looks seemed to tell of his having been frozen rather than starved to
death. They were both dressed in the plain garb of the merchant sailor.
The one that lived was assisted forward and disappeared in the forecastle
in the company of two or three sympathizing seamen of our crew. Nothing
so appeals to the humanity of the British sailor as the misery that is
expressed by the open boat. In this case no appeal could have been more
complete. I jumped into the little craft in obedience to the captain’s
orders and overhauled her, and found nothing to eat or drink. Her cargo
was an empty beaker and some fragments of canvas which appeared to have
been chewed. The very heart within me sickened at the story of anguish
that was silently related by those dusky, dough-like lumps of canvas. We
hoisted the boat aboard. The weather permitted us to do that, and she was
too good and useful a boat to lose.
“In the afternoon we buried the body of the dead, nameless seaman;
nameless, because it seemed that the other was incapable of relating
his story; pain and famine had paralyzed the tongue in his mouth. The
captain read the service; his manner was so subdued, his whole demeanour
expressed him as so affected, that you would have supposed he was burying
some dear friend or near relative. I had often attended a burial service
at sea, but never one more impressive than this. All the desolation of
the mighty deep seemed to have centred, as in a very spirit, in the
lifeless body that lay stitched in a hammock in the gangway.
“When the body was overboard the captain walked to the boat we had
hoisted in, and stood with his first look of amazement and grief,
musing upon, or rather staring at the name _Prairie Chief_ painted in
the stern-sheets. He then went to his cabin. When he again made his
appearance some time afterwards he was extraordinarily reserved and
gloomy. Throughout the watches he would ask if the man was better. I do
not recollect that he addressed another word to me than that question.
“Next forenoon, some time about eight bells, the man was sufficiently
recovered to come aft. I stood beside Captain Huddersfield, sextant in
hand, whilst he talked to him. He said his name was James Dickens, and
that he had been an able seaman aboard the barque _Prairie Chief_. The
ship was from London bound to Sydney. South of the Cape they met with
very heavy weather from the northward, which hove them to and drove them
south; it was so thick the captain could not get an observation. The
wind slackened and the captain made sail, defying the thickness; he was
impatient and had already made a long passage, and was resolved, happen
what might, to ‘ratch’ north for a clear sky. In the middle of the day,
when the smother upon the sea was so thick that the flying-jibboom end
was out of sight from the wheel, a loud and fearful cry of ‘Ice right
ahead!’ rang from the forecastle. The wheel was revolved, every spoke,
with the fury of despair, by the helmsman; but the ship’s time was come,
and there was nothing in seamanship to manœuvre her clear of her fate.
She telescoped into the ice and went to pieces.
“This, Dickens said, had happened about ten days before we fell in with
the boat. The disaster was not so frightfully sudden but that there was
time for some to escape. A number of people, said the man, got upon the
ice. Amongst them were the captain, his wife, and a female passenger.
Dickens particularly noticed these people, that is, the commander and the
two women. He and three others drifted away in a boat. The barque went to
pieces aloft when she struck; he was sure that none others saving himself
and the three men escaped in the boats. It was in the middle of the day
when the ship ran into the berg, and the darkness happened so quickly
after the disaster that he was unable to tell much of what followed. Two
of his companions died whilst they were adrift and their bodies were
dropped overboard.
“Whilst Dickens told his story I watched the captain. His features
were knitted into an expression of consternation, yet he never once
interrupted the man. When the sailor had made an end of his story,
Huddersfield said, in a slow level voice—
“‘Was your commander Captain Smalley?’
“‘Yes, sir.’
“‘Was one of the female passengers Mrs. Huddersfield?’
“‘It was her name, sir.’
“The captain turned his eyes upon me and cried, with a sudden wild toss
of his hands that somehow gave an extraordinary pathos to his words and
looks, ‘She is my wife!’
“Nothing was said for some moments. I was at a loss for speech. It was
the same as hearing of the death of one beloved by the person you are
with when the news is given to him; what can you say? Presently I said
to the man—
“‘Did you sight any ships whilst you were adrift?’
“‘Nothing, sir.’
“‘But won’t the ice you ran into,’ said I, ‘be well within the limits of
the ocean fairway?’
“He could not answer me this.
“‘How far south did you drift?’
“He did not know.
“‘If they are on the ice is it too late to rescue them, sir?’ I inquired,
addressing the captain, after another pause.
