The First Mate: The Story of a Strange Cruise

by Harry Collingwood

When, however, on the second day, seeing that I needed help, his mother and sister came to my assistance, the sight of them working while he idled was too much for even his spoiled and selfish temper; and with many grumblings and mutterings below his breath he ordered his mother away and took her place. But so intractable was he, so unwilling to receive the slightest suggestion or hint from a “darned Britisher”, and so determined to do things his own way or not at all, that eventually I had to tell him plainly he must consent to do as he was told, or drop work altogether. Finally he gave in, mainly in consequence of his sister’s outspoken comments upon his behaviour, but it was with a very bad grace.

Having made the living quarters of the ship once more habitable and safe against bad weather, the next task undertaken was the salving of the sails and as many of the spars and as much of the rigging as possible. This was a lengthy and heavy job, in the performance of which it became necessary for me to be frequently over the side, in the water, cutting the sails from the yards and stays, clearing and unreeving rigging, and so on. It would have been exceedingly dangerous had the sharks which I had seen during the first few days remained in the lagoon; but they seemed to have gone again, for I saw nothing of them.

Although their absence enabled me to work with the utmost freedom, I could not make very rapid headway, single-handed, in the water; while the hoisting inboard of the heavier spars and sails, assisted though we were with such appliances as a derrick, tackles, snatch-blocks, and the winch, taxed our energies to the very utmost. It was done at last, however, and most thankful was I when the last spar it was possible for us to secure came up over the side; for not only had we saved a considerable quantity of material that might possibly prove of the utmost value to us, but we had also rid ourselves of the menace of having the ship holed by the wreckage bumping alongside.

This big task was completed exactly six weeks from the day upon which the wreck had occurred, all of us working strenuously from dawn to dark day after day, excepting Sundays, which Mrs Vansittart insisted should be observed as days of rest, during which she conducted a service, morning and evening, in the drawing-room. Christmas Day, which occurred three weeks after the wreck, was also observed as a holiday; and despite our forlorn and rather precarious situation, we contrived to make a fairly jolly day of it, the only discordant element being the boy Julius, who early became sulky for some unaccountable reason, and spent the entire day upon the topgallant forecastle with a rifle, shooting at sea-birds and wasting some two hundred rounds of ball cartridge. I felt strongly inclined several times to take the rifle forcibly from him, but the mere hint of such a thing seemed to distress his mother so keenly that I did not refer to it a second time. Yet I must confess that I bitterly begrudged the utterly useless expenditure of so many good and, in our case, valuable cartridges.

Now, it must not be supposed that, in our anxiety to recover as much wreckage as possible, we forgot to keep a diligent look-out for passing ships, for we did not. Nor did we neglect to dispatch a copy of our appeal for help, securely sealed up in a bottle, regularly every day. But thus far the horizon had remained blank while daylight lasted; therefore if perchance any ships had passed us, they must have done so during the night. Up to this we had all been working so hard that we had deemed it hardly worth while to sacrifice our hours of rest for the very doubtful advantage of maintaining a night watch; but with the conclusion of what we considered our heaviest task, so far as actual labour was concerned, we decided that it might be of advantage to keep a look-out at night time, at least during the moonlit nights. We should then be able to see a passing ship at such a distance as would enable us to attract her attention by means of a flare. Accordingly it was arranged that four of us, namely, Julius, the two stewardesses, and I, should each take one watch in succession.

In that latitude, which was only a few degrees north of the Line, day and night were approximately of equal length, and for all practical purposes the night might be reckoned as beginning at six p.m., and ending at six a.m. Therefore if each of us kept a watch of three hours, we should cover the twelve hours between us. But by this arrangement the same person would keep one particular watch every night, and, of course, the least arduous of the watches would be that from six o’clock to nine o’clock p.m.; I therefore decided to split this watch into two dog-watches of one and a half hours each, by which arrangement the regularity would be broken, and each of us would get the benefit of the first dog-watch in succession, which seemed to be not only a fair but a desirable thing.

To keep a night watch, however, without possessing the means to attract the notice of a passing ship, would be useless. I therefore constructed a sort of framework consisting of four twelve-foot planks, which I set up on edge in the form of a square enclosure on the after extremity of the poop, securing them firmly to the deck planking by means of battens. The planks were nine inches wide, consequently when my work was complete I had a kind of open box twelve feet square and nine inches deep in which to light my flare. But something was needed to protect the deck from the action of the fire; my next act, therefore, was to nail together a sort of light raft, consisting of six fifteen-foot planks laid side by side and secured to each other by cross battens, the forward ends being bevelled to reduce the resistance to the raft’s passage through the water. Then I fixed up an arrangement on each side of the raft whereby, with the aid of rowlocks, I could work a pair of sculls and so propel the raft through the water. This job took me two days to complete, but when it was done I had a raft that would sustain not only my own weight but something to spare. I placed upon it a couple of wash-deck tubs, put a shovel in one of them, and paddled myself ashore to the small sandbank about half a mile away.

As I rowed away from the wreck, standing up to my work and facing forward, fisherman fashion, I took a rather wide sweep, whereby I was enabled to obtain a good view of her. A pitiful sight she presented, bereft of her three masts, with her jib-boom snapped short off, odds and ends of rigging trailing overboard, a great gap in her starboard bulwarks, and the fair whiteness of her hull disfigured here and there with rust streaks. She sat with a list to starboard, and was a trifle down by the head, from which latter circumstance I concluded that her forefoot and bottom forward were the most seriously damaged parts of her, as, indeed, it was only reasonable to suppose, seeing that she must have hit the reef stem-on. But, oh! it was distressing to look at that still beautiful though dishevelled hull and reflect that she had been brought to her present lamentable condition by pure negligence.

The raft travelled more easily through the water than I had dared to hope, and in about a quarter of an hour I reached the sandbank and sprang ashore, taking the precaution to secure the raft by a painter made fast to one of the oars, the loom of which I drove well into the sand. Then I walked to the highest point of the bank and looked about me.

With the exception of a few bunches of dry and rotting seaweed, the bank was as bare as the back of my hand, but a colony of gulls had settled upon it, and by their cries indicated the resentment which they felt at my intrusion. I looked round to see if I could discover any eggs, for fresh gulls’ eggs are not at all bad eating, and would perhaps afford a welcome change of diet to the women folk; but I found none, so concluded that it was not just then the season for them. The bank measured, by pacing, a little over eighty yards long by some forty broad; and I diligently examined the seaward side of it to see whether perchance there might be a spring of fresh water gushing out of it. I hardly expected that there would be, and was therefore not greatly disappointed at failing to find any such thing. But I found the margin liberally strewed with small shellfish, as well as with numerous empty shells, some of which were so exquisite, both in form and in colouring, that I could not resist the temptation to waste a few minutes in securing specimens of the most beautiful for the delectation of Mrs Vansittart and her daughter. This done, I returned to the raft, hauled it broadside on to the beach, and proceeded to fill my two wash-deck tubs with sand, with which I designed to fill my square box-like arrangement on the poop as a protection for the deck from the flames of my projected flare. Needless to say, two tubs of sand did not go very far toward filling the box, and it was not until the following evening that I had everything ready. Then, with a goodly pile of combustibles, consisting of dry seaweed, chips, kindling wood, and coal, heaped up in the middle of my sandbox, I had everything ready for lighting a flare at a moment’s notice.