MR. SELBY TAKES UP THE STORY.
Having been blown considerably to the southward of our course by a
succession of hard northerly gales, the barque 'Planter,' from London
to Adelaide, on a dark, bitter, raw morning of July 1860, was breaking
the seas close hauled, looking up for as much northing as the seating
of the wind would allow.
Our long topgallant masts were down on deck, and we showed nothing
above the topmast cross-trees. Under single-reefed topsails and reefed
foresail we rolled sluggishly onwards, making small way; the swell was
wide and strong, but the wind blew without spite, save for its edge,
and the seas ran small.
My name is Ralph Selby. I was chief mate of that barque, a vessel of
four hundred and sixty tons, Walter Parry, master, John Newman, second
mate. I had charge of the forenoon watch, and it was now about nine
o'clock, but dark as at any hour of the night. All my sight had been
going for ice whilst it remained black; throughout this had been so
with the rest of us, since seven o'clock of the preceding evening we
had nearly fallen foul of ice mountains three times. At midnight,
indeed, the air being then like fog with snow, a loud and fearful cry
from the forecastle had preserved us by the dark of our nails, we were
in time by a few heart beats only; the whole mass looked aboard us as
we surged past with our helm hard up, floating off on a heave of black
fold that carried us clear, though it nearly thumped the channels off
our sides with the lumps of loose ice it slided us into. The paleness
of that mountain went up into the sky high above our mast-heads; the
roar of the sea bursting at its base was louder than any surf I ever
heard ashore; rock-blasting shocks in thunder echoes came out of the
heap, which perhaps sank two leagues backwards into the blackness.
We drove clear and lost it, but for the rest of the night those who had
the watch kept staring with all their eyes.
Whilst I leaned over the side searching the darkness off the bow, there
broke over the starboard quarter the cold pale day of that desolate
part of the world. The dim light seemed to sift to the zenith through
the clouds like steam under the rolling sky. In twenty minutes it was
daylight all round, the ocean a dirty freckled green, swollen in folds,
and flashful with the short running seas of the then light breeze. The
horizon opened into a hard green distance, working like a revolved
corkscrew against the stooping soot past it, though overhead it was
middling fine weather, streaks of dim green sky veining, into a look
of marble, a surface of compacted yellow stuff; down which the brown
scud was sailing south-west.
Crossing the deck to peer to leeward, I instantly caught sight of a
sail, a white square of canvas which, coming and going this side the
horizon, puzzled me during the moments I kept my naked eye upon it. I
fetched the glass and on pointing it resolved the object into a ship's
long-boat, full of people. She was heading to close us, but did not
look as though she lay nearer than we; I observed no distress signal. I
thought I could count eight or nine heads. The gleam of oilskins came
off the men as the boat lifted. With the sheet flattened right aft the
little fabric shredded through it nobly, flinging the water away in
smoke, and rising with the dance and skill of the galley-punt of the
Downs to the head of every hurdling sea.
The sight of her put a full spirit of civilisation into the desolate
scene; and yet I guessed that exquisite distress lay dumb for distance
only in that open leaping boat, gone now behind a hill of brine, now
straining her square of cloths aslant on a rolling peak.
I sang out to the fellow at the wheel to let her go off by a point, and
was going to make my report to the captain when he appeared. His eye
caught the boat in a moment, and exclaiming, 'What have we here?' he
levelled the glass and said:
'Pretty nigh a whole ship's company adrift.'
We closed her rapidly and were presently within hail.
'Take us aboard for God's sake, sir! Half of us are dead with the
cold,' cried a lamentable voice, no man, whoever he was that spoke,
rising nevertheless.
We manœuvred that she might sheer alongside; we then backed our
topsail yard and her sail dropped with a run. But the men seemed
scarcely to have life enough to catch hold of the coil of rope that
was flung to them, and then when she lay hard by you saw by the rise of
her to the height of our topgallant sail, then by the fall of her into
a hollow twenty feet deep, that if those men were to be rescued they
must be whipped aboard.
So a tackle was secured to the main yard-arm, and the rope slackened
away to let the boat soar and sink fair under the whip; the captain
then sang out for the strongest to send the weakest, themselves
following. A huge, fine fellow with red whiskers answered with a
paralytic flourish of his hand, and without delay the whip end was
secured to one of the people and quickly as might be he was swayed
aboard.
