They looked at the chart together for a minute.
“Give us a course that will pick up the whistling buoy off Thatcher’s Island from this last fix,” said the skipper.
The navigator plotted the course, and the order was given, at which the ship swung a point and a half to the northward.
The speed of the ship had already been reduced to fifteen knots which on a ship in the habit of cruising at twenty-five, and capable of forty, seemed like a snail’s pace. There was not much more than an hour of daylight left, and making a landfall in fog and twilight is nasty business; so the captain was loath to slow down any more. But the fog shut in thicker till the bow could barely be seen from the bridge; a hundred yards marked the limit of visibility ahead. At fifteen knots a hundred yards is traversed in very few seconds; caution therefore constrained the captain to reduce speed to twelve knots. The lithe ship seemed to be crawling through the water.
Forty minutes passed. All eyes looked forward into the thick blanket of fog which seemed to paralyze the sense of sight. Captain and navigator paced nervously to and fro, looking now at the chart and then again into the gray void. The leaden sky began to darken visibly.
“We’ve gone eight miles since we changed course,” said the navigator; “we ought to hear that whistle, we could hear it two miles in any direction.”
“You’d better get some more bearings,” said the captain.
At that moment the lookout in the bow shouted, “Surf ahead.”
The captain sprang to the engine-room telegraph and jerked back the lever calling for full speed astern. In two seconds, which seemed an eternity, the whole ship began to shake as the turbines backed water with all their power. But a seven-thousand-ton ship even at twelve knots cannot be brought to a standstill instantly, and just as the breakers ahead became visible to the anxious eyes on the bridge, there was a hideous, grinding crash and shock.
To the skipper and navigator it was like the crack of doom—the death-knell of their careers, for with a horrible sickness in their hearts they knew they had driven one of Uncle Sam’s finest ships ashore on an exposed and dangerous coast. The Sheridan was hard aground on the north end of a reef known as “the Salvages,” just off the Rockport breakwater, some three miles north of Thatcher’s Island.