“He seemed too distracted by grief to heed my question.
“‘I had hoped,’ he said, speaking in short breathings and broken
sentences, ‘to find her safe at Sydney on my arrival there; she went home
last year on a visit to her mother. It was arranged that Captain Smalley,
an old friend, should bring her out. Ten days ago,’ he muttered to
himself, ‘ten days ago.’ He covered his eyes with his hand, then looking
vacantly at his sextant, went to the rail and seemed to stare out to sea
into the south.
“I was about to question Dickens afresh when the captain rounded upon us
in a very flash of white face and wild, eager manner.
“‘Try for her in fifty!’ he cried, looking at me, but as though he saw
some one beyond me.
“I viewed him with silent surprise. The very memory and therefore the
meaning of the words he now pronounced had gone out of my head, and I did
not understand him.
“‘Try for her in fifty!’ he repeated. ‘I know what it means.’
“He went in a sort of a run to the wheel, and brought the schooner’s head
to a due southerly course, whilst he shouted in tones vibrating with the
excitement that seemed like mania in the man then, with the workings
of his face—I say he shouted for sail to be trimmed for the course he
had brought the schooner to, and the seamen fled about the decks to my
commands, alert and willing, but as astonished as I was. When sail had
been trimmed the captain called to Mr. Curzon to keep her steady as she
went, and requested me to follow him below.
“He stood beside the table and leaned upon it; his agitation was so
extreme that I thought to see his mother in his eyes. His breathing
continued distressingly laboured for some time; indeed, the emotions and
passions which tore him appeared to have arrested the faculty of speech.
At last he exclaimed in a voice low with religious awe, yet threaded too
with a note of triumph that instantly caught my ear—
“‘Do you now guess the meaning of that dream which was three times dreamt
by me?’
“Still I was at a loss and made no answer.
“‘Try for her in fifty!’ he exclaimed. ‘That was the cry I told you
about. You remember the sentence, surely?’
“‘Yes, clearly now, sir, that you recall it.’
“‘Come, let’s work out the latitude,’ he said, ‘and we’ll find that
iceberg’s situation. My heart’s on fire. Oh!’ he cried, but softly, in a
tone that thrilled through me, ‘my wife is dear to me. I pray, I pray! we
may not be too late.’
“I still failed to grasp what was in his mind, and suspected that his
reason had been a little weakened by the shock of the news he had
received. When we had worked out our observations he exposed the chart he
used to prick off the ship’s course on, and mused upon it, and measured
angles and distances.
“‘It is at this season,’ said he, ‘that the ice breaks away out of the
south and comes in fleets of bergs thickly crowding north. There’s been
heavy weather. We’ll not allow for a larger drift than a league a day.
Try for her in fifty. That’s it. That will put the berg when the _Prairie
Chief_ struck it in about fifty-one.’
“I thought now I began to understand him.
“‘You mean fifty-one degrees of south latitude?’
“‘Of course I do,’ he answered.
“I measured the distance due south from the place where our ship then
was, and made it a few hundred miles—I forget the figure.
“‘It’s a short run,’ said he, looking at the chart. ‘The boat did it in
ten days, and that’s not above three knots an hour.’ I was silent. ‘I
shall strike the parallel of fifty degrees,’ he continued, after a pause,
‘then run away east. If I sight nothing I shall head back. I’ll find
her—under God,’ he added, removing his cap, and glancing upwards with an
expression of rapt devotion.
“This was an extraordinary undertaking, prompted as it was by an impulse
bred of the imagination of a mind in slumber, yet by no means irrational,
seeing that it was certain, if the seaman Dickens reported aright, there
was a shipwrecked company upon an iceberg within a few days’ sail.
“The crew were briefly told that Captain Huddersfield’s wife had been
aboard the _Prairie Chief_, and that the schooner was going to seek the
survivors of the wreck. It will be supposed, however, that no hint was
dropped as to the mysterious voice which had spoken in the whisper of a
giant in the captain’s dream. Curzon, the second mate, said that apart
from the heavy odds against our falling in with the particular iceberg
we wanted, there was the certainty, should we strangely enough encounter
the mass of ice, of our finding the people dead of cold and starvation. I
answered there was no certainty about it, and quoted several instances of
astonishing deliverances from floating bodies of ice as recorded in the
old marine chronicles.
