The unholy fascination of dread dwells in the thought of the last moments
of a ship reported as “missing” in the columns of the _Shipping Gazette_.
Nothing of her ever comes to light—no grating, no lifebuoy, no piece of
boat or branded oar—to give a hint of the place and date of her sudden
end. The _Shipping Gazette_ does not even call her “lost with all
hands.” She remains simply “missing”; she has disappeared enigmatically
into a mystery of fate as big as the world, where your imagination of a
brother-sailor, of a fellow-servant and lover of ships, may range
unchecked.
And yet sometimes one gets a hint of what the last scene may be like in
the life of a ship and her crew, which resembles a drama in its struggle
against a great force bearing it up, formless, ungraspable, chaotic and
mysterious, as fate.
It was on a gray afternoon in the lull of a three days’ gale that had
left the Southern Ocean tumbling heavily upon our ship, under a sky hung
with rags of clouds that seemed to have been cut and hacked by the keen
edge of a sou’-west gale.
Our craft, a Clyde-built barque of 1,000 tons, rolled so heavily that
something aloft had carried away. No matter what the damage was, but it
was serious enough to induce me to go aloft myself with a couple of hands
and the carpenter to see the temporary repairs properly done.
Sometimes we had to drop everything and cling with both hands to the
swaying spars, holding our breath in fear of a terribly heavy roll. And,
wallowing as if she meant to turn over with us, the barque, her decks
full of water, her gear flying in bights, ran at some ten knots an hour.
We had been driven far south—much farther that way than we had meant to
go; and suddenly, up there in the slings of the foreyard, in the midst of
our work, I felt my shoulder gripped with such force in the carpenter’s
powerful paw that I positively yelled with unexpected pain. The man’s
eyes stared close in my face, and he shouted, “Look, sir! look! What’s
this?” pointing ahead with his other hand.
At first I saw nothing. The sea was one empty wilderness of black and
white hills. Suddenly, half-concealed in the tumult of the foaming
rollers I made out awash, something enormous, rising and
falling—something spread out like a burst of foam, but with a more
bluish, more solid look.
It was a piece of an ice-floe melted down to a fragment, but still big
enough to sink a ship, and floating lower than any raft, right in our
way, as if ambushed among the waves with murderous intent. There was no
time to get down on deck. I shouted from aloft till my head was ready to
split. I was heard aft, and we managed to clear the sunken floe which
had come all the way from the Southern ice-cap to have a try at our
unsuspecting lives. Had it been an hour later, nothing could have saved
the ship, for no eye could have made out in the dusk that pale piece of
ice swept over by the white-crested waves.
And as we stood near the taffrail side by side, my captain and I, looking
at it, hardly discernible already, but still quite close-to on our
quarter, he remarked in a meditative tone:
“But for the turn of that wheel just in time, there would have been
another case of a ‘missing’ ship.”
Nobody ever comes back from a “missing” ship to tell how hard was the
death of the craft, and how sudden and overwhelming the last anguish of
her men. Nobody can say with what thoughts, with what regrets, with what
words on their lips they died. But there is something fine in the sudden
passing away of these hearts from the extremity of struggle and stress
and tremendous uproar—from the vast, unrestful rage of the surface to the
profound peace of the depths, sleeping untroubled since the beginning of
ages.