I was too busy with superintending these proceedings to do more than
glance at the first of them as they hauled him over the side; and just
took notice that he was a short man, cloaked and thickly wrapped,
with bushy hair, not a sailor, and he looked frozen to death. He was
carried into the cabin and another man was got aboard; he too seemed
lifeless. There were nine or ten, I am not sure. One by one we swayed
them over the rail, the last man to come being the big fellow with the
red whiskers.
Those who seemed dead--of these there were four--were carried into
the cabin; the others who were able to crawl were helped into the
forecastle.
'What's to be done with the boat, sir?' said I to the captain.
'Oh, what can be done with her?' said he, with a shrug and an askant
look of longing at the fine little craft. 'We should drown her if we
towed her, and we can do nothing with her now. Let her go.'
I went forward by the captain's orders and saw to the men who had been
sent into the forecastle. Hot grog and food were given to them; they
were partially unclothed and chafed and wrapped in blankets. The only
one who did not seem to need this care was the burly, red-whiskered
seaman. He had stripped himself of his waterproofs, and after
swallowing a couple of steaming glasses of grog, and eating pretty
heartily of cold beef and biscuit, he asked for some warm water to wash
the frost out of his face; which done, he fell to clapping his arms
upon his breast, and shooting them out to right and left, kicking his
legs about likewise; then turning upon me who stood watching, he said
he was ready to step aft and spin his yarn to the captain.
We were a barque with a short poop; I took him into the cuddy, and
there left him in order to look after the ship, so that I did not
learn the story of this crew until a little while after he had related
it to the captain. When I regained the poop the boat was showing and
vanishing some distance astern. It made me shudder to think of exposure
in her in these seas, and under the wild sky that was stormily sipping
the sea-line with its black lips of vapour, though on high, over our
staggering mast-heads, the heavens continued to lie a little open.
I saw them coming and going with steaming stuff from the galley, and
guessed they were ministering to the poor frozen wretches in the cuddy.
By-and-by the red-whiskered man went forward, and a little later up
came Captain Parry. He approached me, and with a shocked look on his
honest sailorly face said:
'I'm afraid three of the four are dead. We can't put any life into
them. The fourth man stirred after some chafing, and when some hot grog
had been spooned down his throat, and he's now got his mind. But I
don't like to think how it's going to prove with him; his fingers and
thumbs look to be mortified, and if his boots are pulled off his toes
'll come away.'
'Which man is that, sir?'
'The first man we got aboard, a man with bushy hair. He was doctor in
the ship.'
'And the others are dead?'
'I never saw a frozen to death body. Newman says they're dead. He's
been groping after any hint of life and finds none.'
John Newman, as I have said, was our second mate. He had been bred to
medicine, changed his mind, and gone to sea at two-and-twenty, and was
now, at the age of thirty, with a master's certificate of competency in
his desk, earning five pounds a month as third in charge of a little
barque. We all looked up to Newman as a medical authority; he had
during the passage doctored some of us very skilfully; in pronouncing
the man dead he knew what he was talking about.
'This is their yarn,' said the captain, and now I repeat in brief what
he related.
Their ship was the 'Lady Emma.' She sailed from the Thames April 2. A
few days before this time--namely, on July 2--she was thrown on to her
beam ends by a terrific squall; they cut away to right the ship and
all three masts went smack-smooth saving the foremast, of which there
remained a jagged stump of some twelve foot. To this next day they
secured an arrangement of boom and square-sail, which blew over the
bows on the wind suddenly freshening.
The captain was a little broken in his spirits and weakened in his
intellect by this calamity; also it was said forward that it weighed
upon him to remember that a strange man wearing his face and aspect
had walked on the forecastle one night. His hope was to blow north and
fall in with something that would give him a tow to a port, he (it was
understood) having a considerable uninsured venture in the vessel.
The crew sickened of his notion, seeing no good nor hope in it; and
on catching sight of the topmost canvas of a ship they launched a
long-boat, hastily provisioned her, and went away in pursuit, leaving
behind the master, his wife and a young lady passenger: but through no
fault of the men, as the captain and the others declined to accompany
them.