“Not until the fourth day did we strike the latitude of 50°, in which
time we saw no ice. The ocean was of a marvellous rich blue, the heavens
a deep and thrilling violet, with coasts of swelling white vapour of
a rusty bronze in their brows lying upon the glass-like line of the
horizon. We now headed due east; the sailors thought our quest was
ended! Throughout the glittering frosty hours—the wind blew with a
piercing breath down here—Captain Huddersfield kept a look-out. He was
for ever crossing the deck to peer ahead, and again and again, slinging
a binocular glass over his shoulder, he would go aloft on to the little
fore-royal-yard, where he stayed till the bitter cold drove him down.
“At midnight on this day we sighted a large ice-island, pale as alabaster
under the moon, and shortened canvas to approach it. We hove-to till the
grey of the dawn, when the rising sun gave us a magnificent picture of
a floating mountain bristling with pinnacles, a principality of turrets
and castellated eminences, majestic in solitude. The man Dickens said it
was not the berg. We sailed round it, keeping a sharp look-out for the
loose ice, and then observing no signs of life, save a number of birds,
proceeded.
“This same day we fell in with five different bergs, of various sizes,
all of which we approached, and carefully examined; but to no purpose.
Then for some long hours we encountered no more ice; but all this while
we sailed steadily on the parallel of 50° S., making a due east course.
“And now comes the amazing part of this tale. I went on deck at midnight
to take charge of the schooner. On walking to the side as my custom
was, and gazing steadily ahead—a corner of the moon at this time hung
in the sky over the port-quarter—I beheld a dim faintness right
ahead, a delicate gleam like some mysterious reflection of light in a
looking-glass in a darkened room. A man came along from the forecastle,
and sung out in a quiet voice that there was ice ahead. I bade him rout
out Dickens; it was his watch below, but whenever ice was reported we had
him up, and stationed him on the forecastle to keep a look-out as the
one and only man in the vessel who would know the berg we were in search
of. I then ran to the companion hatch and called to the captain, who was
lying upon a locker below, and he immediately arrived.
“The wind was scanty, and our speed through the water scarcely four
knots, but hardly had day broken—the ice-island being then about a mile
distant—when Dickens, who had remained on the forecastle throughout the
dark hours, shrieked out—
“‘The iceberg, sir!’
“It was a fine morning, the sea quiet, the wind a nipping air out of the
south-west; the sun shone full upon the iceberg, and flashed it into a
great moon-white floating heap, scored with ravines and gorges. The swell
rushed in thunder into deep caverns. I saw many Gothic archways with
birds flying in them; the mass was like a city of alabaster, the home of
sea spirits, of ocean fowl of mighty pinion; the surf boiled in thunder
on the windward points. I observed a shelf of the dead-white crystal
sloping very gently like a beach into the wash of the water, and whilst
I was gazing at it the captain, who was working away at the berg with
a telescope, cried out fiercely; then growing inarticulate, he put the
glass into my hand, gaping at the ice, and pointing to it.
“I levelled the glass, and immediately distinguished a structure,
contrived, as I presently saw, of the galley of a ship, and a quantity of
wreckage. It stood in a great split in the ice, within musket-shot of the
beach, and whilst I looked smoke rose from it.
“‘There is life there!’ I cried out.
“We hauled in, and then with the naked eye clearly perceived several
figures making signs to us. When we were as close as prudence permitted,
the long-boat was got over, and the captain and five men, one of them
being Dickens, pulled away towards the berg. I stood off to improve
my offing, and being full of the business of the schooner, had little
opportunity to remark what passed on the ice-island.
“By-and-by the boat returned; she looked to be full of people. When she
was alongside I saw two women in her. One was locked in the embrace of
Captain Huddersfield; he had wrapped her in his coat, and held her to his
heart. Both women were lifted over the side; three of the men were also
handed up. The others managed to crawl on deck unaided. There were seven
men and two women. They afterwards told us that fifteen in all had gained
the ice.
“The wife of the captain of the _Prairie Chief_—he was amongst those
who had perished—died before our arrival in Sydney. Mrs. Huddersfield, a
stronger woman, quickly recovered, and was walking the deck in the sun,
leaning on her husband’s arm, within a week of her rescue.”
_THE “CHILIMAN” TRAGEDY._
In the year 1863 I sailed as ship’s doctor aboard the _Chiliman_, in the
third voyage that fine Blackwall liner made to Melbourne. I had obtained
the berth through the influence of a relative. My own practice was a snug
little concern in a town some fifty miles from London; but a change was
needed, a change for my health, such a change as nothing but the oceans
of the world with their several climates and hundred winds could provide,
and so I resolved to go a voyage round the world on the easy terms of
feeling pulses and administering draughts, with nothing to pay and
nothing to receive, a seat at the cabin table, and a berth fitted with
shelves and charged with a very powerful smell of chemist’s shop down aft
in what is called the steerage.
I joined the ship at the East India Docks, and went below to inspect my
quarters. I found them gloomy and small; but any rat-hole was reckoned
good enough in those days for a ship’s doctor, a person who, though of
the first importance to the well-being of a ship, is, as a rule, treated
by most owners and skippers with the same sort of consideration that in
former times a parson to a nobleman received, until he had obliged my
lord by marrying his cast lady.
First let me briefly sketch this interior of saloon and steerage, since
it is the theatre on which was enacted the extraordinary tragedy I am
about to relate. The _Chiliman_ had a long poop; under this was the
saloon, in those days termed the cuddy; cabins very richly bulkheaded
went away down aft on either hand. Amidships was the table, overhead the
skylights, and the deck was pierced by the shaft of the mizzen-mast,
superbly decorated with a pianoforte secured to the deck just abaft it.
There were no ladies’ saloons, smoking-rooms, bath-rooms, as in this age,
though the ship was one of the handsomest of her class. If you sought
retirement you went to your cabin; if you desired a pipe you stepped on
deck; if you asked for a bath you were directed to the head pump.
The _Chiliman’s_ cuddy was entered from the quarter-deck by doors close
beside the two flights of steps which conducted to the poop. A large
square of hatch yawned near the entrance inside, and you descended a
staircase to the steerage where my berth was. The arrangement of this
steerage resembled that of the cuddy, but the bulkheads and general
furniture were in the last degree plain. I believe they charged about
twenty-five pounds for a berth down here, and sixty or seventy guineas
for a cabin up above.
Whilst I stood in my berth looking around me a little bow-legged man, in
a camlet jacket and a large strawberry mark on his cheek, peered in and
asked if I was the doctor.
“Ay, Dr. Harris,” said I.
“I’m the ship’s steward, sir,” said he. “That’s where I sleep,” and he
pointed to a cabin opposite.
I was glad to make this man’s acquaintance, and was very civil to him.
I would advise all sea-going doctors on long-voyage sailing ships
to speedily make friends with the head steward. I remarked upon the
gloominess of my quarters, and said I was afraid when it came to my
making up draughts I might blunder for the want of light. He answered
that the sailors never expected much more than strong doses of glauber
salts, and that in his experience passengers as a rule managed very well
without physic until they got ashore again.
I asked him if we were a full ship. He answered, pretty full. About half
the steerage berths were taken, and the same number of cabins would be
occupied in the saloon. The ’tween-decks were crowded, he told me.
After this chat I went on deck, where I made the acquaintance of the
captain and the chief mate. The ship was still in the docks, and the
captain had just come aboard, and was talking to the first officer when I
walked up to them. The decks were full of life, and the scene was charged
with excitement and interest. Groups of ’tween-decks people stood about,
and numbers of drunken sailors were bawling and cutting capers on the
forecastle; some saloon passengers who had joined the ship in the docks
walked the poop; Blue Peter was streaming at our fore-royal-masthead
under the grey sky of the Isle of Dogs; in all directions rose the masts
of ships, a complicated forest, bewildering with the lace-work and
tracery of rigging. Cargo was swinging in and out; pawls of capstan and
winch were ticking like gigantic clocks to the thrust of the handspike
and the revolution of the handle; the air was full of the smell of
distant climes; I seemed to taste coffee and nutmeg and a pungent
tickling of black pepper; but the perfume of the greasy wool-bale was
dominant, and suggested nothing of the sweetness of the Arabian gale.
The captain went below, the mate fell a-shouting, I walked to the brass
rail that ran across the break of the poop, and gazed about me. The
steerage passengers on the main-deck looked a shabbily-dressed lot of
poor, distressed people—men, women, and children. I took notice that
certain young fellows, apprentices or midshipmen, with brass buttons
on their jackets and brass badges on their caps, warned them off the
quarter-deck whenever they stepped abaft the mainmast. One of these young
fellows came and stood beside me. He was a gentlemanly, fair-haired,
handsome lad, now making, as he presently told me, his second voyage. I
asked him why those poor people were ordered off the part of the deck
that lay immediately beneath us. He said because it was the quarter-deck,
to be used only by the second-class passengers.
“That dirty rabble,” said he, looking with disgust at the third-class
folks, “must keep to the waist and forecastle if they want air.”
“And this fine deck of poop?” said I.
“Nobody uses this,” he answered, “but the saloon nobs, and the officers
and the midshipmen of the ship.”
Shortly before eleven the vessel hauled out of dock. There was much
noise of yelling and swearing at this time; my sight and hearing were
confounded, and I wondered that any mortal being should understand the
exact thing to do in such a scene of clamorous distraction. People on
the pier-heads shrieked farewells to those on board, and those on board
sobbed and yelped in response. When we had floated over the cill, with
the mud pilot on the forecastle almost apoplectic with unavailing wrath
at some insult fired at him out of a hurricane lung on the wharf, a tug
got hold of us, a couple of seamen lurched aft to the wheel, the hawser
tautened, and away we went down the river in the fizzing wake of a pair
of churning paddles.
The varied scenery of the Thames—I mean its maritime details of craft of
twenty different rigs and steamers of twenty different aspects thrusting
up and down, some staggering athwart, others making a bee-line through
the reaches—charmed and interested me who was fresh from a long spell of
inland, almost rural, life, and I lingered till I was driven below by
the wet which came sweeping along in a succession of drenching squalls
as we rounded out of Galleon’s into Barking Reach. I spent the remainder
of that day in putting my cabin to rights, examining the drugs (some of
which, for antiquity, methought, might have gone round the world with
Cook in his first voyage), and in providing for my own comfort as best
I could, and at half-past six went into the cuddy to join the people
at dinner, by which hour the ship had arrived at a mooring-buoy off
Gravesend, and was lying motionless on her own shadow in the stream.
It was a sullen evening, already dark; and dirty blowing wet weather on
deck. The muffled howling and hissing of the wind in the three towering
spires of mast, and yard, and rigging communicated, I’ve no doubt,
the particular brilliance and beauty I found in the appearance of the
well-lighted cuddy, with its long table draped for dinner, sparkling with
glass and plate, and a number of ladies and gentlemen, along with the
captain and chief officer, issuing from their respective berths to take
their seats. Thirteen of us sat down, and when this was remarked by an
elderly lady next the captain, a midshipman was sent for to neutralize
the sinister influence of that number by making a fourteenth. The lad
took his place with a countenance of happy astonishment. He heartily
wished, I dare say, that thirteen people would sit down to dinner every
day.
I understood that there were some eight or ten more passengers expected
from Gravesend in the morning. I looked about me to see what sort of
persons I was to be associated with on an ocean passage that might run
into four months. No need in this brief record of a tragic event to
enter into minute descriptions of the people: enough if I refer now to
two persons who sat opposite me, both of whom were to prove leading
actors in what I have to tell.
One of them was a man of about six-and-thirty years of age. He wore a
heavy moustache slightly streaked with grey. His eyes were dark, keen,
and steadfast in their gaze—steadfast, indeed, to rudeness, for his
manner of looking at you was scarcely less than a deliberate scrutinizing
stare. His hair was thin on the top, bushy at the sides; his complexion
dark as of one who has lived long under the sun. His voice was subdued,
his whole bearing well bred.
His companion was a lady: a dark, very handsome woman of three or four
and twenty. Her hair was black, without gloss, a soft, dark, rich black,
and I never before saw a woman with so wonderful a thickness of hair as
that girl had. Her large, fine, dark eyes had a tropic sparkle; there was
foreign blood in the glances which flashed through the long lashes. Her
complexion was a most delicate olive made tender by a soft lasting bloom,
which rested like a lingering blush upon her cheeks. Her figure looked
faultless, and doubtless was so. I put the man down as a happy fellow
carrying a beautiful bride away with him to the Antipodes. You could
not have doubted that they were newly married; his behaviour was all
fondness; hers that of the impassioned young wife who finds difficulty in
concealing her adoration in public.