The Sea: Its Stirring Story of Adventure, Peril, & Heroism. Volume 2

by Frederick Whymper

No greater horror can occur at sea than for the good ship to be on fire. At first sight, indeed, it might appear that in the midst of an unbounded waste of waters nothing could be easier than to extinguish a conflagration on board a vessel, but examples already cited in this work have shown the difficulties in the way. Steam-ships have special facilities for pumping water into almost any part of their hulls, yet one of the saddest examples of a ship on fire is afforded in the loss of the Amazon, a steam-ship of the first-class.

The Amazon was one of a fleet of new vessels placed by the Royal Mail Steam-ship Company on the West India service, and was stated to be, at the time of her launching, the largest timber-built steam-ship ever constructed in England. She was of 2,256 tons burden, and fitted with every improvement known at the time; her entire cost was stated at over £100,000. When, on the 16th of December, 1851, she arrived at Southampton, she was regarded as the perfect model of a passenger vessel. In due time she was ready for sea, and having received her crew and engineers aboard, and a little later her passengers and the Admiralty agent with mails, she left Southampton on Friday, January 2nd, 1852. The officers were all tried men, and her commander, Captain Symons, was one of those seamen whom large steam-ship companies are only too glad to employ and retain. He was not merely an officer of thoroughly competent skill, but a man of unbending resolution, a man fitted to be a ruler among men, as should be every commander of a great vessel. Only a few weeks before he had received the thanks of the American Government, accompanied by a present of a silver speaking-trumpet, for interposing, at the risk of his own life, in an affair at Chagres between the Americans and the natives. On this occasion he not only was the means of saving much valuable property, but by his energetic conduct arrested a conflict, which, but for his intervention, might probably have been attended with much bloodshed and slaughter. The Amazon, a pioneer of the service she was to inaugurate, left Southampton amidst a considerable amount of éclat, and commenced her voyage.

“And so,” says the work[88] from which much of the following account is compiled, “the gallant ship sped on. The wind was right ahead, but her engines were powerful, [pg 279]and she passed rapidly through the water. But it is necessary, in order to make clear what follows, to describe the position of her engines and boats.

“The engine-room was about the middle of the vessel, having sixteen boilers—eight in the forward and as many in the after part. There were, consequently, two funnels: one about midships, the other immediately behind the foremast. In those vessels which have but one set of boilers and one funnel these are placed in the after part of the engine-room, while the store-room, containing tallow, oil, and other inflammable materials, is placed forward. But the Amazon having boilers at both ends, it happened that the floor of the store-room rested directly on the wood casing that surrounded the upper part or steam-chest of the forward boilers.

“Then, with regard to the boats: most of the older vessels have life-boats resting, bottom up, on the top of the paddle-boxes, according to a plan much approved in the navy, and the smaller boats swing suspended over the water, from two curved iron props, or davits, as they are technically termed, by ropes that, running through a pulley, enable men seated in the boats to lower themselves from the ship’s side to the water, when the hooks by which the tackle is attached to the boats may at once be cast off. But as it would be inconvenient that the boats so hung from the davits should be swinging backward and forward with every roll of the ship, ropes are lashed round them and fastened to the bulwark of the vessel, in order to keep them steady. Now, in order to get quit of this latter somewhat clumsy contrivance, as well as to ease the strain of the boat upon the tackling by which it swings, a different mode of fastening was adopted in the Amazon. There were the davits as usual, and the common contrivance for lowering the boats into the water; but instead of the undergirding ropes or guys, two iron props were introduced, each of which, branching out at the top into two prongs, received in its groove the keel of the boat, in which she sat as in a cradle, thus taking away all strain from the ordinary tackling. This change in the mode of securing the boats had, however, this effect: that, whereas in the former case the boat’s crew had but to lower the boat and themselves into the water, by the new mode it became necessary, before they could do that, to hoist the boat up a few feet till it was got clear of the projecting points of the crutch on which it rested. Of what fatal consequence this necessity was will become too apparent in the course of the narrative.”

The machinery was perfectly new, and, as is frequently the case on first trials, became much heated in the bearings: so much so, indeed, that water had to be pumped over them. Whether or not the terrible disaster about to be described resulted from that fact will never be known; it much more probably occurred from some light being dropped upon the waste, &c., of the oil-room. No neglect of duty was attributed to the engineers, who seem to have been exceptionally careful.

