Moreover,—this they could not see till things had cooled down—the powder explosions had blown a hole right through her port quarter, and every time she rolled the sea came in there green. Of the four masts only one was left; and the rudder-head stuck up all bald, black and horrible among the jam of collapsed deck-beams. A photograph of the wreck looks exactly like that of a gutted theatre after the flames and the firemen have done their worst.
They spent the whole of the 12th of November pumping water out as zealously as they had pumped it in. They lashed up the loose, charging tanks as soon as they were cool enough to touch. They plugged the hole at the stern with hammocks, sails, and planks, and a sail over all. Then they rigged up a horizontal bar gripping the rudder-head. Six men sat on planks on one side and six at the other over the empty pit beneath, hauling on to the bar with ropes and letting go as they were told. That made the best steering-gear that they could devise.
On the 13th of November, still pumping, they spread one sail on their solitary mast—it was lucky that the Sarah Sands had started with four of them—and took advantage of the trade winds to make for Mauritius. Captain Castles, with one chart and one compass, lived in a tent where some cabins had once been; and at the end of twelve more days he sighted land. Their average run was about four knots an hour; and, it is no wonder that as soon as they were off Port Louis, Mauritius, Mr. Frazer, the Scotch engineer, wished to start his engines and enter port professionally. The troops looked down into the black hollow of the ship when the shaft made its first revolution, shaking the hull horribly; and if you can realize what it means to be able to see a naked screw-shaft at work from the upper deck of a liner, you can realize what had happened to the Sarah Sands. They waited outside Port Louis for the daylight, and were nearly dashed to pieces on a coral reef. Then the gutted, empty steamer came in—very dirty, the men’s clothes so charred that they hardly dared to take them off, and very hungry; but without having lost one single life. Port Louis gave them all a public banquet in the market place, and the French inhabitants were fascinatingly polite as only the French can be.
But the records say nothing of what befell the sailors who “consigned the ship to perdition.” One account merely hints that “this was no time for retribution”; but the troops probably administered their own justice during the twelve days’ limp to port. The men who were berthed aft, the officers and the women, lost everything they had; and the companies berthed forward lent them clothes and canvas to make some sort of raiment.
On the 20th of December they were all re-embarked on the Clarendon. It was poor accommodation for heroes. She had been condemned as a coolie-ship, was full of centipedes and other animals picked up in the Brazil trade; her engines broke down frequently; and her captain died of exposure and anxiety during a hurricane. So it was the 25th of January before she reached the mouth of the Hugli.
By this time—many of the men probably considered this quite as serious as the fire—the troops were out of tobacco, and when they came across the American ship Hamlet, Captain Lecran, lying at Kedgeree on the way up the river to Calcutta, the officers rowed over to ask if there was any tobacco for sale. They told the skipper the history of their adventures, and he said: “Well, I’m glad you’ve come to me, because I have some tobacco. How many are you?” “Three hundred men,” said the officers. Thereupon Captain Lecran got out four hundred pounds of best Cavendish as well as one thousand Manilla cigars for the officers, and refused to take payment on the grounds that Americans did not accept anything from shipwrecked people. They were not shipwrecked at the time, but evidently they had been shipwrecked quite enough for Captain Lecran, because when they rowed back a second time and insisted on paying, he only gave them grog, “which,” says the record, “caused it to be dark when we returned to our ship.” After this “our band played ‘Yankee-Doodle,’ blue lights were burned, the signal-gun fired”—that must have been a lively evening at Kedgeree—“and everything in our power was had recourse to so as to convey to our American cousins our appreciation of their kindness.”
Last of all, the Commander-in-Chief issued a general order to be read at the head of every regiment in the Army. He was pleased to observe that “the behaviour of the 54th Regiment was most praiseworthy, and by its result must render manifest to all the advantage of subordination and strict obedience to orders under the most alarming and dangerous circumstances in which soldiers can be placed.”
This seems to be the moral of the tale.
THE LAST LAP
How do we know, by the bank-high river,