Battles with the Sea

by R. M. Ballantyne

The Fusilier had struck on that part of the sands named the Girdler. In the midst of the turmoil there was but one course open to the crew—namely, to send forth signals of distress. Guns were fired, rockets sent up, and tar-barrels set a-blaze. Then, during many hours of agony, they had to wait and pray.

On that same night another good ship struck upon the same sands at a different point—the Demerara of Greenock—not an emigrant ship, but freighted with a crew of nineteen souls, including a Trinity pilot. Tossed like a plaything on the Sands—at that part named the Shingles—off Margate, the Demerara soon began to break up, and the helpless crew did as those of the Fusilier had done and were still doing—they signalled for aid. But it seemed a forlorn resource. Through the thick, driving, murky atmosphere nothing but utter blackness could be seen, though the blazing of their own tar-barrels revealed, with awful power, the seething breakers around, which, as if maddened by the obstruction of the sands, leaped and hissed wildly over them, and finally crushed their vessel over on its beam-ends. Swept from the deck, which was no longer a platform, but, as it were, a sloping wall, the crew took refuge in the rigging of one of the masts which still held fast. The mast overhung the caldron of foam, which seemed to boil and leap at the crew as if in disappointed fury.

By degrees the hull of the Demerara began to break up. Her timbers writhed and snapped under the force of the ever-thundering waves as if tormented. The deck was blown out by the confined and compressed air. The copper began to peel off, the planks to loosen, and soon it became evident that the mast to which the crew were lashed could not long hold up. Thus, for ten apparently endless hours the perishing seamen hung suspended over what seemed to be their grave. They hung thus in the midst of pitchy darkness after their blazing tar-barrels had been extinguished.

And what of the lifeboat-men during all this time? Were they asleep? Nay, verily! Everywhere they stood at pierheads, almost torn from their holdfasts by the furious gale, or they cowered under the lee of boats and boat-houses on the beach, trying to gaze seaward through the blinding storm, but nothing whatever could they see of the disasters on these outlying sands.

There are, however, several sentinels which mount guard night and day close to the Goodwin and other Sands. These are the Floating Lights which mark the position of our extensive and dangerous shoals. Two of these sentinels, the Tongue lightship and the Prince’s lightship, in the vicinity of the Girdler Sands, saw the signals of distress. Instantly their guns and rockets gleamed and thundered intelligence to the shore. Such signals had been watched for keenly that night by the brave men of the Margate lifeboat, who instantly went off to the rescue. But there are conditions against which human courage and power and will are equally unavailing. In the teeth of such a gale from the west-nor’-west, with the sea driving in thunder straight on the beach, it was impossible for the Margate boat to put out. A telegram was therefore despatched to Ramsgate. Here, too, as at Broadstairs, and everywhere else, the heroes of the coast were on the lookout, knowing well the duties that might be required of them at any moment.

The stout little Aid was lying at the pier with her steam “up.” The Ramsgate lifeboat was floating quietly in the harbour, and her sturdy lion-like coxswain, Isaac Jarman, was at the pier-head with some of his men, watching. The Ramsgate men had already been out on service at the sands that day, and their appetite for saving life had been whetted. They were ready for more work. At a quarter past eight p.m. the telegram was received by the harbour-master. The signal was given. The lifeboat-men rushed to their boats.

“First come, first served,” is the rule there. She was over-manned, and some of the brave fellows had to leave her. The tight little tug took the boat in tow, and in less than half an hour rushed out with her into the intense darkness, right in the teeth of tempest and billows.

The engines of the Aid are powerful, like her whole frame. Though fiercely opposed she battled out into the raging sea, now tossed on the tops of the mighty waves, now swallowed in the troughs between. Battered by the breaking crests, whelmed at times by “green seas,” staggering like a drunken thing, and buffeted by the fierce gale, but never giving way an inch, onward, steadily if slowly, until she rounded the North Foreland. Then the rescuers saw the signals going up steadily, regularly, from the two lightships. No cessation of these signals until they should be answered by signals from the shore.

All this time the lifeboat had been rushing, surging, and bounding in the wake of her steamer. The seas not only roared around her, but absolutely overwhelmed her. She was dragged violently over them, and sometimes right through them. Her crew crouched almost flat on the thwarts, and held on to prevent being washed overboard. The stout cable had to be let out to its full extent to prevent snapping, so that the mist and rain sometimes prevented her crew from seeing the steamer, while cross seas met and hurled her from side to side, causing her to plunge and kick like a wild horse.

About midnight the Tongue lightship was reached and hailed. The answer given was brief and to the point: “A vessel in distress to the nor’-west, supposed to be on the high part of the Shingles Sand!”