The Castaways

by Harry Collingwood

“Oh,” said I, “it has not been bad enough to justify me in disturbing you, thus far; nevertheless I am very glad to have your help now, as I believe there is no time to lose. Kindly keep her as she now is, dead before the wind, and I will get about the work of shortening sail without further delay.”

So saying, I hurried away forward, letting go the trysail outhaul and the main-topsail halliards on my way; passing next to the fore-topsail halliards, which I also let run. I then squared the yards, hauled in, brailed up and furled the trysail, and next took the reef-tackles, one after the other, to the winch, heaving them as taut as I could get them; after which I jumped aloft, passed the reef earrings, and tied the knittles. We were now tolerably safe—the brig being under close-reefed topsails—so I hove-to while we took breakfast, after which I hauled down and stowed the jib, got the brig away before the wind again, with Miss Onslow at the wheel, and resumed pumping operations.

I toiled all through the day, reducing the amount of water in the hold to a depth of eighteen inches only, and then hove-to the brig on the port tack for the night, both of us being by this time so completely exhausted that rest was even more important to us than food, although I took care that we should not be obliged to go without the latter.

About two hours after sunset the wind freshened up still more, and by midnight it was blowing so heavily, and so mountainous a sea was running, that I dared not any longer leave the brig to herself; it became necessary to constantly tend the helm, although the craft was hove-to; and in consequence I had no alternative but to pass the latter half of this night also at the wheel, exposed to a pelting rain that quickly drenched me to the skin. It was now blowing a whole gale from the northward; and so it continued for the next thirty hours, during nearly the whole of which time I remained at the wheel, wet, cold, and nearly crazy at the last for want of rest; indeed, but for the attention—almost amounting to devotion—of my companion I believe I should never have weathered that terrible time of fatigue and exposure. An end to it came at last, however; the gale broke, the wind softened down somewhat, and at length the sea went down sufficiently to permit of the wheel being once more lashed; when, leaving the brig in Miss Onslow’s charge, with strict injunctions that I was at once to be called in the event of a change for the worse in the weather, I went below, rolled into the mate’s bunk, and instantly lost all consciousness for the ensuing ten hours. It was somewhere about midnight when I awoke; yet when I turned out I found Miss Onslow still up, and not only so but with a hot and thoroughly appetising meal ready for me. We sat down and partook of it together; and when we had finished I went on deck, had a look round, found that the weather had greatly improved during my long sleep, and so turned in again until morning.

When I next went on deck the weather had cleared, the wind had dwindled to a five-knot breeze—hauling out from the eastward again at the same time—and the sea had gone down to such an extent as to be scarcely perceptible; I therefore shook out my reefs, and once more made sail upon the ship—a task that kept me busy right up to noon. The weather being fine, I was able to secure a meridian altitude of the sun, and thus ascertain the latitude of the brig, with the resulting discovery that we were already to the southward of the Cape parallels. This was disconcerting in the extreme, the more so from the fact that the easterly wind was forcing us still farther to the southward; but there was no help for it, we could do nothing but keep all on as we were and hope for a shift of wind. The fact of our being so far to the southward accounted, too, for the circumstance that we were not falling in with any other vessels.

Hitherto I had been so fully employed that I had found no time to search for the ship’s papers, or do more than ascertain the bare fact that she was of American nationality, that she was named the Governor Smeaton, and that she hailed from Portland, Maine; but now that the weather had come fine once more, I determined to devote a few hours to the work of overhauling the vessel and discovering what I could about her. So I went to work and instituted a thoroughly systematic search, beginning in the skipper’s cabin—having of course first obtained Miss Onslow’s permission—and there, stowed carefully away in a lock-up desk—which, after some hesitation, I decided to break open—I found the ship’s papers intact, enclosed in a small tin case. And from these I learned, first, that her late master was named Josiah Hobson, and second, that she was bound on a trading voyage to the Pacific, with a cargo of “notions.” Then, in another drawer, also in the skipper’s cabin, carefully stowed away under some clothes, I found the log-book, and a chart of the Atlantic Ocean, with the brig’s course, up to a certain point, pricked off upon it; and from these two documents I learned that the brig had sailed, on such and such a date, from New York, with what, in the way of weather, progress, and so on, had befallen her, up to a date some five weeks later, whereon entries had been made in the log-book up to noon. The remarks respecting the weather at that hour gave no indication of any warning of the catastrophe that must have occurred only a few hours later. This last entry in the log-book enabled me to determine that the brig had been drifting about derelict for nearly three weeks when we two ocean waifs fell in with and took possession of her. The “notions” of which her cargo consisted seemed, according to the manifest, to comprise more or less of nearly everything that could possibly captivate a savage’s fancy; but in addition to these multitudinous articles there were—somewhere in the ship—a few bales of goods—mostly linen, fine muslins, silks, and ready-made clothing—consigned to a firm in Valparaiso, which I believed would be of the utmost value to Miss Onslow and myself, if I could but find them, and which, under the circumstances, I felt I could unhesitatingly appropriate to our use. I therefore determined that my next task should be to search for these bales; which, being composed of rather valuable goods, and destined moreover to be discharged at the brig’s first port of call, I thought would probably be found on top of the rest of the cargo and near to one of the hatches.

