Chapter VI: Part 6

War-time also communicated a degree of discomfort to voyagers beyond all capacity of realization in this age. It was common enough for an Indiaman to be engaged by an enemy’s ship or a privateer which, if she did not carry and seize the vessel, repeatedly succeeded in killing and maiming the passengers amongst others. “Two gentlemen,” you may read in an Annual Register of the beginning of this century, “passengers from Holland, landed at Margate. They affirm they were in the evening boarded in sight of the North Foreland by an English privateer cutter, whose crew, in disguise, confined the captain and crew of the vessel in the cabin, and then plundered it of goods to the value of £2000, demanded the captain’s money, and took what the passengers had.”[49] This sort of thing furnishes engaging reading to boys when told in story-books; but how about the reality? To be tossed for days and days in sight of land; to be horribly sea-sick and barbarously used by captains and mates: to be battened down in foul weather in loathsome interiors, there to expire after a little of suffocation; to be coarsely fed and often starved; to be boarded and massacred and mutilated; to be plundered of the very coat on one’s back—such were the pleasures of the short-voyage passengers in the good old times, of the people who went to France, or sailed to the kingdom of Ireland, or to the Scotch ports, or those of Flanders.

Footnote 49:

A striking example of this occurs in the narrative of the capture of
the _Kent_, East Indiaman, in 1801, by a French privateer off the Sand
Heads. A number of the passengers who were fighting on the
quarter-deck and poop were killed by the hand grenades of the corsair.
The Frenchmen boarded and a desperate fight ensued; but the enemy was
greatly superior in number and arms. “A dreadful carnage followed,
they showing no quarter to any one who came in their way, whether with
or without arms; and such was their savage cruelty that they even
stabbed some of the sick in bed.”

It is not pleasant, to be sure, to be delayed four and twenty hours by the stranding of a steamer of 5000 tons. But all the same, I think we have a good deal to be thankful for.

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_COSTLY SHIPWRECKS._

In 1808, a shrewd and evidently a “highly-calculating” Yankee took the trouble to express the loss suffered by the United States in consequence of the then embargo, in a form very nicely designed to go straight home to the businesses and bosoms of his compatriots. The sum amounted to forty-eight millions of dollars, which, said the ingenious arithmetician, at seventeen dollars to the pound weight, would weigh two millions eight hundred and twenty-three pounds avoirdupois; and it would require to carry it one thousand two hundred and sixty waggons, allowing each waggon to carry one ton; and the distance the waggons would occupy, allowing each waggon seventy-two feet, would be seventeen miles. Forty-eight millions of dollars, placed edge to edge in a straight line, would extend over a space of one thousand one hundred and thirty-four miles. “The above sum,” added the computator, “would be sufficient to furnish one hundred and twenty-one sail of the line, completely equipped for a twelve months’ cruise.” So much for the length, weight, and worth of an embargo in 1808.

Now, what sort of result, I wonder, would come of a calculation of the weight, and the length, and the waggon-filling capacity of all the money—in hard cash, in bars, and ingots—which will have been carried into and out of this kingdom by ships flying the mercantile ensign between January 1 and December 31 of this present year? I sometimes fancy that it needs a shipwreck and a great foundering of specie to make the “average” public realize the prodigious treasure which is at all hours of the day and night, year after year, and year after year growing vaster in bulk and in value, afloat under the colours flown by the ships of the British merchant service. Let any one, during any six consecutive days, take note of the published records of the bullion movements, and he would be astounded by the results. “The _Bokhara_ has arrived at Plymouth, from China, with £42,450 in gold.” “The _Khedive_ has taken £81,598 in specie for the East, and the _Peshawur_ £65,600.” “The _Pekin_ has brought £50,012 in specie.” “The _Sutlej_, £16,110 from Bombay.” “The _Galicia_, from Valparaiso, £80,000 in silver.” “The _Iberia_, from Australia, £58,000 in gold.” “The _Elbe_, from the River Plate, £93,379 in specie.” “The _Kaisar-i-Hind_, £46,000 in bar silver, and £15,000 in bar gold.” “The _Eider_, from New York, with £5920 in specie.” “The _Trave_, from New York, £7941.” “The _Carthage_, with 50,000 sovereigns from Melbourne.” “The _Ruapehu_, from Wellington (N.Z.), with £10,000.” And so on, and so on, day after day, month after month. Think of a year of figures to which the contribution of a single day may mean as much as half a million! But supplement this huge floating pile of gold and silver with the value of the cargoes, with the produce of the east and west and south, the tea, the silks, the cotton, the tobacco—the hundreds and thousands of packages for which the despairing cataloguist can find no better name than “sundries.” Where be the old galleons, the old plate-ships, the monstrous castellated egg-shells, with their millions of pieces of eight,[50] alongside the Aladdin-like metal holds, stored with the mintage of the four corners of the earth, which, in these days, the propeller is steadily threshing through the billows of all the world’s seas?

Footnote 50:

A strange use was made of this coin by Sir John Kempthorne. He was
attacked by a large Spanish ship of war, and fought till all his
ammunition was spent: “Then,” says Campbell in his “Lives,”
“remembering that he had several large bags of pieces of eight on
board, he thought they might better serve to annoy than enrich the
enemy, and, therefore, ordered his men to load their guns with silver,
which did such execution on the Spanish rigging, that, if his own ship
had not been disabled by a lucky shot, he had in all probability got
clear.”

