Round the Galley Fire

by William Clark Russell

“I had charge of the deck, and not liking the look of the weather, I went below to tell the captain about it. He had been up pretty near all the night that was gone, and was in his cabin taking some rest. But there’s very little rest for shipmasters, who need to have as many eyes as you find in a peacock’s tail, that they might close two or three of them at a time, if ever they’re to get the amount of sleep that all other kinds of people, barring nautical men, find needful to keep themselves alive on. Well, sir, I called the captain and told him that the weather looked threatening, and straightway he came on deck and took a squint around. The wind was freshening slowly and surely, and the topsails and topgallant-sails, out of whose cloths the wet of last night’s squalls of rain were not yet dried, were stretching as if they would burst under it; and the water to leeward washed like boiling milk all along the scuppers as the ship was rushed by the pressure, taking the seas with a floating jump, and making them roar as she split them with her sharp stem and sent them seething in white smothers on either hand. There were clouds crawling up out of the thickness in the west and south, and passing like smoke over the mastheads, and there was a look of racing about the whole ocean with the sailing of those bits of vapour, and the pelting of the ship, and the wild hurrying rolling of the seas, along which there were sea-birds screeching as they skimmed in their low flight through the driving spray in pursuit of us.

“Well, sir, the fore topgallant-sail was furled and the watch lay aft to roll up the mainsail; but not for long did we hold on with the main topgallant-sail; that was clewed up soon, and the wind freshened as sail was diminished; so that, although half stripped of canvas, the ship was heeling to it as before, whilst there was the hard look of a gale of wind in the sky that you saw grey between the scud; and the thickness was blowing up nearer and nearer, making a mere biscuit’s-throw of the horizon, so that the seas looked lumping things as they rolled, all of a sudden like, out of the haze, and were under the ship and standing up on either hand of her almost as fast as they seemed to be formed. We were now under topsails and foresail only—of the square canvas—when on a sudden there comes a bit of a lull, and a sort of silence aloft that sounded strange after the roaring, and a great noise of washing waters all around; and then plump sweeps up the wind in a wild out-fly out of the south-west, driving the ship forwards until the foam of the cutwater looked to be smothering her head. All hands were called to shorten sail, the three upper topsail halliards were let go, the starboard braces rounded in, and the helm shifted to bring the ship to her course. Four able seamen and four boys went aloft to furl the upper mizzen-topsail. You know the old story: the light hands well out, the older hands in the slings and quarters, and the sail swelling up like a sheet of iron to the wind that blew fair into it in a storm betwixt the two yards. I had my eye on those men I am speaking of, when a blast like a squall swept the canvas out of their fists, and in a breath one of them fell with a twirl and a toss of his clenched hands off the yard, striking the half-round of the poop a blow that came along with the yell of the wind in a frightful thud; and with that, rebounding as a ball might, over he goes into the yeast and froth alongside. It is a horrible thing to happen; it will stop the breathing of the strongest for a minute. The fellows on the yard roared out, ‘Man overboard!’ I sprang aft, and had a life-buoy in my hand in an instant, which I threw fair, as I prayed and believed, to the yellow patch of sou’wester that I saw dark on the foam of the side of a sea; but the wind blew the light thing, like a feather, to leeward of him. But he was swimming—there was life in him, though, man, you should have heard the thump of his fall, and then thought of him struggling there with his great sea-boots full of water, and his heavy oilskins dragging him down, and a rushing of froth over his head every time that a sea swept him up into the snow of its breaking crest. Well, sir, we went to work smartly; the hands came tumbling down from aloft, and the ship was brought to with her main-topsail aback, whilst half a dozen of us were obeying with mad haste the order to clear away the quarter-boat ready for lowering.

“Meanwhile a hand remained in the mizzen-topsail yard to keep the poor fellow in sight, and he was shouting that the man was swimming, and swimming strong; that he didn’t seem to see the life-buoy, but that he was struggling bravely; and I, seeing this too, and driven half mad by the pitiful sight of that sailor and shipmate fighting the whole ocean, as I may put it, and battling it with an English seaman’s courage, sang out, ‘Who’s going to volunteer for the boat?’ There was no hanging back; it was just a leap to see who should be first. As fast as they could tumble in, there they were, six of them, the pick of the crew—merchant seamen, sir, whom we’re being taught to despise; there they were, I say, with the others handling the falls, and every one looking as if the saving of the life of the man astern was his business and nobody’s else; for he was a shipmate, and that means a brother at sea, sir, when the forecastle holds real sailors.

“It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and the mist was driving between the masts. I was in charge of the boat, but try my dead best I could not help her being badly stove before we got away, and the water came in fast as we headed for the spot where the man was last seen. You must go through it to realize the difference between the deck of a ship pitching and rolling, no matter how heavily, and the feel of an open boat released from her side in the same sea. The solid deck you’re fresh from makes the contrast fearfully sharp, and I can well believe what I remember reading in your yarn of the wreck of the Indian Chief, that the survivors of her crew when in the lifeboat owned to being more frightened by the fearful tossing and jumping of the buoyant craft than they were when in their foretop, with the hull of the ship going to pieces under them. We could only pull four oars, for two men had all their work in baling the boat, one with a sou’wester and the other with a sea-boot, those being our balers. My duty lay at the helm, in watching for the man and looking out for the seas. Bitterly cold it was, the sun going down, the haze thick around, and the ship a mere heaving darkness upon it when we had measured but a few lengths from her. I looked narrowly about me, but could see nothing of the man. Sometimes a lump of green water tumbling over the foam would show like his head, and my heart would leap: but the next moment the clear sea would roll away from the blowing froth and explain what the deception was. We pulled to the buoy, but it was empty.

“Then one of the men said, ‘Supposing even Bill had not been hurt by the fall, surely he couldn’t live in such a sea as this.’ And another said, ‘Think of his wraps and oilskins, sir. The best swimmer in the world couldn’t hold up all these minutes under such drags.’ But they spoke not as if they wished to give up, but as if preparing themselves for the disappointment. Had he hurt himself more than we could know? Was he broken and dying when he touched the water, and were his struggles there the despairing efforts of a broken and dying man? We strained our eyes, but could see nothing save the boiling heads of the seas which came roaring down upon us and threatened with every desperate swing to fill the boat. Still we kept up heart. ‘Another pull, boys! impossible to go back without him!’ I would cry, whilst the two fellows in the bottom were chucking the water out over the side, and the thickness stood like a wall around.

“Well, for three-quarters of an hour did we hang about, pulling in all directions, and thinking only of finding and saving him; and then we gave up and looked round for the ship. I could not see her. I sung out to the men, ‘Do you see the ship?’ and they turned their heads upon their shoulders to look; and the chap in the bow cries out, when we were standing nearly end on up the side of a sea, ‘There she is, I think.’

“Well, to be sure, I could see her, but it might as well have been the thickening of the mist that way as the ship, for she made a shadow scarcely noticeable, and I looked with dismay at the distance that lay before us to row over, and at the water that was coming into the boat as fast as the two men could bale it out, and at the terrible sea around us. We had got into such a situation that the seas ran right abeam, and every send drove us to leeward, and sometimes the mist swept down so thick that there was never a man of us all who could see the ship, though, thanks be to Heaven, it did not come to our losing sight of her for good. It was a bad job for us that the heaving and straining of the boat caused her to leak worse and worse. But for her leaking I could have put the two men who were baling her to the oars, and they would have been just the sort of help we wanted; instead of which they were scarcely able to prevent the boat from filling. It would, however, have been destruction to us to have set more men than those two at the job they were on. Every moment was precious; the afternoon was fast waning; in a short while the night would be upon us, and I knew quite surely that if it came before we fetched the ship we were doomed men. Oh, sir, it was a fierce bit of labour. In the midst of our struggles a squall of sleet blew down and hid the whole surface of the ocean to within our own length of us; but it cleared off, and when it was gone the mist thinned somewhat, and gave us a better view of the ship, at whose peak we could see a colour streaming as a signal of recall. Never was any man of us nearer to death in his life than he was during the time we occupied in reaching the vessel. That we did reach her you may reckon, or I should not be here to tell you this story. But by the hour we had pulled across her head and dropped along the port side of her, the water in the boat was up to the thwarts, we showed scarce more than our gunwale, it was almost dark, the sea had increased in volume, and the wind was blowing half a hurricane. We were fairly exhausted when we gained the deck, but humbly grateful as we were for the preservation of our lives, ne’er a one of us could cast a look over the quarter in the place where our shipmate had gone down, and where the darkness of the evening now lay, with the white foam showing with startling clearness upon the sides of those black rushing hills, without feeling that our thankfulness would have been deeper had we been allowed to rescue the man whom we had been very near to losing our lives to save.”

IN AN OPEN BOAT.

Loneliness has many forms. It is Selkirk, imprisoned in an island, with nothing but the wash of the surf to break the shocking stillness; it is the mountain-climber missing his way, and passing the long night amid the tremendous silence of towering hills and black valleys; or it is the loneliness described by Byron, that of a man solitary in crowds. But what sense of solitude can equal that felt by shipwrecked men in a small open boat, surrounded by a universe of waters, with no other chance for their lives than such as a passing ship may bring? It is not the first hour, nor yet the first day; the agony of such a trial lies in the slow maddening of the mind by fruitless expectation; the deception of the white shoulders of clouds, which look like ships as they seem to linger a moment upon the horizon before sailing above it; the straining of the aching sight against the pitiless, vacant sea-line; the sense that death is close at hand, though a hundred deaths may have been suffered before the skeleton’s clutch is upon the sufferers.

No kind of human anguish is more terrible, and no stories catch a tighter hold of the imagination than those which relate it. Generations have shuddered, and generations will yet shudder over the grand and soul-moving description in “Don Juan.” The raft of the Medusa is an immortal horror. The narratives which are at once the most fascinating and depressing in the marine records are always those which concern the sufferings of human beings adrift in an open boat in the midst of a great ocean. The deep is unchanging in the misery it works. Our ships are of iron; they are propelled through the calm sea by an irresistible power faster than a gale of wind would drive them; they are of proportions so colossal that many of them could sling the “tall schippes” of our forefathers over their sides, and stow them on skids as they stow their boats; and yet just the same sort of sufferings are endured now by mariners as were experienced by them in the days when a vessel of thirty tons was reckoned big enough not only to seek the North-West Passage but to hunt the unnavigated oceans after continents.