“A schooner, from Spain or Portugal, laden with fruit and wine. Make
haste, sir, if you want to see her! It’s thought down on the beach,
she’ll go to pieces every moment.”
The excited voice went clamoring along the staircase; and I wrapped
myself in my clothes as quickly as I could, and ran into the street.
Numbers of people were there before me, all running in one direction,
to the beach. I ran the same way, outstripping a good many, and soon
came facing the wild sea.
The wind might by this time have lulled a little, though not more
sensibly than if the cannonading I had dreamed of, had been diminished
by the silencing of half-a-dozen guns out of hundreds. But, the sea,
having upon it the additional agitation of the whole night, was
infinitely more terrific than when I had seen it last. Every
appearance it had then presented, bore the expression of being
_swelled_; and the height to which the breakers rose, and, looking
over one another, bore one another down, and rolled in, in
interminable hosts, was most appalling.
In the difficulty of hearing anything but winds and waves, and in the
crowd, and the unspeakable confusion, and my first breathless efforts
to stand against the weather, I was so confused that I looked out to
sea for the wreck, and saw nothing but the foaming heads of the great
waves. A half-dressed boatman, standing next me, pointed with his bare
arm (a tattoo’d arrow on it, pointing in the same direction) to the
left. Then, O great Heaven, I saw it, close in upon us!
One mast was broken short off, six or eight feet from the deck, and
lay over the side, entangled in a maze of sail and rigging; and all
that ruin, as the ship rolled and beat—which she did without a
moment’s pause, and with a violence quite inconceivable—beat the side
as if it would stave it in. Some efforts were even then being made, to
cut this portion of the wreck away; for, as the ship, which was
broadside on, turned towards us in her rolling, I plainly descried her
people at work with axes, especially one active figure with long
curling hair, conspicuous among the rest. But, a great cry, which was
audible even above the wind and water, rose from the shore at this
moment; the sea, sweeping over the rolling wreck, made a clean breach,
and carried men, spars, casks, planks, bulwarks, heaps of such toys,
into the boiling surge.
The second mast was yet standing, with the rags of a rent sail, and a
wild confusion of broken cordage flapping to and fro. The ship had
struck once, the same boatman hoarsely said in my ear, and then lifted
in and struck again. I understood him to add that she was parting
amidships, and I could readily suppose so, for the rolling and beating
were too tremendous for any human work to suffer long. As he spoke,
there was another great cry of pity from the beach; four men arose
with the wreck out of the deep, clinging to the rigging of the
remaining mast; uppermost, the active figure with the curling hair.
There was a bell on board; and as the ship rolled and dashed, like a
desperate creature driven mad, now showing us the whole sweep of her
deck, as she turned on her beam-ends towards the shore, now nothing
but her keel, as she sprung wildly over and turned towards the sea,
the bell rang; and its sound, the knell of those unhappy men, was
borne towards us on the wind. Again we lost her, and again she rose.
Two men were gone. The agony on shore increased. Men groaned, and
clasped their hands; women shrieked, and turned away their faces. Some
ran wildly up and down along the beach, crying for help where no help
could be. I found myself one of these, frantically imploring a knot of
sailors whom I knew, not to let those two lost creatures perish before
our eyes.
They were making out to me, in an agitated way—I don’t know how, for
the little I could hear I was scarcely composed enough to
understand—that the life-boat had been bravely manned an hour ago, and
could do nothing; and that as no man would be so desperate as to
attempt to wade off with a rope, and establish a communication with
the shore, there was nothing left to try; when I noticed that some new
sensation moved the people on the beach, and saw them part, and Ham
came breaking through them to the front.
I ran to him—as well as I know, to repeat my appeal for help. But,
distracted though I was, by a sight so new to me and terrible, the
determination in his face, and his look, out to sea—exactly the same
look as I remembered in connection with the morning after Emily’s
flight—awoke me to a knowledge of his danger. I held him back with
both arms; and implored the men with whom I had been speaking, not to
listen to him, not to do murder, not to let him stir from off that
sand!
Another cry arose on shore; and looking to the wreck, we saw the cruel
sail, with blow on blow, beat off the lower of the two men, and fly up
in triumph round the active figure left alone upon the mast.
Against such a sight, and against such determination as that of the
calmly desperate man who was already accustomed to lead half the
people present, I might as hopefully have entreated the wind. “Mas’r
Davy,” he said, cheerily grasping me by both hands, “if my time is
come, ’tis come. If ’tan’t, I’ll bide it. Lord above bless you, and
bless all! Mates, make me ready! I’m a going off!”
I was swept away, but not unkindly, to some distance, where the people
around me made me stay; urging, as I confusedly perceived, that he was
bent on going, with help or without, and that I should endanger the
precautions for his safety by troubling those with whom they rested. I
don’t know what I answered, or what they rejoined; but, I saw hurry on
the beach, and men running with ropes from a capstan that was there,
and penetrating into a circle of figures that hid him from me. Then I
saw him standing alone, in a seaman’s frock and trousers: a rope in
his hand, or slung to his wrist: another round his body: and several
of the best men holding, at a little distance, to the latter, which he
laid out himself, slack upon the shore, at his feet.
The wreck, even to my unpractised eye, was breaking up. I saw that she
was parting in the middle, and that the life of the solitary man upon
the mast hung by a thread. Still, he clung to it. He had a singular
red cap on,—not like a sailor’s cap, but of a finer color; and as the
few yielding planks between him and destruction rolled and bulged, and
his anticipative death-knell rung, he was seen by all of us to wave
it. I saw him do it now, and thought I was going distracted, when his
action brought an old remembrance to my mind of a once dear friend.
Ham watched the sea, standing alone, with the silence of suspended
breath behind him, and the storm before, until there was a great
retiring wave, when, with a backward glance at those who held the rope
which was made fast round his body, he dashed in after it, and in a
moment was buffeting with the water; rising with the hills, falling
with the valleys, lost beneath the foam; then drawn again to land.
They hauled in hastily.
He was hurt. I saw blood on his face, from where I stood; but he took
no thought of that. He seemed hurriedly to give them some directions
for leaving him more free—or so I judged from the motion of his
arm—and was gone as before.
And now he made for the wreck, rising with the hills, falling with the
valleys, lost beneath the rugged foam, borne in towards the shore,
borne on towards the ship, striving hard and valiantly. The distance
was nothing, but the power of the sea and wind made the strife deadly.
At length he neared the wreck. He was so near, that with one more of
his vigorous strokes he would be clinging to it,—when, a high, green,
vast hillside of water, moving on shoreward, from beyond the ship, he
seemed to leap up into it with a mighty bound, and the ship was gone!
Some eddying fragments I saw in the sea, as if a mere cask had been
broken, in running to the spot where they were hauling in.
Consternation was in every face. They drew him to my very
feet—insensible—dead. He was carried to the nearest house; and, no one
preventing me now, I remained near him, busy, while every means of
restoration were tried; but he had been beaten to death by the great
wave, and his generous heart was stilled forever.