As evening approached, the ship seemed little more than suspended in the water. There was no certainty that she would swim from one minute to another; and the love of life, now began to level all distinctions. It was impossible, indeed, for any man to deceive himself with the hopes of being saved on a raft on such a sea; besides, it was probable that the ship in sinking would carry everything down with her in a vortex.
It was near five o’clock, when coming from my cabin, I observed a number of people gazing very anxiously over the side; and looking myself, I saw that several men had forced the pinnace and that more were attempting to get in. I had thoughts of securing this boat before she might be sunk by numbers; there appeared not a moment for consideration; to remain and perish with the ship’s company to whom I could no longer be of any use, or seize the opportunity, which seemed the only one of escaping and leave the people with whom, on a variety of occasions I had been so well satisfied that I thought I could give my life to preserve them. This was, indeed, a painful conflict and of which, I believe, no man could form a just idea who had not been placed in a similar situation.
The love of life prevailed. I called to Mr. Rainey, the master, the only officer on deck, and desired him to follow me and we immediately descended into the boat by the after part of the chains. But it was not without great difficulty that we got her clear of the ship, twice the number that she could carry pushing in, and many leaping into the water. Mr. Baylis, a young gentleman of fifteen years of age, leaped from the chains after the boat had got off and was taken in.
Yes, the love of life had prevailed with Captain Inglefield of the Centaur, and, no matter how painful his moral conflict, it is obvious that his departure was attended with a kind of skulking ignominy. He ran away from his comrades to save his own skin and left them in the lurch. This is quixotic, perhaps, but are not all questions of honor more or less irrational? The captain’s narrative makes no farther mention of the sinking Centaur. At five o’clock of a September afternoon in the North Atlantic, two hours of daylight remained even in thick and cloudy weather. The four hundred men aboard the ship could watch the pinnace as she scudded before the wind with a blanket stretched for a sail and her course laid for the Azores. I imagine they damned the soul of their captain in curses that were wrenched from the bottom of their hearts instead of extenuating his conduct and wishing him luck. And presumably Captain Inglefield turned to gaze at the foundering man-of-war with her people clustered on deck or busied with the pitifully futile rafts. Nobody knows how much longer the Centaur floated. The time must have been mercifully brief. When she went under, every man on board was drowned.
The captain expected sympathy, and you may offer him as much as you like when he relates of his voyage in the small boat:
It was then that I became sensible how little, if anything, our condition was better than that of those who remained in the ship. At least, it seemed to be only the prolongation of a miserable existence. We were altogether twelve in number, in a leaky boat, with one of the gunwales stove, in nearly the middle of the Western Ocean, without compass, quadrant, or sail; wanting great coat or cloak, all very thinly clothed, in a gale of wind and with a great sea running.... On examining what means we had of subsistence, I found a bag of bread, a small ham, a single piece of pork, two quart bottles of water, and a few French cordials.
They were thirteen days adrift and suffered exceedingly, but only one man died of hunger and cold, and the others recovered their strength in the hospitable port of Fayal. These were the captain, the master, a young midshipman, a surgeon’s mate, a coxswain, a quartermaster, and five seamen.
CHAPTER XV
THE BRISK YARN OF THE SPEEDWELL PRIVATEER
Captain George Shelvocke was one of many seamen adventurers unknown to fame who sought a quick and bloody road to fortune by laying violent hands on the golden ingots in the Spanish galleons of Mexico and Peru. A state of war made this a lawful pastime for lawless men, and such were those that sailed from Plymouth on February 13, 1720, in the little armed ship Speedwell, bound out from England to South America with a privateering commission. She was of two hundred tons burden, and there could have been no room to swing a cat by the tail, what with eighteen six-pounders mounted between-decks, a fourteen-oar launch stowed beneath the hatches, provisions for a long voyage, and a crew of a hundred men. Most of these were landlubbers, wastrels of the taverns and the waterside, who were so terrified by the first gale of wind that seventy of them “were resolved on bearing away for England to make a complaint against the ship. They alleged that she was so very crank that she would never be able to encounter a voyage to the South Seas.”
The fact that the seventy objectors were unanimously seasick delayed the mutiny; besides which, Captain Shelvocke talked to them, and he was a persuasive man whenever he used a pair of flint-lock pistols to make his meaning clear. With calmer weather the seventy recalcitrants plucked up spirit to renew the argument, and went so far as to seize the helm and trim the yards on a course toward England. The captain was now seriously vexed. With a dozen officers behind him, he overruled the majority, tied two of them in the rigging, and ordered them handsomely flogged, and consented to forgive the others on promise of good behavior. “Nevertheless,” remarks a commentator, “it occasioned him great uneasiness to find himself with a ship’s company likely to occasion such trouble and vexation.”