I find the seeds of a romance of the true old pattern combined with what may justly be termed a curiosity of disaster in this century-old report: “A vessel coming lately from Newcastle to London at sea, within five miles of the Port of Shields, took up a wooden cradle with a child in it. The child was alive and well.” The old is for ever echoing into the new. Only the other day I read of a boy a few years old going adrift in a boat. He was hunted after in all directions, but to no purpose. The parents were said to be inconsolable. The issue of this thing I know not; but who does not pray that the little fellow was found and restored? When you think of that old collier jogging along, picking up the cradle with the bairn in it, the past re-shapes itself; you see the quaint wooden cradle, the wondering eyes of the child staring into the amazed faces of the rough Jacks, whose touched hearts give a new impetus to the working of the jaws upon their quids. “The cradle,” says the account, “is supposed to have been carried to sea by an inundation in one of the places adjacent.” There should have been found a good subject for a poet, I think, even in those bewigged days of heroic measures and Johnsonian periods, in the meeting of the mother and the babe delivered back to her love by that old ocean whose tenderness is sometimes as marvellous as its cruelty is terrible and inexpressible.
Another curiosity of disaster, hardly credible, though it has been often enough related, may be found in the story of the brig Nerina.
She sailed from Dunkirk on Saturday, October 31, 1840, in charge of Pierre Everaert, with a cargo of oil and canvas for Marseilles, having on board a crew of seven persons, including the captain and his nephew, a boy fourteen years of age. At seven o’clock in the evening of Monday, November 16, she was lying to in a gale of wind, when she was struck by a heavy sea and turned bottom up. There was one man on deck at the time; he was instantly drowned. There were three seamen in the forecastle, two of whom, by seizing hold of the windlass bitts, succeeded in getting up close to the kelson, and so kept their heads above water. The third, letting go his hold, was drowned, and his body was never again seen. The other two, discovering that the bulkhead between the forecastle and the hold was started and that the cargo had fallen down on the deck, drew themselves towards the stern of the ship, with their faces close to the kelson. When the vessel capsized, the captain, mate, and boy were in the cabin. The mate wrenched open the trap hatch in the deck, cleared a vacant space there, and then scrambling up into it, he took the boy from the hands of the captain, whom he assisted to follow them. In about an hour they were joined by the two men from forward, who managed to scrape along the kelson to where they were. They are now described as five individuals, closely cooped together, so that as they sat they were obliged to bend their bodies for want of height above them, whilst the water reached as high as their waists. The only relief they could obtain was by one of them at a time stretching at full length on the barrels in the hold, taking care, however, to keep close to the kelson, where the air was. The 17th and 18th passed. They were without food and without water, and, as might be supposed from their situation, as certainly doomed as if they already lay dead at the bottom of the sea. They could distinguish between day and night by the light in the sea that was reflected up from the cabin skylight and thence into the space where they lay through the hatch in the cabin floor. In the middle of Wednesday night, the 18th, the vessel struck. At the third blow the stern dropped to such an extent that the men were forced forward towards the bows. Whilst making their way one of them fell down through the cabin floor and skylight, and was drowned. They noticed presently that the water was ebbing; on which the mate dropped into the cabin to seek for a hatchet that they might cut their way out, but, the water suddenly rising, he had to fly again to his former shelter. At last the day dawned, and then, perceiving a point of rock sticking into the vessel, they knew that she was hard and fast ashore. The quarter of the ship being stove, the captain looked through the rent there and cried out in French, “Thank God, my children, we are saved! I see a man on the beach.” Shortly afterwards the man approached and put in his hand, which the captain seized, to the terror of the fellow, who nearly died of fright. Several persons arrived, the side of the vessel was opened, and the four men were liberated, after having been entombed for three days and three nights.
Any reference to such a subject as the curiosities of marine disaster must include this amazing narrative, thrice told as it may be. As an escape there is nothing to be compared to it in the maritime annals, though to be sure there is no lack of examples of miraculous salvation from capsizals. The spot where the Nerina struck is Porthellick, in St. Mary’s, Scilly. Two incidents in connection with this wreck increase the wonder of it. First, the want of fresh air threatening the men with death by suffocation, the mate worked with the desperation of a dying man almost incessantly for two days and one night to cut a hole with his knife through the hull. The knife broke; but for this the hole would have been made, with the result that the vessel must have instantly foundered owing to the liberation of the air that alone kept her buoyant. Second, it was afterwards shown that during the afternoon of Wednesday, the 18th, the wreck had been fallen in with, at about five miles from the island, by two pilot boats which towed her for an hour, but the ropes parting, the night approaching, and the weather looking dirty, they abandoned her, little conceiving that there were human beings alive in her hold. Had the vessel not been towed, the set of the current would have carried the wreck clear of the islands into the Atlantic!
The relater of this remarkable story states in a note that the account was furnished to him by Mr. Richard Pearce, Consular Agent for France. “As this gentleman,” he adds, “took great care in his examination of the case, there cannot be a doubt of its correctness throughout.”
INFERNAL MACHINES.