Yet my veneration for the past would make me very earnestly distinguish. It is the number in our time that makes the wonder; the thought of several hundreds of great ocean steamers—English, French, Italian, Dutch—all afloat at once, heading along the thirty-two points, every one of them carrying a fortune, small or great—£10,000 or £100,000—in money, among the other commodities which form her freight; it is the fancy of this aggregate wealth as compared with the cargoes of the treasure ships of other times which gives to the sea-borne specie of this age its prodigious numerical significance. But, ship for ship, our grandsires beat us. You never hear in our time of a single steamer carrying the load of gold, silver, plate, and treasure that was heaped into the hold of the butter-box of the last and earlier centuries. Let me cite an instance or two.

On February 28, 1769, there arrived at Lisbon a ship-of-war, named the _Mother of God_, from Rio Janeiro, having made the voyage in one hundred and twenty days. She had on board nine millions of crusades in gold, two millions and a half of crusades in diamonds, and about a hundred thousand “crowns tournois” in piastres, making in the whole twenty-nine millions and fifty thousand livres tournois. So much for a single ship. In 1774 two Spanish ships from Vera Cruz and the Havannah arrived with twenty-two millions of crowns, exclusive of merchandize valued roundly at twenty-seven millions of crowns. Such examples could be multiplied. Of the cargo of an English Indiaman in 1771, one item alone—a diamond in the rough—was valued at £100,000, “coming to be manufactured here on account of one of the Asiatic Nabobs,” and on the private freight of this vessel I read that policies of insurance were opened at Lloyd’s Coffee House at a high premium, so costly were her contents and so doubtful her safe arrival.[51]

Footnote 51:

In estimating the expressed worth of the early cargoes the relative
value of money must be borne in mind.

In those early days of extraordinary long voyages, clumsy ships, and of a navigation rendered not a little insecure by the blunders or the conjectures of the chart-makers, we should expect to meet with a great number of costly disasters, the more since it was the custom to commit to a single hold the treasure that would in this day be distributed among eight or ten great and powerful steamers. Yet this sort of shipwreck is not nearly so frequently occurring in marine annals as one would suppose. When it happens it takes an historical significance much more profound than that which attaches to loss of life. The memory of the foundering of £200,000 of silver and gold will survive the drowning of a thousand souls in a _coup_. The muse of history has much in her of the philosophy of the cynic who declared that a man will forget his wife, his children, yea, and his country; but he will never forget the person who borrowed £5 from him and forgot to repay it. There was _La Lutine_, for instance. When some time ago there was talk of a proposal to recover the money that went down in her, everybody, somehow or other, seemed to remember the loss of such a ship, though it happened above eighty years ago. But suppose it had been the _Buckinghamshire_ or the _Windsor Castle_?

Yet, as a costly shipwreck, _La Lutine_ deserves a reference. She was a thirty-two gun vessel, commanded by Captain Skynner, and she went ashore on the bank of the Fly Island Passage on the night of October 9, 1799. At first she was reputed to have had £600,000 sterling in specie on board. This was afterwards contradicted by a statement that “the return from the Bullion Office makes the whole amount about £140,000 sterling.” “If,” I find in a contemporary account, “the wreck of the unfortunate _Lutine_ should be discovered, there may be reason to hope for the recovery of the bullion on board of her. In the reign of James II. some English adventurers fitted out a vessel to search for and weigh up the cargo of a rich Spanish ship which had been lost on the coast of South America. They succeeded, and brought home £300,000, which had been forty-four years at the bottom of the sea. Captain Phipps, who commanded, had £20,000 for his share, and the Duke of Albemarle £90,000. A medal was struck in honour of this event in 1687.”[52]

Footnote 52:

The story is told at length in Beckmann’s “History of Inventions and
Discoveries.” The author speaks of William Phipps as the son of a
blacksmith, born in America. He was bred as a shipwright at Boston,
and formed a project for searching and unloading a rich Spanish ship
sunk on the coast of Hispaniola. Charles II. gave him a ship; he
sailed in 1683, but to no purpose. The Duke of Albemarle afterwards
backed him, and he started again in 1687, with the result as told
above. Much about this time several companies were formed and obtained
exclusive privileges for fishing up goods on certain coasts by means
of divers. At the head of one of these was the Earl of Argyle. The
divers of this company worked off the Isle of Mull, and descending to
a depth of sixty feet, remained there sometimes a whole hour, and then
brought up gold chains, money, etc. But the returns were trifling.

