on land what he cannot say of peril at
sea, that he knows the form of it and what shape his destruction will
take if he cannot elude it.
But at sea you have a combination of forces working against a creature
who when on the ocean is as much out of his element as the shark that
ogles him would be if lifted high and dry on to a ship’s deck. Take
those six Spaniards washing about on top of a deck-house. What was to be
their fate? Were they to be drowned, or frozen, or starved, or be picked
up raving mad with thirst and other sufferings? Think of the cruelty of
the sea—fiendish in spirit as any torturer of the good old days of the
Inquisition—tossing that deck-house with a horrible human-like delight
in the sport that kept those white-lipped soaking rags of men holding on
for their lives! Consider a little the malignant confederacy of billows
wasting their giant weight, one after another, ceaselessly, restlessly,
one after another, upon those miserable men made mere mocking tumblers
of by the play of the waters, and looking up to God out of the supreme
agony of their ocean struggles! If the surge could not tear them from
their desperate hold it left them drenched to the marrow, and fit for
the freezing part that it was the business of the wind to play. Or, if
the wind left their hearts warm enough for life it was only that hunger
should not be balked in the lodgment of its own particular anguish.
For my part I can well understand why landsmen are incredulous when
sailors who have suffered begin to talk. There is internal evidence to
suggest that when the Wedding Guest left the Ancient Mariner,
unpleasantly fascinated as he had been by his eye, he went to the people
who had been making merry, and informed them that he had been detained
by a yarn that was fit only for the marines. Why, even in the year 1800,
Sir Samuel Standidge was apologizing for writing to say that he had met
ice in the month of May in the Atlantic forty-five degrees north; his
excuse being that it was true. The Wedding Guest flourished in an
earlier reign when not very much was known about bergs, and one thinks
of him as sneering when he told his friends that the Ancient Mariner
said the roar of the ice breaking up was like “noises in a swound.”
In the “Pasha of Many Tales,” Captain Marryat exaggerates the proverbial
“twister” of the marine. But how many experiences have sailors suffered
incomparably more surprising than the most ingenious of the fictions in
Marryat’s book; and more miraculous in the machinery of fortuitous
escape than could ever occur to the most daring among the old Arabian
inventors? There are instances of disasters so complicated by misfortune
as to become sheer eccentricities of peril. I remember being much struck
with a paragraph I came across in a newspaper of the last century:
“Captain Lamire, commander of the _Heureux_, on April 26, being in the
lat. of one deg. 2 min., and 21 deg. 28 min. long. W., reckoning from
Teneriff, several of his crew, and a great number of negros on board,
were seized with a disorder of their eyes, many of whom were blind for
ten or twelve days; nine lost their sight entirely, and seven or eight
the sight of one eye. Accidents of this kind, it is said, are not
unprecedented in latitudes so near the line, but the great number
affected at the same time exceeds anything that was ever heard of
before.” Had that old ship carried such slender companies as vessels now
go manned with, who shall say, in the face of the numbers who were
blinded, that all hands would not have lost their sight? What object
could the imagination fasten upon more dreadful and tragical than a ship
in charge of a blind crew? What possibilities of harrowing description
would such a subject offer to the romancer!
There is preserved a curious account of the Hon. John O’Brien, a brother
or near relative to the Earl of Inchiquin. He was so incessantly in
jeopardy from one cause or another that his career expresses in
perfection the eccentricity of disaster. A few examples will hint at his
story. He was a lieutenant in the Navy in 1747, and his first mishap
befel him off the coast of India, where his ship was wrecked, all hands
perishing with the exception of O’Brien and four sailors. He embarked in
a vessel to return to Europe, but was cast away near the Cape of Good
Hope, and was the only one of a great number who contrived to escape
with his life. The Dutch Governor, discovering him to be a “person of
honour,” supplied him with every necessary for continuing the voyage,
and gave him a cabin in one of the homeward bound East Indiamen. The
Governor of another settlement, who was going home in the same ship,
finding himself rather straitened for room on account of the number of
his own family, begged for the exclusive use of the vessel for his suite
and baggage. The Governor of the Cape complied, and procured
accommodation for O’Brien in another vessel that was to sail on the same
day. Shortly afterwards the ships put to sea, and it is recorded as an
absolute and well assured fact that, within twenty-four hours of their
leaving the Cape, O’Brien saw the ship he had quitted founder in a gale
of wind, taking down with her every creature on board! A few years later
this fortune-hunted gentleman was stationed on board the _Dartmouth_ of
fifty guns. She fell in with the _Glorioso_, a Spanish man-of-war, and
engaged her for some hours. O’Brien was at his station between decks,
when the gunner ran up to him, and, with wildness and despair in his
look, cried out, “Oh, sir! the powder-room!” Lieutenant O’Brien heard no
more, for the ship instantly blew up! Such a catastrophe as this, you
would conjecture, must effectually put an end to O’Brien. In fact, if I
were to write his life I should skip this little disaster for fear that
it should destroy the reader’s faith in the other parts of the story. It
is true, nevertheless, that O’Brien, instead of perishing, was found
floating about on the carriage of a gun. It was supposed that he had
been blown through a porthole with one of the guns. He was picked up by
a privateer named the _Duke_, and as a proof that the natural
sprightliness and gaiety of his character was superior to so slight an
accident as that of being blown up in a man-of-war, he is recorded to
have said to the captain of the _Duke_, speaking with great gravity,
“You will excuse me, sir, for appearing before you in such a dress; but
the reason is I left my ship so hurriedly that I had no time to put on
better clothes.” But enough of the Hon. John O’Brien.
