“When the long boat left the wreck there remained on board 31 souls. They immediately made preparations for their remaining days by securing on a stage they had erected for that purpose, all the necessaries of life they could obtain from the wreck. For the first week, they had a plenty of salt meat, pork, hams, flour, water, etc. They also caught a turtle and having found a tinder box in a chest they kindled a fire in the ship’s bell and cooked it, making a soup which afforded them a warm dinner, and the only one they were able to cook.
“They remained under the direction of Captain Larcom, whom they had appointed to act as their head, until Sunday, the 27th of May (seven days), when the upper deck came off by the violence of the sea. At this time they lost both the provisions and the water they had secured on the stage. In this distressing situation, Captain Larcom and four others took the yawl, shattered as she was. The other twenty-six went forward on the bowsprit with two gallons of wine and a little salt meat, where another stage was erected on the bows. At this time the water being only knee-deep on the lower deck they were enabled to obtain hams, etc., from below but which for want of water were of little service. And the wine before mentioned was their only drink for seven days.
“They procured a cask of brandy from the lower hold, of which they drank so freely (being parched with thirst) that fourteen of them died the succeeding night. They made one attempt to intercept a sail (four having passed) from which the boat returned unsuccessful. Captain Larcom with four others took the boat, there being only three others in a situation to leave the wreck, and the others preferring to remain on it rather than venture in the boat. They (Captain L. and 4 others) left the wreck, by observation 39°, 12′, and steering N. W. when after twenty-three days had elapsed, and two of them having died, the boat was picked up by Captain S. L. Davis from Lisbon for Gloucester, where they arrived on the 18th of July.”
In this abrupt manner the story ends, and perhaps it is just as well. Those left alive and clinging to the submerged wreck numbered ten, and there they perished without voice or sign to tell how long they struggled and hoped against the inevitable end. The three survivors who escaped in the yawl lived for twenty-three days almost without food or water. When they landed they told how “previous to their departure from the Margaret they went under the bowsprit and joined in prayer for deliverance with Captain Janvin of Newburyport. This gentleman who remained behind had conducted a similar service daily for his companions since their shipwreck, and many of them united in his petitions quite seriously. Then the five men in the yawl took a solemn leave of the ten survivors, of whom no farther tidings has ever reached us. With two and a half gallons of brandy and a little port, the adventurers in so small a boat for sixteen days pursued their anxious and afflictive course. Then they caught rain in their handkershifs and by wringing them out succeeded in partially allaying their thirst. Later they caught some rudder fish and eat them.”
There are old men living in Salem who can recall John Very, second mate of the brig Romp, who was one of the three that lived to be picked up in the yawl. When the boys used to ask him to spin the yarn of the wreck of the Margaret he would shake his head and become morose and sad. These were memories that he wished to forget, and it is pleasanter even to a later generation to recall the Margaret, the fine ship newly launched, with her crew of stalwart young men “in the bloom of youth,” bravely setting sail on her maiden voyage to find the way to mysterious Japan in the faraway year of Eighteen Hundred and One.
FOOTNOTES:
[30] The name of this island is spelled Decima, Disma, Deshima, by the sailor diarists. In the official records of Commodore Perry’s voyage it is spelled Dezima.
[31] Magistrates or police officers.
CHAPTER XIV
THE FIRST YANKEE SHIP AT GUAM
(1801)
That minute dot on the map of the Pacific known as Guam has appealed to the American people with a certain serio-comic interest as a colonial possession accidentally acquired and ruled by one exiled naval officer after another in the rôle of a benevolent despot and monarch of all he surveys. This most fertile and populous of the Ladrone Islands, which are spattered over a waste of blue water for four hundred miles and more, was casually picked up as the spoils of war, it will be remembered, by the cruiser Charleston soon after hostilities with Spain had been declared in 1898. The Spanish Governor of Guam was rudely awakened from his siesta by the boom of guns seaward and, with the politeness of his race, hastened to send out word to the commander of the American cruiser that he was unable to return the salute for lack of powder. Thereupon he was informed that he was not being saluted but captured, and the Stars and Stripes were run above the ancient fort and its moldering cannon which had barked salvos of welcome to the stately galleons of Spain bound from South America to Manila two centuries before.