There was a very costly wreck in 1767. She was a Dutch East Indiaman, and foundered in a storm within three leagues of the Texel, taking down all hands but six, and £500,000. But it was not necessary that a vessel should have so much as an ounce of precious metal in her to be a rich ship. One of the costliest cargoes ever carried was found in 1764 in the galleon _Santissima Trinidad_; for she had on board the vast collection of foreign curiosities formed by Governor Pigot and shipped at Madras, consisting of wild beasts, serpents, and so forth. There was a great loss in 1773. The Dons again! You would say that the price of four such Armadas as that of 1588 went down in the last century alone in the shape of gold, silver, and plate. She was the annual register ship, as the term then was, and had in her five hundred thousand piastres and ten thousand ounces of gold on account of the king, and twice that sum on the merchants’ account, making her a very rich ship. She foundered during the passage, and no man escaped to tell how and when. In the same year the Dutch lost the _Antonietta_, an Indiaman, and with her sank £700,000 sterling, besides jewels of great value.

In 1871 a Scotchman, named Johnston, patented a treasure safe for ships. His proposal was that the safe should be suspended at the ship’s davits, ready at an instant’s notice to be lowered into the sea. He contrived that the safe should detach itself in the event of a sudden calamity, and float off to be picked up by some passing ship, or washed ashore. The idea was ingenious; but it is not every captain who would relish the thought of an unsinkable chest full of gold and jewels hanging at his davits ready to the hand of the first daring Jack who should depend upon a black night and the navigable qualities of the chest to come safely off with a few hundreds of thousands of pounds. Yet what pickings the deep would have offered—would still offer—if the money and jewels carried by ships were stowed in contrivances which floated after the vessel was gone! The mind is oppressed by the splendid possibilities the fancy suggests. Here we have something beyond the dreams of avarice. Where might not such chests be sought with large promise of dazzling discovery? The ocean is a miser. Like some old woman found dead of starvation, with guineas and bank-notes stitched away in her rags, is the sea in her beggarly art of concealing treasure among the squalid weediness of her shores. “Some time ago,” says an old report, “on the arrival of the _Two Sisters_, Captain O’Neale, of Bristol, at Dominica, a chest containing upwards of £40,000 in Portugal gold fell overboard as they were putting it into a boat, and was lost in ten fathoms of water.” They had nothing but Dr. Halley’s diving-bell in those times, and the money lies at this hour where it sank, only deeper perhaps, and very much out of sight. How such a disaster would be dealt with now may be known by reference to the comparatively recent recovery of some hundred thousand pounds off the Grand Canary from the hold of a steamer sunk, if my memory is correct, in about thirty fathoms of water.

There was a curious kind of smuggling practised aboard the old ships, and there is reason to believe that in many instances the actual value of the treasure in foundered vessels was never declared. An example is given of a Spanish register ship falling into the hands of the British. Certain discoveries determined the captors not to sell her, but to break her up themselves, believing that by so doing they might find valuables artfully concealed. The duty on gold was high, and to evade it many of the bars of that metal had been thinly coated with pewter and denominated “fine pewter” in the invoice, by order of the Spanish merchants. The particulars of the freight are worth giving, as illustrative of the cargoes of that age (1793) and of the great value entrusted to a single ship. There were six hundred and ninety-four cases of silver, each containing three thousand dollars; thirty-three cases of gold, besides plate and jewels of the value of £500,000; seventy-two hundred of redwood; sixteen cases of silver in bars; two thousand two hundred and sixty-two quintals of bark of different weights; two thousand two hundred and forty quintals of cocoa; four thousand eight hundred and eighty-seven cases of pepper; a great number of cases of lead, wool, sugar, medical roots, gum of cocoa, together with hides, skins, barrels of honey, and eleven cases of the various productions of Peru. “This cargo,” says the account, “has been two years in collecting from different parts of the coast, and is without exception the richest that ever was trusted on board of any single ship. It is impossible to form a just estimate of its value, but it is certainly not overrated when it is stated as twelve or thirteen hundred thousand pounds. Think of the costly wreck such a vessel as this would have made! and certainly, so far as her freighters were concerned, she was as good as foundered when she was captured.”

The following illustration of the old methods of concealing treasure I find in a little sea-book published anonymously in 1834: “I once went, with others, on board a prize we had taken to make the usual search. After rummaging the sail-room, I got into the store-room, where I saw a case filled with bran, and thrusting my hand among it, for I thought it might prove a hiding-place, I found something hard wrapped up in a piece of blue cloth. Not having leisure to examine it at the moment, I slipped it into the pocket of my jacket, and was coming away, when I trod upon something, and looking down at the place, saw a potatoe that I had crushed with an English guinea peeping from its hiding place. I picked up all I could and jumped into the boat.... The murphies yielded me about thirty guineas; and when I undid the parcel there came from its swaddling clothes a most beautiful gold watch set round with diamonds.”

