CURIOSITIES OF DISASTERS AT SEA.
An old sailor once said to me, “If I were to write down one quarter of what I’ve seen, heard, and gone through, the reader would throw away the book, calling me all the evil names he could put his tongue to, afore he had read half of what I’d writ.” I remember an ingenious reviewer of a nautical romance affirming that it was impossible the author could be correct in representing such a sea as he described as running off Agulhas in a gale from the north-west, because, said the critic, “we have repeatedly crossed the Channel between Folkestone and Boulogne, in all sorts of weather, without ever having witnessed such waves as we are here told about.” Yes, sailors see and do strange things; they spend their lives on a wild and wonderful element, and are a community who generate gnats at which the landsman is prone to strain. We hear of amazing escapes on shore, but, surely, they cannot be so astonishing as the perils which men encounter at sea, or we should hearken with less incredulous souls when Jack coils his legs up under him and relates his experiences.
Some time ago I read what the newspapers called “a terrible story of shipwreck.” An American schooner came across six men washing about on the top of a deck-house. They were the survivors of a crew of Spaniards whose barque had foundered six days before. When the captain of her found that his vessel was bound to sink he set his men to work to make a raft. They were thus employed when the barque all on a sudden turned over and sank. Seven of the poor fellows were sucked down with the hull; the rest, finding the deck-house afloat, crawled on to it. For five days and nights they were beaten here and there by the seas, without drink and without food. Ashore the dangers a man confronts and escapes may be terrible; but the ground he treads is what he is born to: peril is localized or limited. He is imprisoned in a mine; he is menaced by suffocation or starvation. He loses his way on a mountain; he is threatened by death from exhaustion or by stumbling over the edge of a height. He is in the heart of a panic-stricken crowd; he stands to have his ribs crushed in and his lungs choked. He is in a house on fire; he must be burnt if he cannot escape. To be sure, danger on shore is as little agreeable as it would be in the air or under the waters; but a man may commonly say of peril on land what he cannot say of peril at sea, that he knows the form of it and what shape his destruction will take if he cannot elude it.
But at sea you have a combination of forces working against a creature who when on the ocean is as much out of his element as the shark that ogles him would be if lifted high and dry on to a ship’s deck. Take those six Spaniards washing about on top of a deck-house. What was to be their fate? Were they to be drowned, or frozen, or starved, or be picked up raving mad with thirst and other sufferings? Think of the cruelty of the sea—fiendish in spirit as any torturer of the good old days of the Inquisition—tossing that deck-house with a horrible human-like delight in the sport that kept those white-lipped soaking rags of men holding on for their lives! Consider a little the malignant confederacy of billows wasting their giant weight, one after another, ceaselessly, restlessly, one after another, upon those miserable men made mere mocking tumblers of by the play of the waters, and looking up to God out of the supreme agony of their ocean struggles! If the surge could not tear them from their desperate hold it left them drenched to the marrow, and fit for the freezing part that it was the business of the wind to play. Or, if the wind left their hearts warm enough for life it was only that hunger should not be balked in the lodgment of its own particular anguish.
For my part I can well understand why landsmen are incredulous when sailors who have suffered begin to talk. There is internal evidence to suggest that when the Wedding Guest left the Ancient Mariner, unpleasantly fascinated as he had been by his eye, he went to the people who had been making merry, and informed them that he had been detained by a yarn that was fit only for the marines. Why, even in the year 1800, Sir Samuel Standidge was apologizing for writing to say that he had met ice in the month of May in the Atlantic forty-five degrees north; his excuse being that it was true. The Wedding Guest flourished in an earlier reign when not very much was known about bergs, and one thinks of him as sneering when he told his friends that the Ancient Mariner said the roar of the ice breaking up was like “noises in a swound.”
In the “Pasha of Many Tales,” Captain Marryat exaggerates the proverbial “twister” of the marine. But how many experiences have sailors suffered incomparably more surprising than the most ingenious of the fictions in Marryat’s book; and more miraculous in the machinery of fortuitous escape than could ever occur to the most daring among the old Arabian inventors? There are instances of disasters so complicated by misfortune as to become sheer eccentricities of peril. I remember being much struck with a paragraph I came across in a newspaper of the last century: “Captain Lamire, commander of the Heureux, on April 26, being in the lat. of one deg. 2 min., and 21 deg. 28 min. long. W., reckoning from Teneriff, several of his crew, and a great number of negros on board, were seized with a disorder of their eyes, many of whom were blind for ten or twelve days; nine lost their sight entirely, and seven or eight the sight of one eye. Accidents of this kind, it is said, are not unprecedented in latitudes so near the line, but the great number affected at the same time exceeds anything that was ever heard of before.” Had that old ship carried such slender companies as vessels now go manned with, who shall say, in the face of the numbers who were blinded, that all hands would not have lost their sight? What object could the imagination fasten upon more dreadful and tragical than a ship in charge of a blind crew? What possibilities of harrowing description would such a subject offer to the romancer!
