List, Ye Landsmen! A Romance of Incident

by William Clark Russell

I felt myself sucked down, but I preserved my senses, and seemed to understand that I was passing under the body of the ship, clear of her, as though swept to and steadied at some depth below her keel by the weight of water her passage drove in downward recoil. I rose, bursting with the holding of my breath, and floated right upon an oar, which I grasped with a drowning grip, though I was a tolerable swimmer; and after drawing several breaths—and oh, the ecstasy of that respiration! and oh, the sweetness of the air with which I filled my lungs!—my wits being still perfectly sound, I struck out with my legs, with no other thought in me then than to drive clear of the drowning scramble which I guessed was happening hard by.

The oar was under my arms, and my ears hoisted well above the surface of the water. I heard a man steadily shouting—he was at some distance from me, and was probably holding, as I was, to something that floated him—but no other cries than that lonely shouting reached me; no bubbling noises of the strangling; nothing to intimate that anything lived.

I turned my head and looked in the direction of the ship. Her people may or may not have known that they had run down a boat. Certainly she had not shifted her helm; she was standing straight on, a leaning shadow with the bit of moon hanging over her mastheads.

In a few moments the fellow that was shouting at some little distance from me fell silent; but whatever his plight might have been, I could not have helped him, for the tide was setting me at the rate of some two or three miles in the hour into the northeast, and, to come at him, he being astern of me as regards the direction of the tide, I should have been obliged to head in the direction whence his voice had proceeded and seek for him; and so, as I say, I could not have helped him.

We had pulled a full mile, and perhaps more than a mile, from the shore when we were run down. The low land of Deal looked five times as far as a mile across the rippling black surface on which I floated. Yet I knew that the distance could not exceed a mile, and I set my face toward the lights of the beach and struck out with my legs; but I moved feebly. I had swallowed plentifully of salt water when I sank, and the brine filled me with weakness, and I was heavy and sick with it. Then, again, my strength had been shrunk by the sudden dreadful shock of the collision and by my having been under water, breathless and bursting, while, as I might take it, the whole length of the ship was passing over me. I knew that I should never reach the land by hanging over an oar and striking out with my legs. The oar was long and heavy; there was no virtue in the kick of my weakened heels to propel the great blade and loom of ash held athwart as I was obliged to hold it. And all this time the tide was setting me away northeast, with an arching trend to the sheerer east, owing to the conformation of the land thereabouts; so that though for some time I kept my face turned upon Deal, languidly, almost lifelessly, moving my legs in the direction of the lights of that town, in reality the stream was striking me into the wider water; and after a bit I was able to calculate—and I have no doubt accurately—that if I abandoned myself to my oar and floated only (and in sober truth that was all I could do, and pretty much all that I had been doing), I should double the North Foreland at about two miles from that point of coast, and strand, a corpse, upon some shoal off Margate or higher up.

I looked about me for a ship. Therein lay hope. I looked, not for a ship at anchor, unless she hove in view right on end of the course my oar was taking, but for a vessel in motion to hail as she came by; but I reckoned she must come by soon, for on testing my lungs when I thought of the shout I would raise if a ship came by, I discovered that she would have to pass very close if she was to hear me. Indeed, what I had undergone that night, from the moment of lighting upon the gibbet down to this moment of finding myself floating on one oar, had proved too much for my strength, extraordinarily robust as I was in those days: and then, again, the water was bitterly cold—cold, too, was the wind as it brushed me, with a constant feathering of ripples that kept my head and face wet for the wind to blow the colder upon.

The light was feeble, the moon shed but scant illumination, and whenever she was shadowed by a cloud, deep darkness closed over the sea. There were vessels near and vessels afar, but none to be of use. A large cutter was heading eastward about half a mile abreast of me; I shouted and continued to shout, but a drowning sigh would have been as audible to her people. She glided on, and when the moon went behind a cloud the loom of the cutter blended with the darkness, and when the moon came out again, and I looked for the vessel, I could not see her.

I afterward learned that I passed five hours in this dreadful situation. How long I had spent hanging over the oar when my senses left me I know not; I believe that dawn was not then far off; I seem to recollect a faintness of gray stealing up off the distant rim of the sea like a smoke into the sky, the horizon standing firm and dark against the dimness as though the water were of thick black paint; and by that time I guess I had been carried by the tide to a part of the Channel that lies abreast of the cliffs between the town of Ramsgate and the little bay into which the Stour empties itself.

CHAPTER V.
CAPTAIN MICHAEL GREAVES OF THE “BLACK WATCH.”

I found myself in the cabin of a ship. I lay in a hammock, and when I opened my eyes I looked straight up at a beam running across the upper deck. I stared at this beam for some time, wondering what it was and wondering where I was; I then turned my head from side to side, and perceived that I was in a hammock, and that I lay in my shirt under some blankets.