“Lower away the boat, and tumble in, men,” I shouted; and the words were hardly out of my mouth when I heard the murmur of the falls through the blocks, and the splash of the boat as she hit the water. A few muffled ejaculations followed as the men slid down the falls, then came the rattle of oars as they were thrown out; and finally a voice crying:
“All ready, Captain, we only wait for you.”
“Good!” I ejaculated, and rammed down the button. A tremendous jolt that all but flung me off the bridge, accompanied by a not very loud explosion, followed, the ship trembled as though she had been a sentient thing, and the sound of water, as though pouring through a sluice, reached my ears. Down the ladder I rushed, on to the main deck, seized one of the davit tackles and slid down into the boat; and as the men replied to my question that all were present, the bowman thrust the boat away from the sinking steamer’s side, and the oars churned up the water as we pulled away.
“Give way, lively, lads,” I cried, as I seized the tiller; “we’ll get close inshore, where nobody can see us, and save our skins in that way. We have happily escaped thus far; and it would be a pity for any of us to get hit now. There goes the old Chiyo! she hasn’t taken long to sink, bless her! She is worth a lot more where she is, at the bottom of Port Arthur harbour, than she was when afloat.”
Chapter Seven.
THE KORYU MARU.
Meanwhile the Fukui Maru had also reached her destination, and as we pushed off in the boat from the side of our own sinking ship, we heard, through the din of firing and the explosions of bursting shells, the roar of her cable as her crew let go her anchor. I was sitting with my back turned toward her, intent upon getting our boat as close inshore as possible, when the engineer, who was sitting beside me, touched my arm and pointed.
I turned and looked, to see Hirose’s ship brought up right in mid-channel—the berth assigned to her; and, bearing down upon her, a Russian destroyer, her funnels and guns spouting flame and smoke as she tore furiously through the water. Another instant, and the destroyer swerved, just clearing the stern of the Fukui; there was the flash of a torpedo from her deck tube, a terrific explosion, and the Fukui seemed to be hove up out of the water on the top of a great cone of leaping sea intermingled with smoke and flame. The ship had been torpedoed, quite uselessly, indeed worse than uselessly, for the Russians had simply saved our people the trouble of sinking her.
The destroyer passed on, and we temporarily lost sight of her in the darkness and wreathing smoke. We saw the Fukui’s boat lowered, and the crew get into her; but she remained alongside so long that she only got away barely in time to avoid being dragged down with the ship. Meanwhile, shells were falling not only all round but also aboard the Fukui, and we presently saw that she was on fire, as well as sinking. Nearly or quite a dozen shells must have struck her before she finally foundered; but it was not until the next day that we learned the full extent of the tragedy. It then appeared that the explosion of the torpedo had either disconnected or shattered the wires connected with the explosives in the Fukui’s bottom, and a petty officer named Sugino had gone below to explode the charges. It chanced that this man was a blood-brother of Hirose, and, not returning to the deck as he was expected to do, Hirose went in search of him, after ordering the boat to leave the ship. A few seconds later a shell was seen to strike Hirose on the head, of course killing him instantly. Later on, we heard that his floating body had been picked up in the harbour by the Russians, who, to do them justice, buried it with military honours.
A small air of wind at this time came breathing down the harbour, momentarily dispersing the thick veil of smoke that overhung the water, and we were thus enabled to see that our third ship, the Yahiko Maru, had also succeeded in reaching the berth assigned to her, and was at that moment in the very act of sinking, close to the Pinnacle Rock, a great monolith which rose high out of the water on the western side of the harbour’s mouth. Thus far, therefore, everything had gone well with the expedition; and now all that remained was for the fourth ship, the Yoneyama Maru, to close up the gap that still remained.