Round the Galley Fire

by William Clark Russell

The men had come off the yards after having struggled, each watch of them, for hard upon three-quarters of an hour with the frozen topsails, when the brig shipped a sea just abaft the weather fore rigging. It was a whole mountain of green water, and it fell in a dead weight of scores of tons upon the deck, beating for awhile the whole life out of the devoted vessel, and making her pause, trembling and stunned, in the roaring hollow in which it had found her, whilst above the thunder of the dreadful stroke could be heard the crash of breaking wood, of splintered glass, and the rending noise of deck furniture torn from its strong fastenings. A heavy upward send drove the water off the decks, and all hands were found to be alive, holding on like grim death to whatever was next them; and then it was seen that a long range of the weather-bulwarks had been torn down flush with the deck, the cabin skylight broken into shivers, the long boat amidships stove, and nothing left of the port-quarter boat but the frame of its keel and stem, dangling at the davits. The loss of the two boats was a bad job, but still worse was the terrible straining the deeply freighted vessel had undergone, and the destruction of the skylight that left the cabin open for the floods of water that rolled along the deck. The benumbed and half-frozen crew turned to to secure what remained of the skylight and to cover it with tarpaulins; but whilst they were in the midst of this work the brig gave a heavy lurch, which made the men believe it was all over with her; and before a single cry could have been raised, a portion of the weather fore rigging carried away, and in a trice the fore-topmast broke off at the cap, and fell over the side—a horrible muddle—with all its raffle of sail, yards, and gear.

The early Antarctic night was now drawing down over the furious sea, and it was already so dark that the men could hardly discern one another’s faces. Some active fellows sprang forward at the risk of their lives to cut away the rigging, and release the wreck alongside before the yards upon it should pierce the brig’s bottom; and this being done, the helm was put hard up, with the idea of wearing ship, in order to secure the foremast. But the storm-fiend had marked this unhappy brig, and the successive blows came thick and fast. Scarcely was the wrecked spar sent adrift and the helm shifted, when all the rest of the port fore rigging carried away, and the foremast fell down, carrying with it the bowsprit, main topmast, and a portion of the port main rigging.

By this time it was as dark as the bottom of a well; the brig wallowed before the seas with a mass of wreckage over her side, pitching miserably in the fearful hollows, and huge surges curling their white heights around her. A man had need to be a seaman indeed, and to have a seaman’s heart in him too, to act at all in such a moment as this. The full extent of the mischief could not be guessed. Nothing was certain but that the brig was dispossessed of all but her mainmast, and that there were some heavy spars over the side, pounding at her like battering-rams with every hurl of the raging seas. The first business would be to get clear of this mischief, and the men went to work with their knives, feeling for the lanyards and hacking and cutting with a will. Darkness gives a peculiar horror to disasters of this kind at sea. In the daylight you can see what has happened; you can use your eyes as well as your hands and make despatch, and the worst is evident. But the darkness leaves everything to be guessed at. You shout for help for some job too heavy for you, and it does not come. The outlines of the sea grow colossal by the illusion of the faint light thrown out from their breaking crests; you cannot perceive the flying water so as to duck away from it, and in a breath you may find yourself overboard. It is all distraction and uproar, loud and fearful shouting, and blind groping. When at last the wreck was cleared, the vessel seemed little better than a sheer hulk, nothing standing but her mainmast, upon which the mainyard swung helplessly. That she should have lived through that long and fearful Antarctic night, the seas combing over her, icebergs in her vicinity, and draining in water with every roll, must count among the miracles of the deep. Her people had discovered that the mainmast, having little to support it, had worked loose, breaking away the mast-combings, and starting the planking all around it; so that through this large aperture the water poured into the hold in torrents. The port pump had been disabled by the fall of the masts, and the only other pump was manned and worked with such energy as dying men will put into their arms; but in less than an hour the coal choked it, and now nothing remained but to lighten the vessel by throwing the cargo overboard and baling with buckets. All through those black and howling hours, amid freezing falls of water, and in the heart of the raging Cape Horn storm, this severe labour was pursued, so that when the bleak and melancholy dawn broke upon the desolate ocean it found the brig still afloat, and the brave hearts in her grimly fighting death, though faint, famished, and frozen. Help came shortly before noon. A sail was made out heading dead for the wreck, and by the time she was abreast, the wind and sea had so far moderated as to enable her to bring all the men safely off. It was not a moment too soon, for twenty minutes after the crew had been transferred to the ship the brig was observed to give a heavy lurch, and so lie on her beam-ends, never righting, but slowly sinking in that position—so slowly that after her hull had vanished her mainmast remained forking out like the lifted arm of a drowning man.

When this story was told me I could not help thinking of what the Horn route was in Dana’s time, and the very small chance that brig’s crew would have had for their lives had her name been the Pilgrim, and had she been beating to the westward forty years ago. Certain it is, that however ships may come and go, and change the nature of their material and the form of their fabrics, the weather in the Pacific down there is very much what it was in Anson’s time, and as it has been, in all probability, since the creation of the world. Other climates may vary in the lapse of ages, and south-easters may in places be found to work themselves into north-westers. But the Horn remains always the same harsh, tempestuous, frozen headland, echoing at this hour the hurricane notes which reverberated over it centuries ago, and grimly overlooking the stormiest space of waters in the world. Who, then, does not hope that the final construction of the Panama Canal may abridge the bleak and icebound horrors of that point of continent which looks on the chart to stretch its leagues and leagues of tongue into the very heart of the southern frozen waters? To be sure, the passage of the famous cape has long since ceased to be a wonder; but none the less is it full of perils to vessels which, like the brig I have written about, are at the mercy of the monstrous seas and furious gales of that formidable tract of Pacific waters.

A STRANGE CHASE.

One is sorry to hear of the growth of the very un-English habit of sheering off and scuttling away after a collision. The first duty of a shipmaster who plumps into a vessel or is run into is to stand by, if the condition of his ship will permit him, and render all the assistance in his power. There is nothing more despicable and cowardly than running away after a disaster of this kind. We know what came of such conduct in the case of the Northfleet; and week after week one reads in the shipping papers how such and such a vessel was run into, and how the other ship made off, and how so many people were drowned in consequence. Darkness, that is fruitful of collisions, is also, unhappily, favourable to these mean and unmanly escapes. At night it mostly happens that the utmost you can tell of the vessel that comes grinding into your ship is that she is big or little, a steamer or a sailing-vessel, and rigged in such and such a fashion. The letters on her nameboard cannot be deciphered; she will not answer your hail; and her reply to the melancholy shout of “For God’s sake don’t leave us, we believe we are sinking,” is to shift her helm and vanish in the gloom. The obligation to record such casualties in the log-book or to depone to them before receivers of wrecks does not, it is to be feared, always imply the sort of accuracy that would be useful to sufferers. From time to time a buoy is sunk, a lightship run into, and the Trinity Corporation offer a handsome sum of money for information, but without avail. The absence of all reference by shipmates to such occurrences must make one hope that they are mainly the work of foreigners. But whatever the flag under which a captain sails, his sneaking away from a disaster in which he has had a hand expresses a species of cowardice that presses heavily upon the humbler order of shipowners. A little coaster is run into by a fine large vessel, which stops a minute or two and then proceeds. The master of the coaster may be her owner, and all that he has in the world is in his little ship. She is not sunk, but her masts are over the side, and she looks as if she had been for some hours under the guns of a fort. Whether or not the master be to blame for the collision, he is pretty sure to consider that the fault was not his; and his hardship is, that whilst he stands a chance of being ruined, he is unable to discover the name of the ship that ran into him, so as to be able to bring her owners into a court of justice, and take his risk as a litigant.

I was amused and interested some time since by hearing the story of the resolute behaviour of Mr. John Whitear, master of the schooner Jehu, a vessel of about 150 tons. Giving chase, if you can, is one way, at least, of clearing up the mystery of the paternity of an offending ship that sneaks off in the darkness in the hope of saving her owner’s pocket. Any way, Mr. John Whitear’s conduct illustrates a spirit pleasant to come across in the homely prosaics of the marine life of to-day. Eighty and a hundred years ago it was men of the stamp of Mr. Whitear who commanded British privateers; otherwise how should the maritime memorials of that kind of vessel be so full as they are of the unflinching obstinacy and the grim courage which followed the fleeing enemy over leagues and leagues of ocean, through storms and through calms, finally overhauling and boarding the breathless chase in latitudes so remote from the point of departure that the span between the two places might even now be reckoned a long voyage?

Not very many days ago, then, the Jehu, with 230 tons of coal aboard, was quietly jogging along on her way to her port of destination. The afternoon had been fine, and the night came down very clear and bright, with starlight. The water was smooth, though a merry wind was blowing, and the little vessel under easy canvas lay softly leaning in the gloom, with the white water rippling and crisping past her sides in a hollow, brass-like tinkling. Starlight gives beauty even to a coalman; and I have known stump topgallant-masts and sails yawning upon sheets hard upon a fathom from the points in the yardarms through which they lead, make as dream-like and dainty a picture in the tender sobering shadows of the night as the tall and tapering rig of the handsomest yacht now afloat.

At all events, the Jehu was Mr. John Whitear’s sea-home, and as he paced the weather side of the deck, sometimes squinting into the windward darkness where the loom of the land hung low upon the vague greyish softness of the water that way, or sometimes aloft where the stars, like so many benign and encouraging eyes, were tipping him cheerful winks through the black squares in the shrouds and over the main gaff and among the dim tracery of the standing and running rigging, whose heights seemed to bring near the sweeping enfoldment of the glittering heavens, as though the vast star-laden shadow were revolving and was weaving its circling burden of gloom closer and closer yet round the lonely schooner journeying slowly along with a bell-like resonance of broken water around her, he was no doubt as well satisfied with his little hooker as the captain of an ocean steamer could be with his stately ship.

His pipe being smoked out, the weather looking as steady as a church, and all being well in every possible sense of that marine expression, Mr. John Whitear thought that no harm could come of his going below for a spell to take some rest. Accordingly, after exchanging a few words with his mate, and taking another good look to windward and then aloft, he walked to the companion and disappeared down the steps. But instead of going to bed like a landsman, he kept on his boots and his coat, merely removing his cap as a preliminary to turning in, and stretching himself upon a locker, within easy hearing of the first shout that should come down through the companion, he closed his eyes, and was presently contributing to the other creaking sounds raised in the plain and quaint little cabin by the occasional movements of the Jehu.