John Holdsworth, Chief Mate

by William Clark Russell

And he fell to his oar again.

The water rippled round the boat’s sides once more, and the shawl at the mast-head fluttered.

Five minutes passed; and then Holdsworth, whose eyes never wandered from the vessel, saw something black pass up her sails, rise over her masts and there hang. Another followed; another yet; volumes now, and each volume denser, blacker than its predecessor.

“She’s on fire!” he shouted; at which the men tilted up their oars and stood up.

Quicker and quicker the black volumes, like balls growing in size as they mounted, were vomited up, and resembled an endless series of balloons rising from the deck; they met when they reached a short height above the masts, mingled and formed into a livid line which gradually stretched north and south, but very slowly. The spectators in the boat were paralysed; but their emotions were too various and conflicting to permit the deeper, deadlier ones of disappointment and despair to make themselves felt as yet.

Holdsworth broke a long silence by exclaiming, “Can you see them putting off?”

“No—I see nothing. I reckon she’s abandoned hours ago,” answered Winyard.

The General sank upon his knees with a groan, clutching the gunwale and staring at the burning vessel over his knuckles. There was no sign of a boat anywhere—no sign of living creature being on board the doomed craft. The smoke, which appeared to have been pent up in the hold, had now escaped on a sudden; and thick and thicker yet it mounted, marking an ugly stain upon the pure morning sky, and hanging sombre and menacing over the smouldering vessel like a thunder-cloud. Soon a short tongue of flame protruded; then came another and a longer one, which seemed to whiz with a yellow radiance up the rigging and bury itself in the smoke. Then the fire burst out in all directions; in the time it would take you to count ten, the vessel was a mass of flame, keen, brilliant, coiling, with streams of thin blue smoke sailing out of each yellow ray, mingled with particles of burning matter that winked among the heavy cloud like fireflies in a dark evening. She was four or five miles off; a mere toy on the surface of the sea; and yet those who watched her from the boat could distinctly hear the crackling of the fire, and the seething of her flaming spars as they fell into the water. Anon the fires flickered, and up drove new volumes of smoke, which paled and thinned as the rekindled flames burst forth again and darted their spear-shaped fangs into the smoke-hidden sky.

For above an hour this terrible and magnificent spectacle lasted, during which not a word escaped the lips of the inmates of the boat. Their minds seemed incapable of understanding the extinction of the hope that had sustained them since sunrise, by a catastrophe so unexpected, by a horror which united the extreme of sublimity with the extreme of misfortune, and which appeared scarcely more than a vision—so unforeseen, so incredible, so illusive, so ghastly, so terrific was it.

By this time the whole of the upper masts were gone, adding fuel to the interior furnace of the hull, and the three lower masts were burning stumps. Suddenly the blazing mass appeared to rise in the air; the fires went out as if by magic, and an opaque cloud, burnished a livid blue by the sunshine, floated on the water. Not for many moments after the flames had vanished came a concussion that rent the air, loud and violent as a thunder-clap among mountains. The cloud lifted, and where the vessel had been the sea was a smooth outline, reflecting only the dark shadow of the slowly-mounting smoke, and dotted here and there with black remnants of the wreck.