England, and indeed all Europe, long prior to 1870 had been busily constructing ironclads, and the daily journals teemed with descriptions of new forms and varieties of ships, armour, and armament, as well as of new and enormous guns, which, rightly directed, might sink them to the bottom. Among the more curious of the ironclads of that period, and the construction of which had led to any quantity of discussion, sometimes of a very angry kind, was the turret-ship—practically the sea-going “monitor”—Captain, which Captain Cowper Phipps Coles had at length been permitted to construct. Coles, who was an enthusiast of great scientific attainments, as well as a practical seaman, which too many of our experimentalists in this direction have not been, had distinguished himself in the Crimea, and had later made many improvements in rendering vessels shot-proof. His revolving turrets are, however, the inventions with which his name are more intimately connected, although he had much to do with the general construction of the Captain, and other ironclads of the period.
The Captain was a large double-screw armour-plated vessel, of 4,272 tons. Her armour in the most exposed parts was eight inches in thickness, ranging elsewhere downwards from seven to as low as three inches. She had two revolving turrets, the strongest and heaviest yet built, and carried six powerful guns. Among the peculiarities of her construction were, that she had only nine feet of “free-board”—i.e., that was the height of her sides out of water. The forecastle and after-part of the vessel were raised above this, and they were connected with a light hurricane-deck. This, as we shall see, played an important part in the sad disaster we have to relate.
On the morning of the 8th of September, 1870, English readers, at their breakfast-tables, in railway carriages, and everywhere, were startled with the news that the Captain had foundered, with all hands, in the Bay of Biscay. Six hundred men had been swept into [pg 55]eternity without a moment’s warning. She had been in company with the squadron the night before, and, indeed, had been visited by the admiral, for purposes of inspection, the previous afternoon. The early part of the evening had been fine; later it had become what sailors call “dirty weather;” at midnight the wind rose fast, and soon culminated in a furious gale. At 2.15 in the morning of the 7th a heavy bank of clouds passed off, and the stars came out clear and bright, the moon then setting; but no vessel could be discerned where the Captain had been last observed. At daybreak the squadron was all in sight, but scattered. “Only ten ships instead of eleven could be discerned, the ‘Captain’ being the missing one.” Later, it appeared that seventeen of the men and the gunner had escaped, and landed at Corbucion, north of Cape Finisterre, on the afternoon of the 7th. All the men who were saved belonged to the starboard watch; or, in other words, none escaped except those on deck duty. Every man below, whether soundly sleeping after his day’s work, or tossing sleeplessly in his berth, thinking of home and friends and present peril, or watching the engines, or feeding the furnaces, went down, without the faintest possibility of escaping his doom.
Think of this catastrophe, and what it involved! The families and friends of 600 men plunged into mourning, and the scores on scores of wives and children into poverty! In one street of Portsea, thirty wives were made widows by the occurrence.[44] The shock of the news killed one poor woman, then in weak health. Nor were the sad effects confined to the cottages of the poor. The noble-hearted captain of the vessel was a son of Field-Marshal Burgoyne; Captain Coles, her inventor; a son of Mr. Childers, the then First Lord of the Admiralty; the younger son of Lord Northbrook; the third son of Lord Herbert of Lea; and Lord Lewis Gordon, brother of the Marquis of Huntley, were among the victims of that terrible morning. The intelligence arrived during the excitement caused by the defeat and capitulation of Sedan, which, involving, as it did, the deposition of the Emperor and the fate of France, was naturally the great topic of discussion, but for the time it overshadowed even those great events, for it was a national calamity.
