The Tragedy of Ida Noble

by William Clark Russell

"By the light of the cotton in her canvas."

"Ay, and there are more signs than that. She has put her helm over as though she would speak us."

By five o'clock she was about a mile to a mile and a quarter distant on our weather bow, at which hour she had backed her maintop-sail and lay stationary upon the sea, rolling lightly and very stately on the swell, the beautiful flag of her nation—the stars and stripes—floating inverted from her peak as a signal of distress. Both Captain Hoste and I had searched her with a telescope, but we could see no other signs of life aboard her than three figures—one of which stood at the wheel—on her short length of poop, and a single head as of a sailor viewing us over the bulwark-rail forward.

We shortened sail as we slowly drew down, and when within speaking distance Captain Hoste hailed her.

The answer was—"For God's sake send a boat!" Yet she had good boats of her own, and it puzzled me, then, that she should request us to send, seeing that there must be hands enough to enable her to back the yards on the main.

Captain Hoste cried out, "But what is wrong with you?"

One of the figures on the poop or raised deck tossed his hands in a gesture of agitation and distress, and in piteous, nasal Yankee accents repeated, "For God's sake send a boat!"

Captain Hoste gazed for a while, as though hesitating. He then said to me, "Mr. Portlack, there may be trouble aboard that ship, not to be guessed at by merely looking at her and singing out. Take a couple of hands in the jolly boat and ascertain what is wanted," and so saying he bawled a command to the sailors forward to lay the maintop-sail of the Ocean Ranger to the mast, while I called to others to lay aft and lower away the jolly boat that was suspended at irons called davits, a little distance past the mizzen-rigging.

By this time a darker shade had entered the gloom of the sky, due partly to the sinking of the hidden sun, and partly to the thickening of the atmosphere as for rain. The sea, that ran in folds of leaden hue, was merely wrinkled and crisped by the wind, and I had no difficulty in making head against the streaming foam-lined ripples and in laying the little boat alongside the American.

She was a tall, black ship with an almost straight stem and of a clipper keenness of bow. Her stemhead and quarters were rich with gilt devices; her towering skysail poles, the white trucks of which gleamed like silver, seemed to pierce the dusky surface of vapor above them. I sprang into the mizzen channel and stepped from the rail on to the poop.