The cradle of the deep

by Joan Lowell

After Father had seen to the Chinamen and Italian fishermen, he returned aft to the officers’ quarters and told them to be prepared for the worst as the anchors were useless now. Down in the stuffy red plush cabin the men sat around the chart table. They were all silent and depressed. They all had a look of finality on their faces. It was small choice—on deck they could see sure death looming up; in the cabin they could shut their eyes to it and wait! In the last few moments of their lives strange reactions took place in them. The clerk of the cannery, a man about thirty-three years of age, pale and husky-voiced, asked my father to take the money he had, nine hundred dollars, and give it to his family, when my father reached San Francisco. Another man asked Father to take a message to his wife, and still another broke out into vile profanity. A huge man, one of the wealthy owners of the cannery, forgot his pose of dignity and knelt down on the cabin floor and prayed like a frightened child.

“You all have the same chances, men, and each one of you will bear your own responsibility,” Father told them in answer to their pleas.

He set about to have a trunk packed with medicines and stimulants which was taken on deck. Later that trunk was picked up in the wreckage ashore and the contents helped revive some of the men and dress their injuries. Only four lived of the white men who sat around the table in the cabin awaiting the verdict of the storm.

On deck the flying spray from the mountainous seas was like a white blinding screen, but Father could see Ole Swenson, a Norse man, powerful and gigantic, standing on the fo’c’s’le head scanning the horizon for the return of the tugs. Swenson saw nothing but the storm rising in velocity, and the cliffs looming blacker on shore. Roaring and cursing against the fate that was murdering his beloved ship, Ole Swenson jumped into the sea to end his agony.

It was only a matter of minutes before sure death would claim the hundred and thirty-eight men on the Star. Father called for volunteers to man a boat and take a line ashore so that a breeches buoy could be rigged. A breeches buoy is a little buoy on a rope, made fast to the mast and on some point on shore, much like a big pulley line, by which shipwrecked men can slide to the mainland high above a pounding surf. Four young men responded to his call for volunteers. Among them were two brothers, Hasen by name. One of them, the younger, couldn’t swim. His older brother urged him not to go. He, the older one would go, for he was a strong swimmer. The younger boy would not hear his pleading and went first. The good swimmer was drowned just out of reach of help a few moments later.

With great difficulty the crew swung a lifeboat off its davits with the four young men in it fighting for their lives against the running sea. The men on the Star watched them pull for the shore—watched them almost get in—and then saw their shell of a boat dashed on the rocks of the narrow beach. Three of them jumped to safety and were cheered by the crew on board whose lives they would save.

The three men dragged the rope up and fastened it on a tree trunk high out of reach of the waves. This done, they turned their attention to fastening the running rope which would propel the breeches buoy, but that line had broken loose and was lost in the sea. Father called for another volunteer to go ashore with another line to replace it. The ship’s carpenter stepped forward. He tied the rope to his body and ascended the rigging, then hand over hand he slid along the rope which the men had stretched to the shore. The Star was toppling like a drunken sailor from side to side. The men on board watched the carpenter get caught in a green comber which first sucked him under and then threw him high in the air. When he was almost ashore an extra hard strain flipped him off like a fly from a rubber band. He struck the water with a terrific blow on his back. He was close enough to shore for the three surviving young men to pull him in to safety.

Then the end came! The Star crashed on the saw-toothed rocks. The forward part of her, the fo’c’s’le head and the foremast broke off just before the crew fled aft. They hung on like leeches to the after railing and deck houses. The force of the relentless pounding sea was so great that the Star quivered and broke into three pieces, just as her yard arm had broken on that ominous day in San Francisco. The stern of the ship was all that was afloat and that was covered by screaming, frightened men. The sea around was a seething mass of salmon cases, dead Chinamen, screaming Italians and Americans being smothered in the spray. The waves licked up viciously as if to devour the few hanging on for life on the stern. Clinging to the wheelhouse and after railing, a small group of officials and white men held their balance. A sea lifted a piece of wreckage to windward as if to capsize it and most of the men jumped in the opposite direction to avoid being pinned beneath. Three remained with my father. The piece of wreckage, instead of turning turtle to windward, was caught in the backwash of a wave and capsized with all remaining hands to leeward! They came up into a seething maelstrom of pitching wreckage, packing-cases swirling, outstretched arms and kicking legs of drowning men, shrieks of fear and the terrible seas breaking with a roar over all. And on the shore, only two hundred yards away, four of the five men who had taken the first desperate chances, waited helpless. They scanned the incoming combers for bodies, Chinese or white, that might wash in close enough to fish out, but the shore was abrupt and it had become piled with the cargo and wreckage from the Star. The men could reach only a few and yank them out of the jaws of the sea as they washed in.

When the last man had left the wreck my father jumped overboard. He said it took about a half a minute for him to reach the surface. He felt a heavy bulk above his head when he was under the water. He thought it was the keel of his ship and that he was pinned beneath it. Holding his breath, he made one herculean effort to rise to the surface. The “bulk” over his head was the top of one of the hatchings which had broken loose from the ship and was floating on the sea. Father struck out for the shore. The icy water numbed his senses. He remembered nothing more. A big green roller crested with salmon cases overtook him and one of them struck him on the head and mercifully knocked him unconscious. The backwash of the surf carried his inert body to the beach.

Of the one hundred and thirty-eight men on board, only twenty-seven survived. Those that reached the shore before my father set about to rescue the others. Two of them, the carpenter and a Scotch sailor named Frank Muir, pulled my father’s body out of the water.