Great in its way was that treasure of seven million five hundred thousand dollars and the value of a million and a half in cochineal and other effects which five men-of-war, under the command of Rear-Admiral Don Adrian Caudron Cantin, brought to Cadiz in 1775, and the one thousand five hundred octaves of gold, two hundred thousand crusades of silver, and the eighty serons of cochineal which, in the same year, were brought by a ship to Lisbon from the Brazils. In more modern times the costliness of shipwreck is to be found in the destruction of the fabric and her cargo rather than in the loss of the treasure on board. Whatever may have been the worth of a galleon, as a ship, there need be no scruple in concluding that when brand-new her value would be but that of a toy in comparison with such ocean mail boats as now convey specie and “valuables.” The sinking of an Atlantic, Indian, or Australian liner—even with a clean hold—would represent an immense treasure if told in dollars, ducats, or piastres; and when you add the cargo of such a craft along with the passengers’ luggage, which must often include a quantity of jewellery expressing many thousands of pounds alone, some astonishing figures would be the result. As a matter of fact, our later shipwrecks do not point to the same heavy losses in specie and articles manufactured out of the precious metals as were sustained in former times. The destruction or capture of a single ship in the last and in preceding centuries would frequently signify the sinking of a million to a million and a half of pounds sterling in chests of pieces of eight, in ingots and bars, and in religious decorations, and this without reference to the cargo, the value of which may be inferred when we hear of tea selling at two guineas a pound.[53]

Footnote 53:

“Tea was first imported from Holland by the Earls of Arlington and
Ossory in 1666; from their ladies the women of quality learned its
use. Its price was then £3 a pound, and continued the same to 1707. In
1715 we began to use green tea, and the practice of drinking it
descended to the lower class of the people.” “Johnson’s Works,” vol.
ii. p. 335. At the beginning of this century tea was 25_s._ a pound.

The _Royal Charter_ is the most notable modern instance of the wreck of a “treasure” ship that I can just now call to mind. She left Australia with £350,000 in her. Of this sum, says Charles Dickens in his chapter on this dreadful shipwreck in the “Uncommercial Traveller,” £300,000 worth were recovered. At the time of the novelist’s visit to the spot where she had driven ashore, “the great bulk of the remainder,” writes he, “was surely and steadily coming up. Some loss of sovereigns there would be, of course; indeed, at first sovereigns had drifted in with the sand, and been scattered far and wide over the beach like sea shells, but most other golden treasure would be found. So tremendous had the force of the sea been when it broke the ship that it had beaten one great ingot of gold deep into a strong and heavy piece of her solid iron work, in which also several loose sovereigns, that the ingot had swept in before it, had been found as firmly embedded as though the iron had been liquid when they had been forced there.” This is a curiosity of disaster, but mightily suggestive of the sea’s miserly trick of concealing her plunder. Meanwhile, how much gold and silver, minted and otherwise, is annually afloat? How many millions are yearly borne over the deep to and from India, America, Australia, China, and South Africa, by English steamers alone? There should be no difficulty in making the calculation, which, when arrived at, must surely yield a fine idea of the treasure over which the red flag flies, and an excellent notion of the trust that is reposed in the British shipmaster, and of the high and sterling qualities which go to the fulfilment of it.

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_CURIOSITIES OF DISASTERS AT SEA._

An old sailor once said to me, “If I were to write down one quarter of what I’ve seen, heard, and gone through, the reader would throw away the book, calling me all the evil names he could put his tongue to, afore he had read half of what I’d writ.” I remember an ingenious reviewer of a nautical romance affirming that it was impossible the author could be correct in representing such a sea as he described as running off Agulhas in a gale from the north-west, because, said the critic, “we have repeatedly crossed the Channel between Folkestone and Boulogne, in all sorts of weather, without ever having witnessed such waves as we are here told about.” Yes, sailors see and do strange things; they spend their lives on a wild and wonderful element, and are a community who generate gnats at which the landsman is prone to strain. We hear of amazing escapes on shore, but, surely, they cannot be so astonishing as the perils which men encounter at sea, or we should hearken with less incredulous souls when Jack coils his legs up under him and relates his experiences.

Some time ago I read what the newspapers called “a terrible story of shipwreck.” An American schooner came across six men washing about on the top of a deck-house. They were the survivors of a crew of Spaniards whose barque had foundered six days before. When the captain of her found that his vessel was bound to sink he set his men to work to make a raft. They were thus employed when the barque all on a sudden turned over and sank. Seven of the poor fellows were sucked down with the hull; the rest, finding the deck-house afloat, crawled on to it. For five days and nights they were beaten here and there by the seas, without drink and without food. Ashore the dangers a man confronts and escapes may be terrible; but the ground he treads is what he is born to: peril is localized or limited. He is imprisoned in a mine; he is menaced by suffocation or starvation. He loses his way on a mountain; he is threatened by death from exhaustion or by stumbling over the edge of a height. He is in the heart of a panic-stricken crowd; he stands to have his ribs crushed in and his lungs choked. He is in a house on fire; he must be burnt if he cannot escape. To be sure, danger on shore is as little agreeable as it would be in the air or under the waters; but a man may commonly say of peril on land what he cannot say of peril at sea, that he knows the form of it and what shape his destruction will take if he cannot elude it.

But at sea you have a combination of forces working against a creature who when on the ocean is as much out of his element as the shark that ogles him would be if lifted high and dry on to a ship’s deck. Take those six Spaniards washing about on top of a deck-house. What was to be their fate? Were they to be drowned, or frozen, or starved, or be picked up raving mad with thirst and other sufferings? Think of the cruelty of the sea—fiendish in spirit as any torturer of the good old days of the Inquisition—tossing that deck-house with a horrible human-like delight in the sport that kept those white-lipped soaking rags of men holding on for their lives! Consider a little the malignant confederacy of billows wasting their giant weight, one after another, ceaselessly, restlessly, one after another, upon those miserable men made mere mocking tumblers of by the play of the waters, and looking up to God out of the supreme agony of their ocean struggles! If the surge could not tear them from their desperate hold it left them drenched to the marrow, and fit for the freezing part that it was the business of the wind to play. Or, if the wind left their hearts warm enough for life it was only that hunger should not be balked in the lodgment of its own particular anguish.

