Round the Galley Fire

by William Clark Russell

“‘We have outlived a day and a night,’ said he. ‘Keep up your heart, mate; we may have a thousand-ton ship under us before it comes dark again.’

“But Burke kept on crying for water, saying that he was dying for it, and pointing to his throat; and then, falling on all fours, he puts his face to the salt water washing about in the bottom of the boat and sucked up several mouthfuls. Well, it seemed to do him no hurt, and he lay quiet. Soon after this I spied something knocking about in the sea a few fathoms astern, and called the skipper’s attention to it. He said it was one of some kegs of butter that had been aboard the schooner, so we pulled the oars in and dropped down to it and picked it up. We broke it open and ate the butter in fistfuls, being mad with hunger; but it was as salt as brine, and the effect of it was to make our thirst raging. The knife we had used to open the keg lay in the bottom of the boat, and Burke, on a sudden turning over, seized hold of it, jumped up, and fell upon the captain. He hit him once, but the knife didn’t pierce through the thick jacket the skipper had on, and, before he could raise his hand again, we dragged him down and kneeled upon him.

“There was no worse part in all that dreadful time than this. The madman’s face was a terrible sight; almost black it was. He snapped about him with his teeth, and his cries and curses were things it brings the sweat upon my face to talk about. Think of our situation, mad with thirst ourselves and struggling with a madman, a killing north-easter blowing like knives through our frozen bodies, the sea leaping and roaring around us, and nothing between us and the bottom but the little old boat we were in. We were too weak, and in too much suffering ourselves, to remain holding the madman down, and finding him quiet we let go, and squatted one close to another for warmth; but scarcely had we hauled off from the poor wretch when he jumps up and throws himself overboard. ‘Mind!’ shouted the skipper, ‘one’s enough!’ fearing that if we all got to the side Burke had leaped from we should upset the boat. I was the nearest, and as he came up close I leaned over, and got him by the hair, and dragged him into the boat. He was pretty nigh dead, and gave us no more trouble.

“Well, sir, the night came down a second time, finding us living, but without the looks of live men. I made sure I should never see another daybreak. My thirst was not so sharp as it had been; but I don’t know whether the dull throbbing in my throat, the kind of lockjaw feeling in my mouth, the burning in my tongue as though it were a lump of hot iron, was not more torturing than when the craving was fiercer. All night long it blew a strong wind, with now and then a squall of sleet and rain, and hour after hour two of the men, Parsons and Daly, were groaning in the bottom of the boat. When the light came, I looked to see who was alive, and my eyes falling on Burke, I called out, ‘Dead!’ The captain leaned down and felt him, and said, ‘Yes, he’s gone. He’s the first. God have mercy upon us!’ and catching hold of my shoulder he stood up to search the sea, but the haze was as thick as it had been all the time, and he threw himself down with his hands over his face. Presently, looking at the body, he said, ‘We must bury him; but first, my lads, let us say a prayer for him and for ourselves.’ We all knelt while the captain prayed, and when he had done we lifted the body and let it go overboard.

“The madness that thirst creates broke out strong in Daly and Parsons when the body was gone, and down they dropped as Burke had, and lapped up the salt water in the bottom of the boat like dogs would. The captain implored them not to drink, but they never heeded him nor me, who likewise entreated them. However, no harm seemed to come of it. Well, sir, there’s no need for me to describe that Wednesday nor our third night in that open boat. Thursday morning came, making the fourth day, and to our joy the weather cleared, the wind shifted and moderated, and the sea went down. We got the oars in, rigged up one as a mast, and two of us having oilskin coats on, we joined them so as to form a sail, made a yard of the other oar, and putting the boat before the wind, which was blowing a light breeze from the south’ard, headed, as the captain judged, for the Irish coast. All the day long we kept a wild look-out, as you may reckon, for any passing ship; but never once, not in the furthest distance, did such an object heave in sight. We might have been sailing in the middle of the Pacific. Nature in us was almost numbed. We had come to such a pass that we were too faint and exhausted to feel the craving of hunger and thirst. At least I can speak for myself, and it’s in that way I account for my suffering less at the end than I did at the beginning of the dreadful time we went through. It was still cold, but nothing like the bitter cold of the gale and the heavy seas and squalls. We reckoned by the sun that the wind hung steady, and we let the boat slip before it; that was all that could be done. If we were to sail at all we were bound to keep the breeze over our starn, seeing there was nothing to draw but a couple of oilskins secured to the oar.

“But the coming on of Thursday night was like the bitterness of death itself, sir. Indeed it was. All day long we had reckoned upon sighting something before the sun went. Every hour we had hoped and prayed and believed would heave up some sort of vessel to come to our rescue; and therefore, when it drew up black, only a few stars among the slow clouds, and we were brought face to face with another long winter’s night, my heart failed me altogether; I felt that there was a curse upon us, and that we were doomed men, singled out to die of famine, the most cruel of deaths, because the longest. Think of ninety-six hours in an open boat, in January, in the Chops, a north-east gale blowing most of the time, with never a morsel of food except the salt butter, and no drink but the salt water washing in the boat! And yet when the Friday morning came we were still alive, the captain steering, doubled up with faintness and the cold, his knees against his mouth, and his head lolling for want of strength in his neck; Daly and Parsons lying still as dead men under the thwarts, and me in the bows, too weak and broken-hearted even to cast my eyes around the sea to notice if there was a vessel in sight.

“The morning passed; the afternoon passed. Were we to go through another night? The sun was within half of an hour of his setting when Parsons, who was leaning his breast on the gunwale, stood upright and pointed. His mouth was full of froth, and as he tried to speak the foam flew out of his lips, but no words he spoke; it was naught but a kind of death-rattle in his throat. We all looked in the direction he pointed to, and saw a large sailing-vessel heading right down for us. How we watched her! all of us standing up, never speaking, and only moving with the roll and toss of the boat. It took her an hour to approach us, and then she hove us a line; but her people had to sling us aboard. None of us could move. Nothing but the excitement of seeing her had allowed us to stand. The moment the line was in the boat and we were alongside, we all became as helpless as babies.

“The vessel’s name, sir? She was the Austrian barque Grad Karlovak, commanded by so humane a man that I feel fit to cry when I think of him and his kindness to us poor miserable shipwrecked English sailors. That’s the story, sir, or as much of it as there is any call to relate. Five days and four nights in the month of January, in an open boat, most of the time blowing heavily! The tale’s known at Plymouth—it’s known at Runcorn—it’s known to Mr. Hopkins, the agent of the Shipwrecked Mariner’s Society at Plymouth. And I’ll tell you somebody else it’s known to, sir—some one as’ll swear to every word of it; and that’s me.”

WAITING FOR A SHIP.

The Shipping Office in Tower Hill is a place where seamen, firemen, stokers, and others assemble in the hope that captains in want of crews will come and pick out the best men among them to “sign on,” as it is called. I was induced to visit it the other day by hearing a sailor complain bitterly of the filthy state of it. “Neglect,” said he, “is our lot; but the condition of that shipping office beats my time. It’s all dirt and Dutchmen, and if ye want to see something to make you reflective, just trot down the steps and take a turn round the yard the next time you’re passing that way.” When finally I did trot down the steps I found myself in a kind of courtyard, flanked on the one hand by the shipping offices—grimy doors, leading into gloomy interiors—and on the other hand by a species of shed, partitioned into stone rooms, with hard and painful seats against the walls, and unwholesome draughts of dampish wind eddying about them. It was a gloomy day—rain had fallen, and pools of muddy water gleamed here and there in the yard; the brown and stooping London sky threatened more wet, and flung a shadow that made the shipping office and its yard and its condemned-cell-like rooms under the shed an unspeakably cheerless, depressing, and miserable picture. Some sixty or seventy men stood or moved about in groups in the yard, or were seated in the cells under the shed. I was hardly prepared to witness so large an assembly, and remained near the steps for a little while surveying them. A few of them were decently attired—one or two respectably and comfortably dressed in good clothes and clean linen; but a large proportion of them were, so far as their costume went, little better than scarecrows. Some were clad merely in shirt and trousers, with their naked feet thrust into old shoes or boots; here and there was a red or blue shirt, or a figure buttoned up in such a manner as to suggest that under the ragged old coat there was no shirt at all. “And is this,” thought I, “the British sailor of the nineteenth century?—is this the original of those rubicund features, those flowing breeches, that tarpaulin hat on nine hairs, those well-polished shoes twinkling in the light-hearted measures of the hornpipe, which are offered by novelists, dramatists, and theatre lessees as accurate representations of the jolly tar we are so fond of joining in choruses about, and whom we gaze at with such patriotic enthusiasm as he hitches up his breeches, turns his quid, and smites his timbers?” Every crowd of human faces is full of variety, but no crowd that ever I looked at had the variety submitted by the countenances of these sixty or seventy men who were “waiting for a ship.” The negro’s face—flat, bland, and open-mouthed—was, of course, not wanting. Square cheeks, hollow cheeks, high cheeks; complexions black, brown, and yellow; eyes of every pattern and shade—from the small, twinkling blue of the North-country to the filmy and red-webbed optics of the gin-soaked Cockney—combined, with the different build and shapes of the men, the appearance of their clothes, the various head-coverings, to make up a truly singular scene. I stepped forward and got among a little bunch of men, of whom, addressing myself to one, I asked what sort of shelter that dirty and wretched shed and those bleak and stony cells offered in the winter, when the wind blew with an edge and the sleet and rain fell. No notice had been taken of me before, but on my making this inquiry the eyes of the whole group were fixed upon me, and half a dozen voices answered at once. The meaning of the replies was lost in the confusion, but the noise was like a signal; for I can truly say that within a few seconds of my having asked that question every man in that yard and every man that had been lounging in the cells had gathered about me, so that before I very well knew what was happening I found myself—pretty tightly squeezed—in the centre of a mass of men, the outer portions of whom pressed eagerly upon the inner to hear and see what was going forward. It was like a mutiny on a large scale, and when I looked around at the mass of faces, and tasted the tobacco-laden breath of the near people blowing hot against my cheeks, I felt that nothing was wanted to complete the suggestion of revolt but the gleam of a score of sheath-knives flourished in the air. “Give me a little room, my lads,” said I, working with my elbows; and, having freed myself somewhat, I said, “There seems no lack of men here; captains ought to find no difficulty in manning their ships.”