At the starboard gangway I stumbled over a man lying face down. I rolled him over and spoke to him, but received no reply and was unable to make out who he was, as we were all in darkness. It is my opinion that he was already dead. Moving to the after end of the ship, I took station on a gun platform. The ship was filling rapidly and her bulwarks amidships were level with the water. I sung out to cut away the after dories and life-rafts and throw them in the water, and told the men near me to jump over the side.
Before I could follow them, however, the ship listed heavily to port, plunging down by the head and sinking. I was dragged down with her, but came up again and swam to a life-raft to which three men were clinging. We managed to lift ourselves upon it, and then, looking around, I observed Doyle, chief boatswain’s mate, and one other man in the whaleboat. We paddled over to them and crawled into the boat. It was half-filled with water and we started to bale and to rescue survivors from the wreckage. The whaleboat was quickly crowded to capacity and no more could be taken aboard. We then picked up two overturned dories which were nested together, separated and righted them only to find that their sterns had been smashed. Presently we discovered another nest of dories which were found to be seaworthy. We shifted some of the men into them from the whaleboat and proceeded to pick more men from the wreckage. During this time, cries of distress were heard from others adrift who had floated some distance away. Two of them were believed to be Ernest M. Harrison, mess attendant, and John Winne, seaman. We proceeded to where they were last seen, but could find no trace of them.
About this time, which was probably an hour after the ship sank, a German submarine approached the scene of the torpedoing and lay to near some of the dories and life-rafts. No effort was made to assist the men freezing in the water. Three Germans, presumably the officers, were visible upon the top of the conning tower as they stood and watched us. The U-boat remained on the surface about half an hour and then steered off and submerged. I then made a further search through the wreckage to be sure that none of my men were left in the water. At 4.30 in the morning we started away from the scene to attempt to make the nearest land.
The flare of Penmarch Light was visible and I headed for it, observing the star Polaris and reckoning the light to be about northeast. We rowed the boats all through the forenoon and sighted the Penmarch Lighthouse at 1.15 P.M. Keeping steadily at the oars, turn and turn about, we moved toward the coast until 5.15 in the afternoon when a French torpedo boat took us aboard. There were three officers and forty men of us, who were promptly carried into Brest, where I was informed that two other dories, containing three officers and twenty-five men, had landed at Penmarch Point. This was the first news that these had been saved, for they had not been seen by any of my party near the place of the disaster.
It was true of the Alcedo that in the moment of gravest crisis the cohesion and discipline of the Navy manifested itself. Orders were given and obeyed while the shattered yacht was dropping from under the feet of the young men and boys who had worn the uniform only a few months. It was a nightmare of an experience in which panic might have been expected, but officers and bluejackets were groping to find their stations or endeavoring to cut away boats so that others might be saved. Such behavior was fairly typical of the patrol fleet, although no other yacht was doomed to such a fate as this, but there was the stuff in the personnel to stand the test and the spirit of fidelity burned like a flame.
The yachts had been playing the game lone-handed, hoping to be reinforced by enough destroyers to move the American convoys which were subjected to long and costly delays in the French ports for lack of escort vessels to carry them out through the danger zone. The news that the United States proposed to build two hundred destroyers sounded prodigious, but it failed to fit the immediate occasion. To the Queenstown base were assigned the up-to-date oil-burning destroyers as fast as more of them could be diverted from home, and they were doing superb and indispensable service in cruising a thousand miles offshore to meet and escort the troop convoys in to France, but they could not tarry to take the ships out again nor to protect the slower supply convoys and undertake the other work of the Breton Patrol.
The French coast was compelled to do the best it could with the cards that were dealt. There was no such thing as discouragement in the Corsair or her sister ships, but the feeling grew that the job was vastly bigger than the resources. It was singularly cheering, therefore, when the flotilla of veteran coal-burning destroyers came storming in from the Azores, all stripped and taut and ready for business, looking for trouble and unhappy until they could find it. They became close kindred of the yachts, sharing the rough weather cruises with the convoys and, when in port, taking their doses of the dirty, back-breaking work of eternally shovelling coal in little baskets. And by the same token, their men wore the common mark of the trade, the shadows of grime beneath the eyes which soap and water could never entirely remove. Yachts and destroyers took orders from each other at sea and seldom disagreed. The authority depended upon which commander held the senior naval rank to qualify him to direct the movements of the patrol division.
Reid, Smith, Flusser, Lamson, and Preston, they were rated as no longer young and in size were lightly referred to as the “flivver” class when compared with the thousand-ton destroyers operating out of Queenstown, while bets were made that a winter in the Bay of Biscay would be too much for them. But they stood the gaff and sailed home again after the war, while the unterrified crews bragged of the merits of their sturdy boats and forgot all the hardships. Like the yachts they had a sprinkling of college rookies among the bluejackets, and of Reserve officers on the bridge, while the Regular Navy leavened the lump.
BUCKING INTO THE WINTER SEAS