For my part I can well understand why landsmen are incredulous when sailors who have suffered begin to talk. There is internal evidence to suggest that when the Wedding Guest left the Ancient Mariner, unpleasantly fascinated as he had been by his eye, he went to the people who had been making merry, and informed them that he had been detained by a yarn that was fit only for the marines. Why, even in the year 1800, Sir Samuel Standidge was apologizing for writing to say that he had met ice in the month of May in the Atlantic forty-five degrees north; his excuse being that it was true. The Wedding Guest flourished in an earlier reign when not very much was known about bergs, and one thinks of him as sneering when he told his friends that the Ancient Mariner said the roar of the ice breaking up was like “noises in a swound.”

In the “Pasha of Many Tales,” Captain Marryat exaggerates the proverbial “twister” of the marine. But how many experiences have sailors suffered incomparably more surprising than the most ingenious of the fictions in Marryat’s book; and more miraculous in the machinery of fortuitous escape than could ever occur to the most daring among the old Arabian inventors? There are instances of disasters so complicated by misfortune as to become sheer eccentricities of peril. I remember being much struck with a paragraph I came across in a newspaper of the last century: “Captain Lamire, commander of the _Heureux_, on April 26, being in the lat. of one deg. 2 min., and 21 deg. 28 min. long. W., reckoning from Teneriff, several of his crew, and a great number of negros on board, were seized with a disorder of their eyes, many of whom were blind for ten or twelve days; nine lost their sight entirely, and seven or eight the sight of one eye. Accidents of this kind, it is said, are not unprecedented in latitudes so near the line, but the great number affected at the same time exceeds anything that was ever heard of before.” Had that old ship carried such slender companies as vessels now go manned with, who shall say, in the face of the numbers who were blinded, that all hands would not have lost their sight? What object could the imagination fasten upon more dreadful and tragical than a ship in charge of a blind crew? What possibilities of harrowing description would such a subject offer to the romancer!

There is preserved a curious account of the Hon. John O’Brien, a brother or near relative to the Earl of Inchiquin. He was so incessantly in jeopardy from one cause or another that his career expresses in perfection the eccentricity of disaster. A few examples will hint at his story. He was a lieutenant in the Navy in 1747, and his first mishap befel him off the coast of India, where his ship was wrecked, all hands perishing with the exception of O’Brien and four sailors. He embarked in a vessel to return to Europe, but was cast away near the Cape of Good Hope, and was the only one of a great number who contrived to escape with his life. The Dutch Governor, discovering him to be a “person of honour,” supplied him with every necessary for continuing the voyage, and gave him a cabin in one of the homeward bound East Indiamen. The Governor of another settlement, who was going home in the same ship, finding himself rather straitened for room on account of the number of his own family, begged for the exclusive use of the vessel for his suite and baggage. The Governor of the Cape complied, and procured accommodation for O’Brien in another vessel that was to sail on the same day. Shortly afterwards the ships put to sea, and it is recorded as an absolute and well assured fact that, within twenty-four hours of their leaving the Cape, O’Brien saw the ship he had quitted founder in a gale of wind, taking down with her every creature on board! A few years later this fortune-hunted gentleman was stationed on board the _Dartmouth_ of fifty guns. She fell in with the _Glorioso_, a Spanish man-of-war, and engaged her for some hours. O’Brien was at his station between decks, when the gunner ran up to him, and, with wildness and despair in his look, cried out, “Oh, sir! the powder-room!” Lieutenant O’Brien heard no more, for the ship instantly blew up! Such a catastrophe as this, you would conjecture, must effectually put an end to O’Brien. In fact, if I were to write his life I should skip this little disaster for fear that it should destroy the reader’s faith in the other parts of the story. It is true, nevertheless, that O’Brien, instead of perishing, was found floating about on the carriage of a gun. It was supposed that he had been blown through a porthole with one of the guns. He was picked up by a privateer named the _Duke_, and as a proof that the natural sprightliness and gaiety of his character was superior to so slight an accident as that of being blown up in a man-of-war, he is recorded to have said to the captain of the _Duke_, speaking with great gravity, “You will excuse me, sir, for appearing before you in such a dress; but the reason is I left my ship so hurriedly that I had no time to put on better clothes.” But enough of the Hon. John O’Brien.

Though it might not be wise in a romancer to represent his hero as being blown up in a ship without injury, there are, for all that, several instances in the old accounts—and one or two, I think, in more recent annals—of mariners and others who have gone up like rockets and come down all alive, perfectly sound, if not in high spirits. Monsieur de Montauban, who underwent this experience off the coast of Guinea, wrote a very thrilling account of it. In his case there were two ships, both of which exploded simultaneously. “The reader,” says he, “must figure to himself our horror at two ships blowing up above two hundred fathoms into the air, where there was formed, as it were, a mountain of fire, water, and wreck; the awfulness of the explosion below, and the cannons going off in the air; the rending of masts and planks, the tearing of the sails and cordage, added to the cries of the men.” He was on the forecastle giving orders when the ship took fire, and attributes his preservation to his being blown so high as to go clear of the volcanic wreckage. In truth, he seems to have topped the whole blazing mass, and then fallen into clear water, under whose surface he remained so long that he was nearly spent before he rose.

