There was no magic in the commands even of British officers to British sailors to put the least element of calm into the business. It was not only that at one moment the boat alongside seemed to be hove up to the Indiaman’s covering-board and that at the next she was rushing down into a chasm that laid bare many feet of the big ship’s yellow sheathing: there was the dreadful expectation of the whole of the human freight being overset and drowning alongside in a breath; there were the heart-rending shouts of the distracted people; there was the total inability of captain and mates to make themselves understood. How it was managed I will not pretend to explain. By some means the boat was dragged to the gangway, grinding and thumping herself horribly against the Indiaman’s rolling, stooping, massive side; then bowlines and ropes in plenty were dangled over or flung into her; and through the unshipped gangway, illuminated by half-a-dozen lanterns, and crowded by a hustling mob of sailors and passengers, one after another, the women and the men—most of the men coming first!—were dragged inboards, some of them falling flat upon the deck, some dropping on their knees and crossing themselves; a few of the women weeping passionately, one of them sobbing in dreadful paroxysms, the others mute as statues, as though terror and the presence of death had frozen the lifeblood in them and arrested the very beating of their hearts. Two of them fell into the sea; but they had lines about them and were dragged up half dead. They were all of them dripping wet, the men’s sea-boots full of water; whilst the soaked gowns of the women flooded the deck on which they stood, as though several buckets of brine had been capsized there.
Old Keeling’s pity for them would not go to the length of introducing the wretched creatures into the cuddy, to spoil the ship’s fine carpets and stain and ruin the coverings of the couches. They were accordingly brought together in the recess under the break of the poop, where at all events they were sheltered. Hot spirits and water were given to them along with bread and meat, and this supper the unhappy creatures ate by the light of the dimly burning lanterns held by the sailors.
There never was an odder wilder sight than the picture the poor half-drowned creatures made. Some of the women scarcely once intermitted their sobs and lamentations, save when they silenced their throats by a mouthful of food or drink. They were very ugly, dark as coffee; and their black wet hair streaming like sea-weed upon their shoulders and brows from under their soaked caps made them look like witches. The men talked hoarsely and eagerly with many passionate gestures, which suggested fierce denunciation. The mate coming down to the booby hatch around which these people were squatting, eating, drinking, moaning, and jabbering without the least regard to the crowd of curious eyes which inspected them from the quarter-deck—the mate, I say, coming down, stood looking a minute at them, and then sent a glance round, and seeing me, asked if I spoke French.
‘Yes,’ said I, ‘but not such French as those people are talking.’
‘We have three passengers,’ said he, ‘who, I am told, are scholars in that language; but the steward informs me they’re too sea-sick to come on deck. Just ask these people in such French as you have, if their captain’s amongst them.’
As he said this, a little old man seated on the hatch-coaming, with a red nightcap on, immense earrings, and a face of leather puckered into a thousand wrinkles like the grin of a monkey, looked up at Mr. Prance, and nodding with frightful energy whilst he struck his bosom with his clenched fist, cried out: ‘Yash, yash, me capitaine.’
‘Ha!’ said the mate, ‘do you speak English, then?’
‘Yash, yash,’ he roared: ‘me speakee Angleesh.’
Happily he knew enough to save me the labour of interpreting; and labour it would have been with a vengeance, since, though it was perfectly certain none amongst them, saving the little monkey-faced man, comprehended a syllable of the mate’s questions, every time the small withered chap answered—which he did with extraordinary convulsions and a vast variety of frantic gesticulations—all the rest of them broke into speech, the women joining in, and there was such a hubbub of tongues that not an inch of idea could I have got out of the distracting row. However, in course of time the leathery manikin who called himself captain made Mr. Prance understand that the lugger belonged to Boulogne; that she had the survivors of another lugger on board, making some thirty-four souls in all, men and women, at the time of the collision, of which seventeen or eighteen were drowned. After he had given Mr. Prance these figures, he turned to the others and said something in a shrill, fierce, rapid voice, whereat the women fell to shrieking and weeping, whilst many of the men tore their hair, some going the length of knocking their heads against the cuddy front. It was a sight to sicken the heart, the more, I think, for the unutterable element of grotesque farce imported into that dismal tragedy by their countenances, postures, and behaviour; and having heard and seen enough, I slipped away on to the poop, with a chill coming into my very soul to the thought of the drowned bodies out yonder when my eye went to the sea weltering black to the troubled line of moonshine, and heaving in ashen luminous billows in that chill path of light.
But long before this, our rockets, blue-lights, and flares had been seen; and a moment or two after I had gained the poop I spied the figure of Captain Keeling with a few male passengers at his side standing at the rail watching a powerful cutter thrashing through it to us close-hauled, with the water boiling to her leaps, and her big mainsail to midway high dark with the saturation of the flying brine. In less than twenty minutes she was rising and falling buoyant as a seabird abreast of us, with a shadowy figure at her lee rail bawling with lungs of brass to know what was wrong.