The next day proved even finer than its predecessor, the wind holding in the same direction but of perhaps a shade less strength than on the day before, while the sea had gone down until the water was smooth as the surface of a pond excepting for the low swell that scarcely ever quite disappears in mid-ocean; it was an ideal day for taking off the hatches, and I therefore determined to commence my examination of the cargo at once, beginning with the main hatch. To knock out the wedges, remove the battens, and roll back the tarpaulin was not a difficult job, and when I had got thus far, the removal of a couple of the hatches was soon effected. Luck was with me that day, for no sooner had I got the hatches off than my eyes fell upon a bale bearing marks which, according to the testimony of the vessel’s manifest, showed it to be one of those of which I was in search. It was too large, and was too tightly wedged in among others to admit of my moving it unaided, but with the assistance of a strop on the mainstay, and the watch tackle, I soon broke it out and triumphantly landed it on deck. The manifest gave the contents as ready-made clothing—men’s and women’s; which was exactly what Miss Onslow at least needed more than anything else; so I opened it forthwith, and then called the young lady to overhaul the contents and select what she would, while I gave her a spell at the wheel. In ten minutes she came aft, with her arms full of neatly-folded white material, and disappeared below. Then she came on deck again, had a further search, and this time carried off a load of coloured fabric; after which she remained invisible for nearly three-quarters of an hour. Finally she reappeared clad in an entirely new rig-out from top to toe; and very sweet and charming she looked, although I regret being unable to inform my female readers of the details of her costume. Then I had my innings, and after a considerable amount of rummaging succeeded in finding a couple of suits of light tweed that I thought would fit me, together with a generous supply of underclothing. This done, and our more pressing needs in the matter of clothing met, I returned the despoiled bale to its place in the hatchway, replaced the hatches, and battened everything securely down once more. The remainder of the day I devoted to the task of pumping the ship dry.

The two succeeding days were quite devoid of incident; the weather held fine, and the wind so light that the brig made barely three knots in the hour, on a taut bowline; there was nothing particular to do, for the small air of wind that continued to blow hung obstinately at east, and we were still driving slowly south, the vessel steering herself. Under these circumstances, as I was daily growing increasingly anxious to fall in with a sail of some sort that would take us off, and convey us to a civilised port, or even lend me a few hands to help in carrying the brig to Cape Town, I spent pretty nearly the whole of the day in the main-topmast crosstrees, from whence I could obtain the most extended view possible, and perhaps be thus able to intercept some craft that would otherwise slip past us unseen.

On the third day after my raid upon the cargo I was aloft as usual—the hour being about ten a.m.,—while Miss Onslow was busy in and out of the galley. The ship was creeping along at a speed of about two and a half knots, when, slowly and carefully sweeping the horizon afresh with the telescope, after a rather long spell of meditation upon how this adventure was likely to end, a small, hazy-looking, ill-defined object swam into the field of the instrument. The object was about one point before the weather beam, and was so far away that the rarefaction of the air imparted to it a wavering indistinctness of aspect that rendered it quite unrecognisable. The fact, however, that it was visible at all in the slightly hazy atmosphere led me to estimate its distance from the brig as about ten miles, while, from its apparent size, it might be either a boat, a raft, or a piece of floating wreckage. But whatever it might be, I determined to examine it, since it would be nothing out of my way, and would merely involve the labour of getting the ship round upon the other tack; so I continued to watch it until it had drifted to a couple of points abaft the beam—which occurred just two and a half hours after I had first sighted it, thus confirming my estimate as to its distance—when I put the helm hard down, lashed it, and then tended the braces as the brig sluggishly came up into the wind and as sluggishly paid off on the starboard tack. When the brig was fairly round, and the helm steadied I found that the object bore a full point on the lee bow, and that we should probably fetch it with ease. It was now distant about ten and a half miles, so there was plenty of time for us to go below and get tiffin ere closing it.

It was within about two hours of sunset when we at length came up with the object; but long ere then I had, with the assistance of the telescope, made it out to be a large boat, apparently a ship’s longboat, unrigged, and drifting idly before the wind. Yet her trim, sitting low, as she was, on the water, showed that she was not empty; and at length, when we were within some two miles of her, I suddenly observed a movement of some sort aboard her, and a couple of oars were laid out—with some difficulty, I thought. I was at the wheel when this occurred—for I had discovered, some time earlier in the afternoon, that although, with the wheel lashed, the brig could be made to steer herself fairly well upon a wind, she was just a trifle too erratic in her course to hit off and fetch such a comparatively small object as we were now aiming for, and consequently I had been steering all through the afternoon—but I at once called Miss Onslow to relieve me while I ran the ensign—the stars and stripes—up to the peak, as an encouragement to the occupants of the boat, and an intimation that they had been seen. It was tedious work, our snail-like closing with the boat, and it was rendered all the more so by the fact that those in her, after vainly attempting for some five minutes to use the oars, had given up the effort, and were once more invisible in the bottom of the boat, while the oars, left to take care of themselves, had gradually slid through the rowlocks and gone adrift. This simple circumstance, apparently so trivial, was to me very significant, pointing, as I considered it did, to a condition of such absolute exhaustion on the part of the strangers that even the loss of their oars had become a matter of indifference to them. Who could tell what eternities of suffering these men had endured ere being brought into this condition? It was quite likely that that lonely, drifting boat had been the scene of some ghastly tragedy! Who could tell what sight of horror might be passively awaiting us between the gunwales of the craft? I once more resigned the wheel to Miss Onslow’s hand, with strict injunctions to her not to leave it or attempt to get a peep at the interior of the boat, on any account, and then went forward to prepare a rope’s-end to drop into her as we drew up alongside. I conned the brig in such a manner as to bring the boat alongside under the lee fore chains, and then, when the proper moment had arrived, let go the weather main braces and swung the topsail aback.