Though it might not be wise in a romancer to represent his hero as being
blown up in a ship without injury, there are, for all that, several
instances in the old accounts—and one or two, I think, in more recent
annals—of mariners and others who have gone up like rockets and come
down all alive, perfectly sound, if not in high spirits. Monsieur de
Montauban, who underwent this experience off the coast of Guinea, wrote
a very thrilling account of it. In his case there were two ships, both
of which exploded simultaneously. “The reader,” says he, “must figure to
himself our horror at two ships blowing up above two hundred fathoms
into the air, where there was formed, as it were, a mountain of fire,
water, and wreck; the awfulness of the explosion below, and the cannons
going off in the air; the rending of masts and planks, the tearing of
the sails and cordage, added to the cries of the men.” He was on the
forecastle giving orders when the ship took fire, and attributes his
preservation to his being blown so high as to go clear of the volcanic
wreckage. In truth, he seems to have topped the whole blazing mass, and
then fallen into clear water, under whose surface he remained so long
that he was nearly spent before he rose.
The Moskito Indian and Alexander Selkirk are representative names for
preservation from marooning—a situation idealized by Defoe. The
“eight-and-twenty years all alone in an uninhabited island on the coast
of America, near the mouth of the great river of Oroonoque,” is very
well for poor old Robinson Crusoe, whose life and strange, surprising
adventures are, perhaps, chiefly imaginary in this span of time allotted
to them by the great master of English fiction. The longest period of
“all-aloneness” I have encountered in my reading may be found in the
memoirs of Captain Edward Thompson, who was “born at Hull, in Yorkshire,
of a respectable family.” But on the whole we must count him a more real
person than that other gentleman of York, mariner. Thompson was the
author of “A Sailor’s Letters,” and in a communication in which he
proposes to write his life, he says, “I shall begin like Daniel Defoe,
with “I, E. T., was born of respectable parents in Kingston-upon-Hull,
from whence I sailed in the _Love and Unity_, (whom God preserve), anno
1750, on a voyage to Greenland.” Whether his discovery was inspired by
his admiration of Defoe, or whether he states a fact in what he records,
I cannot say. He was an officer in her Majesty’s ship _Stirling Castle_,
and being at Tobago, he wandered into the woods in search of wild
oranges. Whilst roaming here and there he discovered a hut, the
inhabitant of which, a venerable looking man, addressed him in French,
and, to his astonishment, declared that he had resided _twenty-one
years_ in that solitary situation, having scarcely any communication
with a human being! He told Thompson that the Indians occasionally
called at his hermitage whilst hunting, gave him part of their game, and
shaved his beard off with a knife, but he never paid enough attention to
their language to converse in it. He had been a priest at Martinique,
but having in some way given offence, he was seized in the night and
transported to Tobago. He declined all offers to convey him to Europe,
declaring that he was reconciled to his all-alone life and happier than
he could be in any other. In this, as in other respects, this singular
person cannot be said to have resembled Crusoe.”
I find the seeds of a romance of the true old pattern combined with what
may justly be termed a curiosity of disaster in this century-old report:
“A vessel coming lately from Newcastle to London at sea, within five
miles of the Port of Shields, took up a wooden cradle with a child in
it. The child was alive and well.” The old is for ever echoing into the
new. Only the other day I read of a boy a few years old going adrift in
a boat. He was hunted after in all directions, but to no purpose. The
parents were said to be inconsolable. The issue of this thing I know
not; but who does not pray that the little fellow was found and
restored? When you think of that old collier jogging along, picking up
the cradle with the bairn in it, the past re-shapes itself; you see the
quaint wooden cradle, the wondering eyes of the child staring into the
amazed faces of the rough Jacks, whose touched hearts give a new impetus
to the working of the jaws upon their quids. “The cradle,” says the
account, “is supposed to have been carried to sea by an inundation in
one of the places adjacent.” There should have been found a good subject
for a poet, I think, even in those bewigged days of heroic measures and
Johnsonian periods, in the meeting of the mother and the babe delivered
back to her love by that old ocean whose tenderness is sometimes as
marvellous as its cruelty is terrible and inexpressible.
Another curiosity of disaster, hardly credible, though it has been often
enough related, may be found in the story of the brig _Nerina_.