The invention of a small fabric that sinks under water and rises to the surface at the will of her occupants should indicate a large approach towards the perfecting of the whole theory and practice of submarine warfare. Such a deadly, dangerous engine of destruction has been tried and not found wanting. Unhappily, I think; for unless the murderous inventions of our times are ultimately to render warfare impossible, by occasioning a common dread because of the swiftness and magnitude of the butchery—a probability not to be contemplated—one cannot but wish that the patentee would suffer some of the old elements of manhood to dignify and animate the conflicts of fleets and armies, by a succession of failures in the direction of a hidden and annihilating machinery. “So violent it is,” writes honest old Camden, of the cannon, “in breaking, tearing, bruising, renting, razing, and ruinating walles, towers, castles, ramparts, and all that it encountereth; that it might seem to have been invented by practice of the Devill to the destruction of mankinde as the onely enemy of true valour and manfull couragiousness, by murthering afar off.” Murthering afar off! very different, indeed, as a means of exemplifying courage from the hand-to-hand conflict of the sword and the spear. So Camden implies, speaking of the cannon of his time, a weapon that even the long-tailed guardians of the Taku forts twenty-five years ago would have disdained for their own jingalls. But what would that mostly learned Clarenceux, King of Arms, have found to say on the subject of “true valour and manfull couragiousness” had his theme, instead of the primitive engine whereof the effects as he himself describes were “destruction, violence, fury, and roaring crack,” been an electric boat in which men could go about their duties whilst under water, in which they could softly and hiddenly sneak under the keel of an ironclad of twelve thousand tons, containing a company of perhaps a thousand souls, and attach to her a machine that—after they had withdrawn, still under water, to a safe distance—would blow her and her people into fragments? This craft is no mere fancy; she is an accomplished fact, as the French say. It is not long since that the inventors tested her in the West India Docks. She is a cigar-shaped boat, sixty feet long, and displaces about fifty tons. They sank and raised her readily, kept her under water for some time, and then propelled her. I read that a supply of air—of fresh air—large enough to last for three days, may be stored in this terrible boat, so that the Jonahs who man her will be perhaps better off in the matter of oxygen or ozone than are the occupants of the common above-sea forecastle, even when their hatch is open.
Of course the electric feature is the novelty in this latest invented diving boat. But as a fabric that can be made to float or sink, as those who are inside her may choose, this screw-craft is by no means the first of her kind. In 1801 Fulton experimented with what he called a Bateau-Poisson, or fish-boat at Rouen. The first account of this invention says that the boat sank and rose seven or eight times. The longest period during which it remained under water was eight minutes. The machine was entered by means of an opening shaped like a tunnel. “When those who conducted the experiment wished to descend into the river, and disappear, they let down this opening and lost all communication with the external air. The inventors of this ingenious machine are Americans, the principal of whom is called Fulton. Three of them went into the boat, and remained during the experiment. The Prefect and a vast concourse of spectators were present.”[[54]] A fuller account, written by St. Aubin, was printed in 1802. The boat he inspected was in some respects similar to the one that had been exhibited at Rouen, Havre, and Brest. He speaks of it as a nautilus, or diving boat, invented by Mr. Fulton. It could carry eight men, and hold provisions enough for this number of persons to last twenty days. The inventor had contrived a reservoir for air large enough to enable the crew to live under water for eight hours. The boat was of sufficient strength to plunge one hundred feet deep, and to bear the pressure of water at that depth. She was furnished with two sails, and when above water presented the appearance of an ordinary boat. Fulton, in making his experiments at Havre, not only remained an hour under water with his companions, but held his boat parallel to the horizon at any given depth. He proved the compass-points as correctly under water as on the surface, and while under water “the boat made way at half a league an hour, by means contrived for that purpose.” At this point M. St. Aubin indulges in the following prophetical exclamation: “It is not twenty years since all Europe was astonished at the first ascension of men in balloons; perhaps in a few years they will not be less surprised to see a flotilla of diving boats, which, on a given signal, shall, to avoid the pursuit of an enemy, plunge under water, and rise again several leagues from the place where they descended. The invention of balloons has hitherto been of no advantage, because no means have been found to direct their course. But if such means could be discovered what would become of camps, cannon, fortresses, and the whole art of war?” He then proceeds to point out that Fulton’s craft has the advantage of sailing like a common boat, and also of diving when it is pursued. It was therefore fit for carrying secret orders to succour a blockaded port and to examine the force and position of an enemy in their own harbours. He further tells us that Fulton had already added to his boat a machine by means of which he blew up a large craft in the port of Brest. He concludes: “What will become of maritime wars, and where will sailors be found to man ships of war, when it is a physical certainty that they may every moment be blown into the air by means of a diving-boat against which no human foresight could guard them?” St. Aubin does not say how the boat was sunk and raised, and how it was propelled, when sunk, at the rate of a mile and a half in an hour. But that Fulton invented such a boat as the Frenchman describes is indisputable, and it is equally certain that, although its merit as an invention was remarkable, nothing came of it.
[54]. Naval Chronicle, 1805.