There is preserved a curious account of the Hon. John O’Brien, a brother or near relative to the Earl of Inchiquin. He was so incessantly in jeopardy from one cause or another that his career expresses in perfection the eccentricity of disaster. A few examples will hint at his story. He was a lieutenant in the Navy in 1747, and his first mishap befel him off the coast of India, where his ship was wrecked, all hands perishing with the exception of O’Brien and four sailors. He embarked in a vessel to return to Europe, but was cast away near the Cape of Good Hope, and was the only one of a great number who contrived to escape with his life. The Dutch Governor, discovering him to be a “person of honour,” supplied him with every necessary for continuing the voyage, and gave him a cabin in one of the homeward bound East Indiamen. The Governor of another settlement, who was going home in the same ship, finding himself rather straitened for room on account of the number of his own family, begged for the exclusive use of the vessel for his suite and baggage. The Governor of the Cape complied, and procured accommodation for O’Brien in another vessel that was to sail on the same day. Shortly afterwards the ships put to sea, and it is recorded as an absolute and well assured fact that, within twenty-four hours of their leaving the Cape, O’Brien saw the ship he had quitted founder in a gale of wind, taking down with her every creature on board! A few years later this fortune-hunted gentleman was stationed on board the Dartmouth of fifty guns. She fell in with the Glorioso, a Spanish man-of-war, and engaged her for some hours. O’Brien was at his station between decks, when the gunner ran up to him, and, with wildness and despair in his look, cried out, “Oh, sir! the powder-room!” Lieutenant O’Brien heard no more, for the ship instantly blew up! Such a catastrophe as this, you would conjecture, must effectually put an end to O’Brien. In fact, if I were to write his life I should skip this little disaster for fear that it should destroy the reader’s faith in the other parts of the story. It is true, nevertheless, that O’Brien, instead of perishing, was found floating about on the carriage of a gun. It was supposed that he had been blown through a porthole with one of the guns. He was picked up by a privateer named the Duke, and as a proof that the natural sprightliness and gaiety of his character was superior to so slight an accident as that of being blown up in a man-of-war, he is recorded to have said to the captain of the Duke, speaking with great gravity, “You will excuse me, sir, for appearing before you in such a dress; but the reason is I left my ship so hurriedly that I had no time to put on better clothes.” But enough of the Hon. John O’Brien.
Though it might not be wise in a romancer to represent his hero as being blown up in a ship without injury, there are, for all that, several instances in the old accounts—and one or two, I think, in more recent annals—of mariners and others who have gone up like rockets and come down all alive, perfectly sound, if not in high spirits. Monsieur de Montauban, who underwent this experience off the coast of Guinea, wrote a very thrilling account of it. In his case there were two ships, both of which exploded simultaneously. “The reader,” says he, “must figure to himself our horror at two ships blowing up above two hundred fathoms into the air, where there was formed, as it were, a mountain of fire, water, and wreck; the awfulness of the explosion below, and the cannons going off in the air; the rending of masts and planks, the tearing of the sails and cordage, added to the cries of the men.” He was on the forecastle giving orders when the ship took fire, and attributes his preservation to his being blown so high as to go clear of the volcanic wreckage. In truth, he seems to have topped the whole blazing mass, and then fallen into clear water, under whose surface he remained so long that he was nearly spent before he rose.
The Moskito Indian and Alexander Selkirk are representative names for preservation from marooning—a situation idealized by Defoe. The “eight-and-twenty years all alone in an uninhabited island on the coast of America, near the mouth of the great river of Oroonoque,” is very well for poor old Robinson Crusoe, whose life and strange, surprising adventures are, perhaps, chiefly imaginary in this span of time allotted to them by the great master of English fiction. The longest period of “all-aloneness” I have encountered in my reading may be found in the memoirs of Captain Edward Thompson, who was “born at Hull, in Yorkshire, of a respectable family.” But on the whole we must count him a more real person than that other gentleman of York, mariner. Thompson was the author of “A Sailor’s Letters,” and in a communication in which he proposes to write his life, he says, “I shall begin like Daniel Defoe, with “I, E. T., was born of respectable parents in Kingston-upon-Hull, from whence I sailed in the Love and Unity, (whom God preserve), anno 1750, on a voyage to Greenland.” Whether his discovery was inspired by his admiration of Defoe, or whether he states a fact in what he records, I cannot say. He was an officer in her Majesty’s ship Stirling Castle, and being at Tobago, he wandered into the woods in search of wild oranges. Whilst roaming here and there he discovered a hut, the inhabitant of which, a venerable looking man, addressed him in French, and, to his astonishment, declared that he had resided twenty-one years in that solitary situation, having scarcely any communication with a human being! He told Thompson that the Indians occasionally called at his hermitage whilst hunting, gave him part of their game, and shaved his beard off with a knife, but he never paid enough attention to their language to converse in it. He had been a priest at Martinique, but having in some way given offence, he was seized in the night and transported to Tobago. He declined all offers to convey him to Europe, declaring that he was reconciled to his all-alone life and happier than he could be in any other. In this, as in other respects, this singular person cannot be said to have resembled Crusoe.”