Frank Brown, Sea Apprentice

by Frank Thomas Bullen

But Mr. Carter was missing! Is missing still. Whether in horror at the deed he had done he had jumped overboard, or whether he had been knocked overboard by a falling spar, no one will ever know; he was gone, and, if the truth must be told, no one could regret him very much. The unanimous opinion was, “Well, poor chap, if he made a mistake, and there isn’t much doubt that he did, he’s paid for it with all that man has to give, and may God have mercy upon his soul.”

Now, while Captain Sharpe was outlining his plan of work to the men, who were all recovered from their fright and confident in the safety of the ship, one of the boys came up to him with the startling news that two men had just crept into their house looking like lunatics, as indeed they were temporarily. How they got there they could not explain, but the supposition is that when the Thurifer passed through their ship, they, feeling only the blind desire to save themselves, had sprung at the black side of their destroyer, had caught some gear hanging outboard, or perhaps the chain plates, as the iron bars to which the standing rigging is secured and which are bolted on the outside of the ship are called, and had climbed on board, hiding in some corner until their paroxysm of fear had passed away, when they had emerged and entered the first open door they saw, which happened to be that of the boys’ house. But they completed the tale of the rescued, four in all, the other two being the late captain’s wife and daughter, whom the steward was vainly trying to comfort in the captain’s cabin.

Daylight was now beginning to struggle through the mist on the horizon, and the wind was falling fast. So that after giving a few general orders as to the clearing away of the gear aloft in order to enable the ship to be handled, and men to move about the decks without the imminent danger to life and limb of spars falling upon their heads, the captain and carpenter went forward to survey the damage done to the bows. In truth it was a grim spectacle. The ministering priest, torn from his beautiful attitude of blessing, hung dolefully head downward, battered out of all recognition and only held by a few wrenched and twisted bolts whose tenacity would not be denied, and the thurible, that emblem of beatific aspersion, was gone.

The huge bar of iron which held down the bowsprit, the bobstay, was still in place though bent and curiously twisted, and so was the sturdy steel bowsprit itself. The jibboom with its great complication of stays, guys, foot-ropes, sails, and downhaul was like a scene I witnessed once, where a man fishing from the end of a pier caught a conger-eel which he flung into the midst of his line by mistake and then attacked with his umbrella. It was just hideously hopeless, the sort of thing you want to cut off and let drift away as beyond the wit or skill of man to get disentangled.

The anchors, snugly stowed and firmly lashed to their respective bolts by the cat-tails, were all right but useless, for the hawse-pipes through which the cables should have led to secure the ship to them while they bit into the ground were torn and twisted beyond locating or use. And the stem, that splendid curvilinear girder of steel which had cleft the waves so proudly, it reminded now only of the battered, inhuman visage of an old prize-fighter, so curiously bent and broken did it appear. Lastly, and most serious of all, the two sides of the bows were stove in, two huge rents appeared there, into either of which you might have driven a cart, and into which the unresisted sea flowed gaily, resurging discoloured with coal-dust and laden with curious fragments, for the fore-peak, as that part of a ship is called, was now getting such a scouring out as it had never received since she was built.

But it will be asked, why did this fine ship not sink with such a tremendous wound in her most vulnerable part? Only because of that invaluable invention, the water-tight bulkhead. At a distance of some twenty feet from the stem or cutwater there is built into all such ships a barrier of steel plates at right angles to the line of the ship’s keel, or right across the ship. And the general practice was to build them without any door, so that neglect could not vitiate the safety they promised. They were built quite perpendicular and flat, which I have always thought a mistake, a slight curve or angle from each side pointing forward would have made them so much safer when resisting the inrush of the water when the ship was head-reaching with a hole in her bows.

Now with the exception of any possible damage done to the bottom plates of the ship by the wreck as she bumped over it, the extent of the structural damage to the ship was fairly well defined, and as the bulkhead which kept the water out of the main hold was well shored up behind by the well-packed cargo of jute, and consequently there was little or no danger of its giving way under pressure of the head sea, Captain Sharpe’s mind as far as the ship’s safety was concerned was quite easy.

What, however, he could not rid himself of was the fear which all shipmasters must have when any accident to the vessel under their command occurs—would he be brought in as being to blame? It is here that so much injustice is done to the men of the sea. No allowance is made for possible accidents over which a man has no control; could have none, in the nature of the case, be he as careful and vigilant as a man may be, there being no discharge in this war. And if he be brought in to blame, in most cases he falls, like Lucifer, never to rise again. Too old for service as a junior officer in a tramp, he may get a precarious position in a line whose directors, trading upon their fellow-creatures’ misfortunes, get skippers upon whom disgrace has come to command their vessels at a miserably inadequate salary, and keep them in terror of instant dismissal, making an immense merit of employing them at all. Pah! the whole business is vile, it should stink in the nostrils of all honest men.

However, Captain Sharpe was not the man to allow his work to be hindered by any premonition of coming disaster to himself, so he proceeded as vigorously as he possibly could, aided to the utmost by his good crew, in the work of getting his ship so far repaired aloft as to be manageable. This enormous task was made somewhat easier by the wind falling away to an almost perfect calm, during which many an anxious glance was cast around in the hope of espying some sign of life upon the floating wreckage. But never a glimpse did they see, and consequently the work being unhindered by the arduous job of getting boats out, by nightfall they had her again well under control.

True, she looked ragged and unkempt aloft, a sad, strange contrast to the beautifully-rigged and splendidly-kept ship she was before the collision, but the great thing, getting her dirigible again, was accomplished by sunset. In this work the two rescued men took active part, albeit they had to be spoken to in sign language almost exclusively. But all sailors know that at sea this disability is no bar to the employment of foreigners, it being no uncommon thing for an officer to find himself commanding a whole crew, none of the members of which can speak more than two or three words of English, and some no word at all.