The Moskito Indian and Alexander Selkirk are representative names for preservation from marooning—a situation idealized by Defoe. The “eight-and-twenty years all alone in an uninhabited island on the coast of America, near the mouth of the great river of Oroonoque,” is very well for poor old Robinson Crusoe, whose life and strange, surprising adventures are, perhaps, chiefly imaginary in this span of time allotted to them by the great master of English fiction. The longest period of “all-aloneness” I have encountered in my reading may be found in the memoirs of Captain Edward Thompson, who was “born at Hull, in Yorkshire, of a respectable family.” But on the whole we must count him a more real person than that other gentleman of York, mariner. Thompson was the author of “A Sailor’s Letters,” and in a communication in which he proposes to write his life, he says, “I shall begin like Daniel Defoe, with “I, E. T., was born of respectable parents in Kingston-upon-Hull, from whence I sailed in the _Love and Unity_, (whom God preserve), anno 1750, on a voyage to Greenland.” Whether his discovery was inspired by his admiration of Defoe, or whether he states a fact in what he records, I cannot say. He was an officer in her Majesty’s ship _Stirling Castle_, and being at Tobago, he wandered into the woods in search of wild oranges. Whilst roaming here and there he discovered a hut, the inhabitant of which, a venerable looking man, addressed him in French, and, to his astonishment, declared that he had resided _twenty-one years_ in that solitary situation, having scarcely any communication with a human being! He told Thompson that the Indians occasionally called at his hermitage whilst hunting, gave him part of their game, and shaved his beard off with a knife, but he never paid enough attention to their language to converse in it. He had been a priest at Martinique, but having in some way given offence, he was seized in the night and transported to Tobago. He declined all offers to convey him to Europe, declaring that he was reconciled to his all-alone life and happier than he could be in any other. In this, as in other respects, this singular person cannot be said to have resembled Crusoe.”

I find the seeds of a romance of the true old pattern combined with what may justly be termed a curiosity of disaster in this century-old report: “A vessel coming lately from Newcastle to London at sea, within five miles of the Port of Shields, took up a wooden cradle with a child in it. The child was alive and well.” The old is for ever echoing into the new. Only the other day I read of a boy a few years old going adrift in a boat. He was hunted after in all directions, but to no purpose. The parents were said to be inconsolable. The issue of this thing I know not; but who does not pray that the little fellow was found and restored? When you think of that old collier jogging along, picking up the cradle with the bairn in it, the past re-shapes itself; you see the quaint wooden cradle, the wondering eyes of the child staring into the amazed faces of the rough Jacks, whose touched hearts give a new impetus to the working of the jaws upon their quids. “The cradle,” says the account, “is supposed to have been carried to sea by an inundation in one of the places adjacent.” There should have been found a good subject for a poet, I think, even in those bewigged days of heroic measures and Johnsonian periods, in the meeting of the mother and the babe delivered back to her love by that old ocean whose tenderness is sometimes as marvellous as its cruelty is terrible and inexpressible.

Another curiosity of disaster, hardly credible, though it has been often enough related, may be found in the story of the brig _Nerina_.

She sailed from Dunkirk on Saturday, October 31, 1840, in charge of Pierre Everaert, with a cargo of oil and canvas for Marseilles, having on board a crew of seven persons, including the captain and his nephew, a boy fourteen years of age. At seven o’clock in the evening of Monday, November 16, she was lying to in a gale of wind, when she was struck by a heavy sea and turned bottom up. There was one man on deck at the time; he was instantly drowned. There were three seamen in the forecastle, two of whom, by seizing hold of the windlass bitts, succeeded in getting up close to the kelson, and so kept their heads above water. The third, letting go his hold, was drowned, and his body was never again seen. The other two, discovering that the bulkhead between the forecastle and the hold was started and that the cargo had fallen down on the deck, drew themselves towards the stern of the ship, with their faces close to the kelson. When the vessel capsized, the captain, mate, and boy were in the cabin. The mate wrenched open the trap hatch in the deck, cleared a vacant space there, and then scrambling up into it, he took the boy from the hands of the captain, whom he assisted to follow them. In about an hour they were joined by the two men from forward, who managed to scrape along the kelson to where they were. They are now described as five individuals, closely cooped together, so that as they sat they were obliged to bend their bodies for want of height above them, whilst the water reached as high as their waists. The only relief they could obtain was by one of them at a time stretching at full length on the barrels in the hold, taking care, however, to keep close to the kelson, where the air was. The 17th and 18th passed. They were without food and without water, and, as might be supposed from their situation, as certainly doomed as if they already lay dead at the bottom of the sea. They could distinguish between day and night by the light in the sea that was reflected up from the cabin skylight and thence into the space where they lay through the hatch in the cabin floor. In the middle of Wednesday night, the 18th, the vessel struck. At the third blow the stern dropped to such an extent that the men were forced forward towards the bows. Whilst making their way one of them fell down through the cabin floor and skylight, and was drowned. They noticed presently that the water was ebbing; on which the mate dropped into the cabin to seek for a hatchet that they might cut their way out, but, the water suddenly rising, he had to fly again to his former shelter. At last the day dawned, and then, perceiving a point of rock sticking into the vessel, they knew that she was hard and fast ashore. The quarter of the ship being stove, the captain looked through the rent there and cried out in French, “Thank God, my children, we are saved! I see a man on the beach.” Shortly afterwards the man approached and put in his hand, which the captain seized, to the terror of the fellow, who nearly died of fright. Several persons arrived, the side of the vessel was opened, and the four men were liberated, after having been entombed for three days and three nights.