From the statements of survivors we now know that the watch had been called a few minutes past midnight; and as the men were going on deck to muster, the ship gave a terrible lurch to starboard, soon, however, righting herself on that occasion. Robert Hirst, a seaman, who afterwards gave some valuable testimony, was on the forecastle. There was a very strong wind, and the ship was then only carrying her three top-sails, double reefs in each, and the foretop-mast stay-sail. The yards were braced sharp up, and the ship had little way upon her.[45] As the watch was mustered, he heard Captain Burgoyne give the order, “Let go the foretop-sail halyards!” followed by, “Let go fore and maintop-sail sheets!” By the time the men got to the top-sail sheets the ship was heeling over to starboard so much that others were being washed off the deck, [pg 57]the ship lying down on her side, as she was gradually turning over and trembling through her whole frame with every blow which the short, jumping, vicious seas, now white with the squall, gave her.[46] The roar of the steam from her boilers was terrific, “outscreaming the noise of the storm,” but not drowning the shrieks of the poor engineers and stokers which were heard by some of the survivors. The horrors of their situation can be imagined. The sea, breaking down the funnel, would soon, no doubt, extinguish the furnaces, but not until some of their contents had been dashed into the engine-room, with oceans of scalding water; the boilers themselves may, likely enough, have given way and burst also. Mercifully, it was not for long. Hirst, with two other men, rushed to the weather-forecastle netting and jumped overboard. It was hardly more than a few moments before they found themselves washed on to the bilge of the ship’s bottom, for in that brief space of time the ship had turned completely over, and almost immediately went down. Hirst and his companions went down with the ship, but the next feeling of consciousness by the former was coming into contact with a floating spar, to which he tied himself with his black silk handkerchief. He was soon, however, washed from the spar, but got hold of the stern of the second launch, which was covered with canvas, and floating as it was stowed on board the ship. Other men were there, on the top of the canvas covering. Immediately after, they fell in with the steam-lifeboat pinnace, bottom-up, with Captain Burgoyne and several men clinging to it. Four men, of whom Mr. May,[47] the gunner, was one, jumped from off the bottom of the steam-pinnace to the launch. One account says that Captain Burgoyne incited them, by calling out, “Jump, men, jump!” but did not do it himself. The canvas was immediately cut away, and with the oars free, they attempted to pull up to the steam-pinnace to rescue the captain and others remaining there. This they found impossible to accomplish. As soon as they endeavoured to get the boat’s head up to the sea to row her to windward to where the capsized boat was floating, their boat was swamped almost level to her [pg 58]thwarts, and two of the men were washed clean out of her. The pump was set going, and the boat bailed out with their caps, &c., as far as possible. They then made a second attempt to row the boat against the sea, which was as unsuccessful as before. Meantime, poor Burgoyne was still clinging to the pinnace, in “a storm of broken waters.” When the launch was swept towards him once, one of the men on board offered to throw him an oar, which he declined, saying, nobly, “For God’s sake, men, keep your oars: you will want them.” This piece of self-abnegation probably cost him his life, for he went down shortly after, following “the six hundred” of his devoted crew into “the valley of death.” The launch was beaten hither and thither; and a quarter of an hour after the Captain had capsized, sighted the lights of one of their own ships, which was driven by in the gale, its officers knowing nothing of the fate of these unfortunates, or their still more hapless companions. Mr. May, the gunner, took charge of the launch, and at daybreak they sighted Cape Finisterre, inside which they landed after twelve hours’ hard work at the oars.
THE “CAPTAIN” IN THE BAY OF BISCAY.
One man, when he found the vessel capsizing, crawled over the weather-netting on the port side, and performed an almost incredible feat. It is well told in his own laconic style:—“Felt ship heel over, and felt she would not right. Made for weather-hammock netting. She was then on her beam-ends. Got along her bottom by degrees, as she kept turning over, until I was where her keel would have been if she had one. The seas then washed me off. I saw a piece of wood about twenty yards off, and swam to it.” In other words, he got over her side, and walked up to the bottom! While in the water, two poor drowning wretches caught hold of him, and literally tore off the legs of his trousers. He could not help them, and they sank for the last time.
Many and varied were the explanations given of the causes of this disaster. There had evidently been some uneasiness in regard to her stability in the water at one time, but she had sailed so well on previous trips, in the same stormy waters, that confidence had been restored in her. The belief, afterwards, among many authorities, was that she ought not to have carried sail at all.[48] This was the primary cause of the disaster, no doubt; and then, in all probability, when the force of the wind had heeled her over, a heavy sea struck her and completely capsized her—the water on and over her depressed side assisting by weighting her downwards. The side of the hurricane-deck acted, when the vessel was heeled over, as one vast sail, and, no doubt, had much to do with putting her on her beam-ends. The general impression of the survivors appeared to be that, with the ship heeling over, the pressure of a strong wind upon the under part of the hurricane-deck had a greater effect or leverage upon the hull, than the pressure of the wind on her top-sails. They were also nearly unanimous in their opinion that when the Captain’s starboard side was well down in the water, with the weight of water on the turret-deck, and the pressure of the wind blowing from the port hand on the under surface of the hurricane-deck, and thus pushing the ship right over, she had no chance of righting herself again.
It is to be remarked that long after the Captain had sunk, the admiral of the squadron thought that he saw her, although it was very evident afterwards that it must have been some other vessel. In his despatch to the Admiralty,[49] which very plainly indicated that he had some anxiety in regard to her stability in bad weather, he described her appearance and behaviour up till 1.30 a.m.—more than an hour after her final exit to the depths below. In the days of superstitious belief, so common among sailors, a thrilling story of her image haunting the spot would surely have been built on this foundation.