They lost the ship and wore for the hull afresh, missed her, and
stood north-east by a compass which did not appear to have been very
trustworthy. They were exposed for two nights and very nearly two days,
and another night must have killed them all. The dead men were the
steward, a Dutch seaman who had been ill for weeks with rheumatism, and
another.
'How should the wreck bear now, do you think?' said Captain Parry.
I reflected, and after recalling the weather, and estimating the
boat's sailing powers and the like, I answered if she was to be
sought she might be found about one hundred and fifty miles distant
west-south-west.
'I make her further than that,' said the captain.
'Perhaps so, sir.'
'But your bearings about tally with mine. I think it's our duty to give
those people a chance for their lives. Three of them! and two of the
three, women, Mr. Selby! And the passenger, I understand from Wall the
bo'sun, is the daughter of an English baronet--the skipper's wife was
her old nurse--she was sent out for her health.'
He looked thoughtfully round the sea, then told me to get the yards
braced in, and going to the wheel, shifted the course, making a fair
wind of the breeze, and the ship drove along.
The main difficulty lay in the shortness of the time of daylight. We
were not going to hunt for a large becalmed craft, clothed like a
pyramid to the trucks, and courting the eye like an iceberg, but for
a low dismasted hull, which might slide past us within musket-shot in
some hour of blackness, and no man dream it was near. But the captain
was resolved to give the poor people a chance: there could be no
question that the master of the ship, his wife, and a young lady were
alive, locked up, helpless and hopeless, aboard a hull which at any
hour might float away in staves from the side of an icehill; and it
was right, it was our duty, it was a service that God would expect of
us, that humanity required of us, to search, even at some peril to
ourselves--loss of time counting for nothing when the errand is one
of mercy--seeing that the hull lay, perhaps, within two hundred miles
off, and her inmates in a situation to continue alive for a long while,
the boatswain Wall having told Captain Parry that she was plentifully
stocked with coal, provisions, and liquor.
All that day, till night blackened out the scene, we kept an eager
watch upon the sea. It held fairly clear, a slender promise overhead
in greenish streaks of an opening heaven, though the horizon scowled
with snow-clouds. We sighted several icebergs, but saw nothing of the
wreck. When it fell dark that afternoon, we shortened sail to two
close-reefed topsails, furling the foresail, and rolled onwards slowly.
The swell was high and ran strong from the westward, but the sea curled
lightly. A few wan stars blinked in the rifts. The cold was intense.
The rigging seemed to take a new thickness of ice when the night came,
and the running gear was as stiff as bar-iron in the shears.
I guessed that Captain Burke (as I was told his name was) would show a
light every night: he had lanterns and oil and an altitude that, with
his freeboard, might give him twenty feet above the water in his stump
of foremast. But we searched in vain for a sparkle. For my part, I
took but a halfhearted view of the quest; yet it was a thing not to be
omitted by an English seaman: no man of the slenderest mercy of heart
would have foregone it.
I had charge of the middle watch, and being a man of some imagination,
I cast my mind into the misery of the poor people who were somewhere
out upon those black, swollen waters in a flat wallowing hull, and
I shuddered and grieved when I thought of them. The life of a lofty
superstructure of masts and spars, with canvas to spread or reduce
at will, was in our ship; I felt the buoyant rise of her on hills
of ink rolling invisible; I'd step aft to search the gloom astern
and on either quarter, and mark the dim snow of the wake sheeting to
the taffrail with the droop of her stern, and hear the grind of the
wheel-chains, and see the illuminated disc of card trembling the course
at the lubber's mark betwixt faithful oscillations, as though it were
the spirit of the ship, naked and shining, and revealed in all its
sublime guiding and informing motions; and then my mind would go again
to that dismantled hull somewhere out in the freezing blackness here or
there, a coffin of a ship with three live people locked up in it!
It came on to blow in hissing snow-squalls a little before daybreak. I
got two hours' sleep after eight o'clock and turned out for a mouthful
of breakfast: when that meal was ended, the dull day had whitened
through the snow upon the skylight glass, and in a cabin window I saw
the sea, lifting close with the ship's lurches, rolling astern and
quickly out of sight into the blowing flakes.
The captain came below: he shook the snow off him by the stove and said:
'No signs of the hull. Nothing can be done if the weather don't clear.
It's as thick as smoke all round, and if we go on making southing in
this fashion we shall be running down the South Shetlands.'
'To pick up a wreck like this, sir,' said I, 'you may need to cross and
re-cross your track a hundred times over.'
'I should never be able to sail away with a good conscience either,'
said he. 'To leave three people to wash about down here, to perish
certainly after a horrible time of it! Though it should cost a week of
cruising to rescue them--'twould be like murder.'
He stepped into his cabin with unsettled looks and a face of agitation.
He was one of the humanest men I ever met whether at sea or ashore. He
was not what would be called a gentleman by birth, but he was a man of
God's best moulding, a simple, generous, just person, beloved of his
crew, his officers' friend and companion, and their kindly counsellor
as well as commander. I never heard a coarse word escape him nor a
harsh one to even the most provoking of his people. He was an honour to
the flag of his Service.
When I went on deck the weather had somewhat cleared round the ship,
but the snow was whirling grayly against the soft dark thickness to
leeward, whilst the windward sky was black with cloud of a true Horn
pattern, low-flying, shredding off its edges, and swollen with burdens
of hail and sleet.
I went to the starboard rail to take a long, careful look round, never
knowing but that all on a sudden, in a flying way, the hull might leap
into sight out of some green trough dim with salt breeze. Mr. Newman,
heavily clad in sea boots and yellow oilskins, was standing for shelter
under a square of canvas seized in the mizzen rigging. For my part I
never wore an oilskin in my life. I was to-day clothed as I always went
in bitter weather, north or south: in a thick pilot coat, thick pilot
cloth trousers, a warm fur cap with ear-covers, thick mittens, and a
shawl round my neck.
I was straining my sight into the whirling gray thickness over the bow,
the ship then being under two close-reefed topsails and stern main
trysail, and surging over the high swell and through the broken rugged
seas at about five knots; when a man who was descending the starboard
fore-shrouds with a coil of rigging round his neck missed a ratline
with his foot and slapped at another with his hand: it parted at the
seizing and he fell overboard backwards.
In the swift glance I had shot, my sight being already bent that way, I
saw the ratline he had clapped hold of stand out from the shroud like a
bar of steel.
I roared 'Man overboard!' and shouted to the fellow at the wheel to
put the helm hard down. In the same breath I caught a lifebuoy off its
pin and flung it at the body of the man who was then floating on the
top of a swelling fold within a pistol-shot astern, fast sliding off.
This buoy, like others in the ship--a device of the captain's--when
it struck the water freed a red staff with a length of red bunting
attached: the staff stood up on the buoy and the streamer like a tongue
of fire blowing out made a beacon for a swimmer as well as for a boat
in daylight.
Meanwhile the second mate was yelling for all hands and bawling 'Man
overboard!' and shouting for seamen to lay aft and heave the vessel
to. The captain came running up on deck. I called the tragic news to
him, pointing aft, and then sprang for a jolly-boat as we termed the
thing, which hung in davits upon the starboard quarter. A number of
men came crowding around; the boat was swiftly cleared away, and I and
three sailors jumped into her.
'Keep all fast till way is lost,' shouted the captain. 'Stand by to
unhook handsomely or she'll drown ye.'
In a few minutes, which seemed as long as months, the boat sank to
the water's edge and was waterborne: a sea lifted her half-way to her
davits again; in that upward rush we unhooked, got oars over, and away
we went for the red streamer which I could see faintly glimmering
through a mist of spume.
She was a fat lubberly boat, better for this work than our longer
whale-ended quarter-boats. She jumped like something alive and
distracted, sometimes sped end on, made with headlong plunges into the
valleys, sweeping up the acclivity with her nose to the sky, doing
her work dryly but so wildly that the men could scarcely plunge their
blades for a drag upon her. A couple of spare oars were lashed along
her bottom under the thwarts. I had nearly cut them adrift, meaning
to help the others, fisherman-fashion, with one, and I never cease to
thank my God I did nothing of the sort.
I steered for the man, but he was not to be seen. I had never from the
moment of marking him fall doubted that he had plumbed the bottom like
a lead, weighted as he was with heavy sea boots, painted clothes, and a
coil of rigging round his neck; but it was not to be admitted: the man
was overboard, the ship was to be hove-to, and the poor fellow searched
for and saved if so willed.