About a quarter before one o’clock, Sunday, when the ship was about entering the Bay of Biscay, Mr. Treweeke, the second officer, a most promising and practical sailor, being then officer of the watch, was on the bridge. Just before, Dunsford, quartermaster, had gone the rounds to see that the lights were all out, and had reported that all was right; Mr. Treweeke then was on the bridge, and Mr. Dunsford was standing under him to receive orders. Mr. Vincent, one of the midshipmen, was on the quarter-deck; all was [pg 280]still as the grave, save the monotonous throbbing of the engines. He happened to look towards Mr. Treweeke at that moment, and saw him leaning listlessly against the railing of the bridge. Suddenly Treweeke started up, and looked earnestly at something apparently issuing from the engine-room. That officer had discovered flames issuing thence, and Dunsford was detailed to call the captain: and although he should have performed his duty noiselessly, he managed, rather boisterously, to disturb some of the passengers. The captain immediately ran out of his cabin, half nude, and after finding that the fire was serious, ran back and put on some clothes, immediately returning to the scene of action. At the same time, Mr. Stone, the fourth engineer, saw fire on the starboard foremost boiler from the iron platform on which he was standing, and instantly gave the alarm. He even attempted to stop the engines, but the smoke was so dense that he was obliged to retreat. One of the men, who was going to the engine-room to warm himself, observed a glare of light in the fore stoke-hole, and on examination found between the starboard fore-boiler and the bulkhead a flame issuing as far as he could see. The firemen’s backs were turned at the time, and he shouted out to them, “Don’t you see the fire? Why don’t you get water?” They did not, however, seem to notice it. He rushed aft, where the hose was kept, and tried to drag it forward, shouting for assistance; but by the time the hose was brought the flames of fire were rushing up through the oil, tallow, and waste store-rooms. The flames were leaping upwards to the deck above. Owing to the smoke, he was obliged to give up the hose, and rush on deck, it being impossible to remain below any longer. The chief engineer, Mr. Angus, and one of his assistants, tried to put on the hose, and kept by it till they could not breathe. Hearing a cry for buckets on deck, Angus ran aft as fast as he could, and the passengers were then breaking open the saloon door to get on deck. Several attempts to get water to the flames were unsuccessful or utterly ineffective.

The second engineer, Mr. William Angus, stated that when he was alarmed by the cry of “Fire!” he was in the act of “blowing off”[89] the after-boiler, and on coming up the lower platform ladder of the engine-room, ran to set the “donkey” engine (which pumps the ship and keeps the boilers a-going). A blast of smoke stopped him, and when he recovered more or less from the suffocation he attempted to work her, but failed. All the lamps were extinguished by the smoke. Mr. Stone, the fourth engineer, came to his assistance, but was forced to retire. The stokers and others found it equally impossible to remain. One of the survivors described the progress of the flames in the engine-room “as that of a great wave of fire, before which no man could stand and live.” He stated that it rushed upon his mind that if the boilers were left in their then state the water would soon become exhausted, and the boilers themselves explode, so he turned on the water into them, and attempted to remove the weights from the safety valves, so as to ease the pressure of the steam. The glass above was cracking with the intensity of the heat. “It was not three minutes from the time that the fire was discovered till the ship was in flames.”

Above, on deck, all was horror, confusion, and despair, among the passengers and crew. The flames, having broken out abaft the foremast, rapidly extended across the whole breadth [pg 281]of the ship, forming a wall of fire as high as the paddle-boxes, cutting off all communication. One or two of the sailors, indeed, managed to get across the paddle-boxes, cautiously creeping up one side and sliding down the other, but all other means of access were effectually debarred. It was the sole chance of safety, for the boats were all in the after part of the ship. “It would be needless here to tell of the screams and shrieks of the horror-stricken passengers, mixed with the cries of the animals aboard; of the wild anguish with which they saw before them only the choice of death almost equally dreadful—the raging flame or the raging sea, and of those fearful moments when all self-control, all presence of mind, appeared to be lost, and no authority was recognised, no command obeyed.” Meanwhile the ominous fire-bell was ringing—the knell of many a poor man and woman that night.