Any reference to such a subject as the curiosities of marine disaster must include this amazing narrative, thrice told as it may be. As an escape there is nothing to be compared to it in the maritime annals, though to be sure there is no lack of examples of miraculous salvation from capsizals. The spot where the _Nerina_ struck is Porthellick, in St. Mary’s, Scilly. Two incidents in connection with this wreck increase the wonder of it. First, the want of fresh air threatening the men with death by suffocation, the mate worked with the desperation of a dying man almost incessantly for two days and one night to cut a hole with his knife through the hull. The knife broke; but for this the hole would have been made, with the result that the vessel must have instantly foundered owing to the liberation of the air that alone kept her buoyant. Second, it was afterwards shown that during the afternoon of Wednesday, the 18th, the wreck had been fallen in with, at about five miles from the island, by two pilot boats which towed her for an hour, but the ropes parting, the night approaching, and the weather looking dirty, they abandoned her, little conceiving that there were human beings alive in her hold. Had the vessel not been towed, the set of the current would have carried the wreck clear of the islands into the Atlantic!

The relater of this remarkable story states in a note that the account was furnished to him by Mr. Richard Pearce, Consular Agent for France. “As this gentleman,” he adds, “took great care in his examination of the case, there cannot be a doubt of its correctness throughout.”

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_INFERNAL MACHINES._

The invention of a small fabric that sinks under water and rises to the surface at the will of her occupants should indicate a large approach towards the perfecting of the whole theory and practice of submarine warfare. Such a deadly, dangerous engine of destruction has been tried and not found wanting. Unhappily, I think; for unless the murderous inventions of our times are ultimately to render warfare impossible, by occasioning a common dread because of the swiftness and magnitude of the butchery—a probability not to be contemplated—one cannot but wish that the patentee would suffer some of the old elements of manhood to dignify and animate the conflicts of fleets and armies, by a succession of failures in the direction of a hidden and annihilating machinery. “So violent it is,” writes honest old Camden, of the cannon, “in breaking, tearing, bruising, renting, razing, and ruinating walles, towers, castles, ramparts, and all that it encountereth; that it might seem to have been invented by practice of the Devill to the destruction of mankinde as the onely enemy of true valour and manfull couragiousness, by murthering afar off.” Murthering afar off! very different, indeed, as a means of exemplifying courage from the hand-to-hand conflict of the sword and the spear. So Camden implies, speaking of the cannon of his time, a weapon that even the long-tailed guardians of the Taku forts twenty-five years ago would have disdained for their own jingalls. But what would that mostly learned Clarenceux, King of Arms, have found to say on the subject of “true valour and manfull couragiousness” had his theme, instead of the primitive engine whereof the effects as he himself describes were “destruction, violence, fury, and roaring crack,” been an electric boat in which men could go about their duties whilst under water, in which they could softly and hiddenly sneak under the keel of an ironclad of twelve thousand tons, containing a company of perhaps a thousand souls, and attach to her a machine that—after they had withdrawn, still under water, to a safe distance—would blow her and her people into fragments? This craft is no mere fancy; she is an accomplished fact, as the French say. It is not long since that the inventors tested her in the West India Docks. She is a cigar-shaped boat, sixty feet long, and displaces about fifty tons. They sank and raised her readily, kept her under water for some time, and then propelled her. I read that a supply of air—of fresh air—large enough to last for three days, may be stored in this terrible boat, so that the Jonahs who man her will be perhaps better off in the matter of oxygen or ozone than are the occupants of the common above-sea forecastle, even when their hatch is open.

Of course the electric feature is the novelty in this latest invented diving boat. But as a fabric that can be made to float or sink, as those who are inside her may choose, this screw-craft is by no means the first of her kind. In 1801 Fulton experimented with what he called a _Bateau-Poisson_, or fish-boat at Rouen. The first account of this invention says that the boat sank and rose seven or eight times. The longest period during which it remained under water was eight minutes. The machine was entered by means of an opening shaped like a tunnel. “When those who conducted the experiment wished to descend into the river, and disappear, they let down this opening and lost all communication with the external air. The inventors of this ingenious machine are Americans, the principal of whom is called Fulton. Three of them went into the boat, and remained during the experiment. The Prefect and a vast concourse of spectators were present.”[54] A fuller account, written by St. Aubin, was printed in 1802. The boat he inspected was in some respects similar to the one that had been exhibited at Rouen, Havre, and Brest. He speaks of it as a nautilus, or diving boat, invented by Mr. Fulton. It could carry eight men, and hold provisions enough for this number of persons to last twenty days. The inventor had contrived a reservoir for air large enough to enable the crew to live under water for eight hours. The boat was of sufficient strength to plunge one hundred feet deep, and to bear the pressure of water at that depth. She was furnished with two sails, and when above water presented the appearance of an ordinary boat. Fulton, in making his experiments at Havre, not only remained an hour under water with his companions, but held his boat parallel to the horizon at any given depth. He proved the compass-points as correctly under water as on the surface, and while under water “the boat made way at half a league an hour, by means contrived for that purpose.” At this point M. St. Aubin indulges in the following prophetical exclamation: “It is not twenty years since all Europe was astonished at the first ascension of men in balloons; perhaps in a few years they will not be less surprised to see a flotilla of diving boats, which, on a given signal, shall, to avoid the pursuit of an enemy, plunge under water, and rise again several leagues from the place where they descended. The invention of balloons has hitherto been of no advantage, because no means have been found to direct their course. But if such means could be discovered what would become of camps, cannon, fortresses, and the whole art of war?” He then proceeds to point out that Fulton’s craft has the advantage of sailing like a common boat, and also of diving when it is pursued. It was therefore fit for carrying secret orders to succour a blockaded port and to examine the force and position of an enemy in their own harbours. He further tells us that Fulton had already added to his boat a machine by means of which he blew up a large craft in the port of Brest. He concludes: “What will become of maritime wars, and where will sailors be found to man ships of war, when it is a physical certainty that they may every moment be blown into the air by means of a diving-boat against which no human foresight could guard them?” St. Aubin does not say how the boat was sunk and raised, and how it was propelled, when sunk, at the rate of a mile and a half in an hour. But that Fulton invented such a boat as the Frenchman describes is indisputable, and it is equally certain that, although its merit as an invention was remarkable, nothing came of it.

Footnote 54:

_Naval Chronicle_, 1805.

Fulton, however, was not the first. In 1774 a man named Day, who had for years been thinking over a method of sinking a vessel under water with a man in it, who should live for a certain time, and then, by his own agency, rise to the surface, fancied he had hit upon the right way at last. The story is worth telling, for it involves a singular tragedy. Day was so sanguine that he determined to test his invention at the Broads, near Yarmouth. He fitted a Norwich market boat, and sank himself thirty feet under water, where he remained for twenty-four hours. His success so elated him that he at once went to work to see how he could get money by it. He accordingly wrote the following letter to a Mr. Blake, a well-known sporting man: “Sir, I have found out an affair by which many thousands may be won. It is of a paradoxical nature, but can be performed with ease. Therefore, sir, if you chuse to be informed of it, and give me one hundred pounds of every thousand you shall win by it, I will very readily wait upon you and inform you of it. I am, myself, but a poor mechanic, and not able to make anything by it without your assistance.—Yours, etc., J. DAY.” Blake wrote to Day to call upon him. They met, and Day said that he could sink a ship one hundred yards deep in the sea with himself in it, and remain therein for the space of twenty-four hours without communication with anything above, and at the expiration of the time rise up again in the vessel. Blake asked for a model, which in the course of a month was sent to him. He was struck with the invention, and supplied Day with money enough to enable him to carry out his scheme. The vessel is described as having a false bottom, standing on feet “like a butcher’s block,” which contained the ballast, and by the person unscrewing some pins she was to rise to the surface, leaving the false bottom behind. Plymouth was selected as the scene of the experiment. On the appointed day the vessel was towed to the place agreed upon, the inventor provided himself with whatever he deemed necessary, entered the vessel, retired to the cabin, and shut up the valve. The craft settled slowly down in twenty-two feet of water. The hour was two o’clock in the afternoon of Tuesday, June 28, and she was to rise again at two o’clock on the following morning. Day had furnished himself with some buoys or messengers, which he had arranged to send to the surface to announce his situation below; but none appearing, his patron, Blake, suspected an accident, and applied to the captain of a frigate at anchor close by for assistance. But to no purpose; every effort was made in vain to weigh the vessel, and Day perished.

The comments on the account of which I have given the substance are curious when read side by side with the recent newspaper narratives of the experiment at the West India Docks. “That any man should be able, after having sunk a vessel to so great a depth, to make that vessel at pleasure so much more specifically lighter than water as thereby to enable it to force its way to the surface, through the depressure of so great a weight, is a matter not hastily to be credited.”

But even Day was not first. Cornelius Drebelle, by order of James I. (so says Robert Boyle), built a vessel to be rowed under water. She was furnished with a kind of chemical liquor that served to purify and renew the air. She carried twelve oarsmen besides passengers, and was tried in the river Thames, and Mr. Robert Boyle, the “Father of Modern Chemistry and the Brother of the Earl of Cork,” got his account of her from a person who was in her during her submarine navigation of the river.

And who was before Cornelius Drebelle? “Novelty is only in request,” says Shakespeare, “and it is dangerous to be aged in any kind of course.” But what is novelty?[55]

Footnote 55: