CHAPTER XII 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.