Lost ships and lonely seas

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

This temperate speech had the desired result. The firmness and confidence with which he spoke, and their reliance on his seamanship and judgment, as well as his constant presence and attention to every accident, had a wonderful effect upon them. Since the first disaster, the admiral had, in fact, scarcely ever quitted the deck. This they had all observed, together with his diligence in personally inspecting every circumstance of distress.

This simple picture of him portrays a fine figure of a man, of the sort who have created and fostered the spirit and traditions both of the British and the American naval services. In a sinking ship which had lost all her guns, he was still mindful of his duty of guarding the merchant convoy, or what was left of it, against any roving French or Spanish war vessels or privateers, and every fiber of him rebelled against deserting his ship as long as her flag flew above water. He was a brother of the sea to Admiral Duncan who, as Stevenson describes it,

lying off the Texel with his own flagship, the Venerable, heard that the whole Dutch fleet was putting to sea. He told Captain Hotham to anchor alongside of him in the narrowest part of the channel and fight his vessel until she sank. “I have taken the depth of the water,” added he, “and when the Venerable goes down, my flag will still fly.” And you observe this is no naked Viking in a prehistoric period; but a Scotch member of Parliament, with a smattering of the classics, a telescope, a cocked hat of great size, and flannel underclothing.

At three o’clock in the morning of the next night the pumps of the Ramillies were found to be hopelessly out of commission, the water was rushing into the gaping wounds made by the sea, and it seemed as though the timbers were pulling asunder from stern to bow. Sadly the admiral admitted that the game was lost, and he told his captain to abandon ship at daybreak, but there was to be no wild scramble for the boats. The crew was to be informed that the sick and disabled were to be removed, and that all the merchant vessels would be ordered to send boats for this purpose. Confidentially, however, the officers were instructed to fetch ample stores of bread, beef, pork, and flour to the quarterdeck and to arrange for distributing the crew among the boats that were to be called away from the other ships. Such boats of the Ramillies as had not been smashed by the storm were to be ready to launch, and every officer would be held responsible for the men in his own division. As soon as the invalids were safely out of the ship, the whole crew would be embarked in an orderly and deliberate manner.

Accordingly at dawn, the signal was made for the boats of the merchantmen, but nobody suspected what was to follow until the bread was entirely removed and the sick gone. About six o’clock the rest of the crew were permitted to go off, and between nine and ten, there being nothing farther to direct or regulate, the admiral himself, after shaking hands with every officer, and leaving his barge for their better accommodation and transport, quitted forever the Ramillies which had then nine feet of water in her hold. He went into a small leaky boat, loaded with bread, out of which both himself and the surgeon who accompanied him had to bale the water all the way. He was in his boots, with his surtout over his uniform, and his countenance as calm and composed as ever. He had, at going off left behind all his stock, wines, furniture, books, charts, &c. which had cost him upwards of one thousand pounds, being unwilling to employ even a single servant in saving or packing up what belonged to himself alone, in a time of such general calamity, or to appear to fare better in that respect than any of the crew.

The admiral rowed for the Belle, Captain Foster, being the first of the trading vessels that had borne up to the Ramillies the preceding night, and by his anxious humanity set such an example to his brother traders as had a powerful influence upon them, an influence which was generally followed by sixteen other ships.

Two hours after the six hundred men of the Ramillies had been taken off, the weather, which had moderated, became furious again, and during a whole week after that it would have been impossible to handle boats in the wicked seas. Admiral Graves had managed the weather as handsomely as he did his ship and her men, getting them away at precisely the right moment and making a record for efficiency and resolution which must commend itself to every mariner, whether or not he happens to be a Britisher. On October 10 the Belle safely carried the admiral into Cork Harbor, where he hoisted his pennant aboard the frigate Myrmidon. The crew reached port in various ships, excepting a few who were bagged by French privateers which swooped seaward at the news that the great West India convoy had been dispersed by a storm.

Of the other British men-of-war which went to the bottom, the story of the Centaur was reported by her commander, Captain Inglefield, who was one of the thirteen survivors of a crew of more than four hundred men. Whether or not he should have stayed with his hapless people and suffered the common fate is a difficult problem for a landsman to weigh, but the facts speak for themselves, and they afford opportunity to compare his behavior with that of Admiral Graves of the Ramillies. Tried by an Admiralty court martial, Captain Inglefield was honorably acquitted of all blame, and his official record is therefore without a stain.

During the first night of the storm the Centaur was thrown on her beam-ends, and was to all appearances a capsized ship. The masts were cut away, and she righted suddenly. Three guns broke adrift on the main-deck, and the heavy round shot spilled out of the smashed lockers. There was a devil’s game of bowls below, with these ponderous objects madly charging to and fro to the violent motion of the ship, such a scene as Victor Hugo painted in a famous chapter of his “Ninety-Three.” The bluejackets scrambled after these infernal guns, which could be subdued only by snaring them with ropes and tackles. They destroyed everything in their path, maiming or slaying the sailors who were not agile enough to dodge the onslaught, reducing bulkheads, stanchions, deck-beams to kindling wood; but they were captured after a long conflict and before they could batter the oaken sides out of the ship.

There was a glimpse of hope in the early morning when the Ville de Paris was sighted two miles to windward. The storm had subsided, a sort of breathing-spell between the outbreaks of terrific weather. The stately three-decker of a Frenchman lifted all her masts against the foaming sky-line and was even setting a topsail. Plunging her long rows of painted gun-ports under, she climbed buoyantly to meet the next gray-backed comber, while the copper glinted almost to her keel as she wildly rolled and staggered. This captured flag-ship in which De Grasse, fresh from the triumph of Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, had confidently expected to crush Rodney and so sweep the seas of the New World for France, seemed to have been vouchsafed some peculiar respite by the god of storms. To those who beheld her from the drowning Centaur the impression conveyed was the same as that reported by Admiral Graves, that she had miraculously come through unhurt, the only ship of this great fleet whose lofty spars still stood.