Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 387, January, 1848

by Various

"Out on the ocean!"—here his face fell with the expression of a dawning apprehension; "what have we to do with the ocean?"

"How are we to keep out of it? Our last chance was to get her round and run her on the reef,—a poor chance, but all that we could dream of. You saw me try her just now, and saw that it was impossible."

"Then you mean to say nothing can prevent our drifting out to sea?" My silence and dejection gave him the sorrowful answer.

Poor Hamilton! he was a brave enough fellow in his way, and willing to stand any risk for the good of the service,—this was all in the way of business, and he felt it to be right enough,—but the idea of being drowned on a pic-nic excursion seemed to strike him as something altogether out of his way. I will not say that he was afraid on the occasion, because I do not believe he would admit the influence of fear. But he gave me the idea of a man labouring under the strangeness of an inadmissible proposition. It seemed as though a strong sense of injured innocence were mixed with his apprehensions, as if he felt himself to have been done and ill-treated.

"You don't mean to say that you cannot get her round?" this was said to me in a tone that seemed to imply that I could if I would. "If I could," I answered, "I should have run her on the reef; she would certainly soon go to pieces there, but it was our only chance."

"Never mind her going to pieces," said he; "I will pay half the damage."

It annoyed me, even at that terrible moment, to hear our condition made a question of pounds, shillings, and pence. I felt angry, too, with him, when I reflected that we had been brought to this predicament simply by his clumsiness. I so far gave way to anger as to tell him that, if we got safe to land I never would go sailing with him again, nor trust myself on salt water with a watch-mate who didn't know what "luff" meant, and who wanted to sail in the wind's eye under a jib. Poor Hamilton, who now seemed fully to appreciate our peril, contented himself with assuring me that I might rest quiet, for I never should go sailing again with him, or with anybody else.

A growing and abiding sense of the truth of this probability soon checked the spirit of squabbling within each of us. We were every moment drifting out farther and farther. So long as the lights of the island had been visible, they had imparted some degree of comfort. They at least showed whither our course would lay in case matters should so far mend as to enable us to choose our own course. But our distance was each moment increasing, and the night was waxing darker continually. A few more minutes, and the lights were hidden from us; and we were left simply and literally without any knowledge of our position, on the Indian Ocean. The sea had got up, prodigiously, the wind blew harder than ever, and the night was as dark as pitch. Though she was flying before the wind, we could not keep the sea out of her,—it washed in over her quarter every few minutes, and it was all that we could do to keep her free by baling. Happily we had a couple of buckets with us, that served the turn well.

I shudder when I look back to this part of that fearful night. Later on in the season of our peril we did not feel so acutely the horrors of our position, because our sensibilities had been then pretty well exhausted by the struggle for existence. So little hope remained at last that our spirits scarcely retained the vitality necessary for suffering. We were as though already dead, and already taken away from living pains and feelings. But with the earlier part of the evening are connected associations of far more active pain—I mean during that part when I had not resigned hope. I know that there is a theory current that the living spirit never resigns hope; that a man sinking alone in the midst of the Atlantic, or bowed down for the stroke of the descending guillotine, never believes it to be impossible that he shall escape. I cannot pledge my own experience to the truth of this theory. The spirit of man is so firmly wedded to hope, that it is in extremity only that this blessing can be torn from us. But the divorce may be effected at last, even while the tide of life beats in the veins. I am quite sure that, during some hours of this night, we both felt perfectly devoid of hope, and that we could not have felt more certain of death had we actually passed the gloomy portals. But this was only latterly, when our physical energies had succumbed under protracted exertion, when every expedient we could devise for prolonging our chance seemed to have failed. At first I could not make up my mind that our case was hopeless, nor familiarise myself with the idea of approaching death. No rational ground remained of expecting any thing that could rescue us; and yet I could not forego the expectation that something would turn up. Our perishing seemed too bad a thing to be true. It could not be that our jocund morning should have such an issue; that we, so recent from the companionship of youth and grace, should be hurried to the contact of death. And yet all the while that I thus yielded to the promptings of natural instinct, I felt that we were drifting on each moment rapidly to the catastrophe.

While any room for activity remains, there is to be found some relief in exertion. The full bitterness of our condition was not felt till we had tried every device that we could think of, and had been reduced to inaction—without resignation. Our last resource was one on which I had been sanguine enough to build up some hope. It occurred to me that if we were to let go her anchor, the weight of that, together with her eighteen fathom of chain, might bring her bodily up. I only regretted that we had no spare spars wherewith to form a sort of breakwater, for I have great faith in the powers of a boat to ride out a gale and heavy sea under the lee of such a defence. Still I thought that we might manage to check her way effectually before we had driven too far out to sea; and then in the morning we might still find ourselves in sight of the island. There are circumstances under which one learns to make much of a very little hope, and I had made the most I could of this. We watched till we got into a smooth place, and then "let go." The extremity of peril had been reserved for this moment. The sudden check certainly brought her up as we expected, but other effects of our manœuvre followed which were beyond our calculation. She rounded to abruptly, and swung head to wind. But the weight of her anchor and chain hanging at her bows seemed as if they would pull her under water. The depression was so great that we saw that not a minute was to be lost, and that our only chance lay in heaving up again as quickly as possible. In our haste we both ran forward to the windlass, and by so doing nearly completed our destruction, for the additional weight had a most alarming effect on her immersion. It became evident that we must at once get rid of the weight, and that it must be done without any additional strain. Our only plan was to slip the cable, and let both it and the anchor go by the run. This I accordingly did; but not even in this extreme peril without a pang of regret. Being relieved, she rose instantly, and in a moment was before the wind again. It had been a narrow escape for us, and, but that we had chosen a smooth place, we must have been swamped there and then. She had shipped a great deal of water, and we had hard work to clear her; and then once more all our work to begin again, for she shipped seas almost as quickly as we could bale them out.