In ship and prison

by William P. Chipman

“But to dig a tunnel we must get under the floor,” I objected. “How are we to do that?”

Our berths were arranged in a double tier on the north side of the room, the Captain occupying one of the lower ones and I the other. In answer to my question he led us over there, and, removing the blanket from his own berth, showed us how one of the bottom boards had cracked in two under his weight.

“It broke just before I got up this morning,” he explained, “and when I arose I took a look at it to see how serious the damage was. Then I discovered this,—” as he spoke he bent the two ends of the board downwards until they had parted several inches at the center, and we all saw what he meant. The floor of the room did not extend under the tier of berths, and we were looking down upon the bare ground.

Of course, the broken board did not give us an aperture wide enough even for the smallest of us to crawl through, but with the knife that had served to make the small opening between the logs we at length succeeded in cutting out the entire bottom of the captain’s berth, and then any of us could crawl beneath the building at his will.

Rude paddles were made from the pieces of boards we had removed, and that night the tunnel was begun. I will not attempt to describe the feverish anxiety with which we slowly dug our way down the passage that we believed would finally give us the one thing we desired above all others—our liberty.

We worked only through the night hours, carefully covering all traces of our work during the day. First we sank a pit about four feet deep, and large enough for us to turn around in. The dirt from this we hoisted in a blanket and emptied it in the open space under the floor of the building.

Then the real tunnel began. We made it big enough for the largest man among us to crawl in and out easily. The dirt from this was pushed back to the pit, from which it was removed to the open space under the floor.

The work went slowly. We gained only about twelve inches each night, and therefore over two weeks elapsed before we had gone the fifteen feet which we had estimated would carry us beyond the outer wall of the fort. All was now ready for our last task, the making of the opening from the tunnel into the open air. We reserved this for the last night—the night we hoped to escape, and waited therefore for one that would be favorable in every respect for the enterprise. It came on the last night of July, at the end of the seventeenth day since we had begun the digging, a rainy, drizzly evening when a dark pall hung over the fort and all its surroundings.

Captain Tucker had asked that his own hands might do the last work, and about nine o’clock he entered the tunnel for that purpose. Midshipman Lawrence attended him to draw back the blanket as he filled it with dirt. The rest of us gathered about the inner opening, waiting for the word that should send us down the passage one by one—down the passage to the outer world from which we had been shut off for weeks.

Three times Master Lawrence drew back the filled blanket for us to empty. The third time he said: