“We hauled in, and then with the naked eye clearly perceived several figures making signs to us. When we were as close as prudence permitted, the long-boat was got over, and the captain and five men, one of them being Dickens, pulled away towards the berg. I stood off to improve my offing, and being full of the business of the schooner, had little opportunity to remark what passed on the ice-island.
“By-and-by the boat returned; she looked to be full of people. When she was alongside I saw two women in her. One was locked in the embrace of Captain Huddersfield; he had wrapped her in his coat, and held her to his heart. Both women were lifted over the side; three of the men were also handed up. The others managed to crawl on deck unaided. There were seven men and two women. They afterwards told us that fifteen in all had gained the ice.
“The wife of the captain of the Prairie Chief—he was amongst those who had perished—died before our arrival in Sydney. Mrs. Huddersfield, a stronger woman, quickly recovered, and was walking the deck in the sun, leaning on her husband’s arm, within a week of her rescue.”
THE “CHILIMAN” TRAGEDY.
In the year 1863 I sailed as ship’s doctor aboard the Chiliman, in the third voyage that fine Blackwall liner made to Melbourne. I had obtained the berth through the influence of a relative. My own practice was a snug little concern in a town some fifty miles from London; but a change was needed, a change for my health, such a change as nothing but the oceans of the world with their several climates and hundred winds could provide, and so I resolved to go a voyage round the world on the easy terms of feeling pulses and administering draughts, with nothing to pay and nothing to receive, a seat at the cabin table, and a berth fitted with shelves and charged with a very powerful smell of chemist’s shop down aft in what is called the steerage.
I joined the ship at the East India Docks, and went below to inspect my quarters. I found them gloomy and small; but any rat-hole was reckoned good enough in those days for a ship’s doctor, a person who, though of the first importance to the well-being of a ship, is, as a rule, treated by most owners and skippers with the same sort of consideration that in former times a parson to a nobleman received, until he had obliged my lord by marrying his cast lady.
First let me briefly sketch this interior of saloon and steerage, since it is the theatre on which was enacted the extraordinary tragedy I am about to relate. The Chiliman had a long poop; under this was the saloon, in those days termed the cuddy; cabins very richly bulkheaded went away down aft on either hand. Amidships was the table, overhead the skylights, and the deck was pierced by the shaft of the mizzen-mast, superbly decorated with a pianoforte secured to the deck just abaft it. There were no ladies’ saloons, smoking-rooms, bath-rooms, as in this age, though the ship was one of the handsomest of her class. If you sought retirement you went to your cabin; if you desired a pipe you stepped on deck; if you asked for a bath you were directed to the head pump.
The Chiliman’s cuddy was entered from the quarter-deck by doors close beside the two flights of steps which conducted to the poop. A large square of hatch yawned near the entrance inside, and you descended a staircase to the steerage where my berth was. The arrangement of this steerage resembled that of the cuddy, but the bulkheads and general furniture were in the last degree plain. I believe they charged about twenty-five pounds for a berth down here, and sixty or seventy guineas for a cabin up above.