All in a breath, when we were within fifty strokes of the streaming red
flag, the boat was capsized on an apex of pyramidal sea, that poled
her sheerly bottom up at the instant that a blinding snow-squall came
seething along, whitening the water into hissing salt, and thickening
down the sea within a biscuit-toss. This I had been observing at the
very instant the boat was flung keel up, and I recollect that I carried
the memory of that scene of snow-squall under water, scarce realising
but that I was in a dream, happening as it did too swiftly to give the
mind time to catch a hold on reality.
When I came to the surface I was bubbling and spitting in a smother of
froth hard against the side of the boat. There were two others. I got
my senses quickly and sputtering the brine out of my mouth roared, 'We
must right her. We can't hold on. We shall freeze off her dead men in
five minutes. Together now.'
The three of us got a hold of the keel, and a sea helping us, we
righted her, swaying down upon the little fabric with the strength of
the madness that fights for life; but in righting she struck one of the
men under, and he went down like a shot whilst I and the other got into
the boat.
A large copper baler attached to a lanyard lay at the bottom. I plunged
my hand down, groped for, and found it, and fell with fury to casting
out the water, the other baling with his sou'-wester with all his
might. The sea repeatedly broke over us, but we toiled with superhuman
effort for our lives. I believe the filled boat would have sunk under
our united weight but for a couple of empty breakers secured in the
bows and aft. We laboured with rage, flashing the water out of the
boat, and presently she was showing some little height of side. Then
to slenderly provide against a second surprise of capsizal which would
signify certain death to us, I lashed the two spare oars that were
under the thwarts to the painter and chucked them overboard; this
brought the boat head to sea, and we went on baling.
The spite of the squall had gone out of the wind, but it was snowing
heavily, and strain my sight as I would I could see nothing of the
ship. In a flaw in the thick feathery fall I caught sight of the red
tongue of bunting; the buoy then was about a cable's length distant; it
was closed out quickly and all became a tumbling, gyrating blackness;
yet I had drawn some faint comfort from the sight of it. I guessed
the ship could not be far off and that she must spy us the instant it
cleared, which might happen at any minute. Meanwhile we baled for our
lives.
My companion was an able seaman named Tom Friend. After he had been
throwing out the water for some while, when the boat was perhaps still
about a quarter full, I meanwhile baling with the same sort of fury
that possesses a drowning man when he clutches and catches and beats
in the air for life, he said to me:
'Mr. Selby, if we aren't rescued soon I'm a dead man.'
'No, no, keep up your spirits,' I shouted. 'They'll have us. Bale, man.
We must keep afloat to be picked up.'
He went to work afresh with his sou'-wester, stooping and flinging; the
wind smote the brine into smoke as we hove it over the side. We did not
cease till but a little water was left in the bottom of the boat, and
we sat and gasped and stared about us.
I know not how long this business had occupied. It seemed to me that
the shadow of the night was already in the air. It may have been no
more than the darkness of the thick black cloud out of which the snow
was tumbling in immense flakes. All the time I was expecting to see the
dye of the ship's fabric oozing out of the whiteness, plunging out of
the smother into her clear shape within easy earshot of us; but that
did not happen.
After we had been in this situation about two hours Friend put his two
hands together, and began to waggle his body as he sat on the midship
thwart fronting me; his face was blue. He made shocking grimaces of
anguish and fell a-moaning most piteously, crying: 'Oh, the cold! Oh,
the cold! Oh, Jesus, support me! I can't stand it!'
Though my own sufferings were inexpressible, I was still sensible of
a good stock of vitality; but I cannot tell why I should have better
resisted the cold than Friend, who was a lump of a man, broad-backed as
a table, though a little stout. I was soaked to the skin, and coat and
breeches were already frozen hard upon me; they cracked when I stirred
as glass might. The thwarts were glazed and ice half an inch thick
sheathed the timber.
Friend let his sodden and frozen sou'-wester lie; and he looked wild
and dreadful with icicles pendent from his hair. In a sudden sharp leap
of the boat to the summit of an ugly sea, that broke and curled white
as milk on a line with our gunwales, he pitched towards me, slipped
over the thwart he struck, and lay motionless at my feet. He groaned
twice but spoke not.
What could I do? Chafe his hands? As well the thwart he had been flung
over. I had not a drop of spirit for his throat, and myself felt dying.
I could not but let him lie, and I believe he gave up the ghost very
shortly after he had uttered his second groan.