CHAPTER XVI
CONCLUSION
There are, I think, few more terrible and majestic spectacles to be witnessed than a collision at sea between two large ships, and especially between two large sailing-ships. The moment before the shock the immense cobweb-like entanglement of masts, yards, sails and rigging is towering skyward in all its graceful beauty and scientific arrangement, making the uninstructed beholder marvel, not merely how it can support the tremendous stress put upon it by the vast sail area acted upon by the wind, but how it is held in its place at all against the incessant pitching and rolling of the hull upon which it is reared.
But when two vessels like that come crashing into one another with an impact of several thousands of tons, and the mighty top-hamper comes hurtling down in ghastly entanglement of ruin, the scene is even more terrifying than that of some gigantic forest-tree with wide-spreading branches being struck by lightning and falling in an avalanche of riven fragments of timber. It is, however, a sight that is seldom seen by an outsider, and as, moreover, it usually occurs at night, few indeed are the people who have even had the momentary glimpse of its terrors caught by the crew of either vessel in their agony.
In the impact of the Thurifer upon the stranger, not one of the usual horrors was wanting. In the first place the Thurifer appeared to rebound as if aghast at the deed she had done, but her impetus carried her on again, rending and tearing her gigantic way through the hull of her victim, which was literally cut in twain, and heeling away from her, settled down as the Thurifer passed through her.
Amid all the horror of the scene, two figures in fluttering white were noticed on the top of the forward house of the doomed ship as it came abreast of the main rigging of the Thurifer.
Some instinct, I suppose, prompted Mr. Wilson to leap with a rope from the Thurifer’s rail on the house of the other ship, shouting as he did so, “Come on, Frank—women!”
Frank was close behind him at the time, and in a very tempest of energy the two succeeded in saving the two unfortunates, who were indeed the wife and daughter of the captain of the sinking vessel. And as they were hauled into the rigging of the Thurifer they sent up shriek after shriek for “husband” and “father” in Italian, and had to be forcibly restrained from leaping back into the whirling blackness of sea and wreck through which the Thurifer was relentlessly ploughing her way. At last, that is after two or three minutes of eternity, the Thurifer dragged clear, her upper gear a mass of entanglement, ropes, sails, and masts carried away and dangling most dangerously overhead, while beneath her keel the mass of ruin which had so recently been a splendid ship settled quietly down to a final resting-place on the sea-bed.
Now here was a case where the most superb seamanship was absolutely of no avail for any attempt to save life. The ship could not be handled, for her braces and running gear generally were in an apparently inextricable confusion, no one knew the extent of the damage done to the hull, although the carpenter, true to the instinct of that most valuable class of seafarer, regardless of the falling and dangling gear overhead, ran and sounded the well, finding that she was as yet making no water. The boats were mostly destroyed, and in any case the falling wreckage had made it an impossibility to get at them even had they remained intact. So Captain Sharpe did the only thing possible, called all hands aft to see if any were injured or lost, and found to his delight that every man answered to his name.