Back Aa

My Danish Sweetheart Volume 1

<h2>CHAPTER III.</h2> <h3>IN THE LIFEBOAT.</h3> Now had come the moment when I should need the utmost exertion of nerve and coolness my nature was equal to. There was a large globular lamp alight in the little building—its lustre vaguely touched the boat, and helped me to see what was going on and who were present. Nevertheless I shouted: 'Are all hands aboard?' 'All hands!' came a hurricane response. 'All got your belts on?' I next cried. 'All!' was the answer—that is to say, all excepting myself, who, having worn a cork-jacket once, vowed never again to embark thus encumbered. 'Are your sails hooked on ready for hoisting?' I shouted. 'All ready, sir!' 'And your haul-off rope?' 'All ready, sir!' 'Now then, my lads—look out, all hands!' There was a moment's pause: 'Let her go!' I roared. A man stood close under the stern, ready to pass his knife through the lashing which held the chain to the boat. 'Stand by!' he shouted. 'All gone!' I heard the clank of the chain as it fell, an instant after the boat was in motion—slowly at first, but in a few breaths she had gathered the full way that her own weight and the incline gave her, and rushed down the slipway, but almost noiselessly, so thickly greased was the timber structure, with some hands hoisting the foresail as she sped, and others grimly and motionless facing seawards, ready to grasp and drag upon the haul-off rope the moment the craft should be water-borne amid the smothering surf. The thunderous slatting of the sail as the yard mounted, flinging a noise of rending upon the ear as though the cloths were whipping the hurricane in rags, the furious roaring and seething and crackling and hissing of the mountainous breakers toward which the boat was darting—the indescribable yelling of the gale sweeping past our ears as the fabric fled down the ways—the instant sight of the torn and mangled skies, which seemed dimly revealed somehow by the snowstorms of froth coursing along the bay—all this combined into an impression which, though it could not have taken longer than a second or two to produce it, dwells upon my mind with so much sharpness that the whole experience of my life might well have gone to the manufacture of it. We touched the wash of the sea, and burst through a cloud of foam; in the beat of a heart the boat was up to our knees in water; in another she was freeing herself and leaping to the height of the next boiling acclivity, with my eight men, rigid as iron statues in their manner of hauling and in their confrontment of the sea, dragging the craft through the surf and into deep water by the haul-off rope attached to an anchor some considerable distance ahead of the end of the slipway. At the moment of the boat smiting the first of the breakers I grasped the tiller-ropes, and on the men letting go the haul-off line I headed the craft away on the port tack, my intention being to 'reach' down in the direction of Hurricane Point, so as to be able to fetch the barque on a second board. One had hardly the wits to notice the scene at the first going off, so headlong was the tumble upon the beach, so clamorous the rush of the tempest, and so frightfully wild the leapings and launchings of the boat amid the heavily broken surface of froth. But now she had the weight of the gale in the close-reefed lug that had been shown to it, and this steadied her; and high as the sea ran, yet as the water deepened the surge grew regular, and I was able to settle down to my job of handling the boat, the worst being over, at least so far as our outward excursion went. I glanced shorewards and observed the blaze of a portfire, held out by a man near the boat-house to serve as a signal to the barque that help was going to her. The fire was blue, the blaze of it was brilliant, and it lighted up a wide area of the foreshore, throwing out the figures of the crowd who watched us, and the outline of the boat-house, and flinging a ghastly tint upon every tall upheaval of surf. The radiance lay in a sort of circle upon the ebony of the night, with what I have named showing in it, as though it was a picture cast by a magic-lantern upon a black curtain. You could see nothing of the lights of the town for it. On either hand of this luminous frame the houses went blending into the land, and each way all was sheer ink. Shortly after this signal of portfire they sent up a rocket from the barque. It was a crimson ball, and it broke like a flash of lighting under the ragged rush of the sky, and then outleaped afresh the flames of a flare, or, as you might call it, a bonfire, from the deck of the vessel—a burning tar-barrel, perhaps; and the light of it disclosed the vision of the ship plunging awfully, again and again veiled by storms of crystal which the fathom-high flames of the flare flashed into prisms. One of our men roared out with an oath: 'She'll have taken the Twins afore we get to her!' and another bellowed: 'Why did they wait to drag a mile afore they signalled?' But no more was said just then. Indeed, a man needed to exert the whole strength of his lungs to make himself heard. The edge of the wind seemed to clip the loudest shout as it left the lips, as you would sever a rope with a knife. Our boat was small for a craft of her character, but a noble, brave, nimble fabric, as had been again and again proved; and every man of us, allowing that good usage was given her, had such confidence in the Janet, that we would not have exchanged her for the largest, handsomest, and best-tested boat on the coast of the United Kingdom. You would have understood her merits had you been with us on this night. I was at the yoke-lines; Pentreath, my second in command, sat with his foot against the side, gripping the foresheet, ready to let go in an instant; the mizzen had been hoisted, and the rest of the men, crouching down upon the thwarts, sat staring ahead, with iron countenances, with never so much as a stoop among them to the hardest wash of the surge that might sweep with a wild hissing shriek athwart their sea-helmets and half fill the boat as it came bursting in smoke over the weather-bow, till, for the space of a wink or two, the black gale was as white as a snowstorm overhead. As we 'reached' out the sea grew weightier. Never before had I known a greater sea in that bay. The ridges seemed to stand up to twice the height of our masts; every peak boiled, and as we rose to the summit of it, the boat was smothered in the foam of her own churning, and in the headlong, giddy, dazzling rush into which she soared, with the whole weight of the gale in her fragment of lug bowing her over and sending her, as you might have believed, gunwale under down the long, indigo slant of the under-running billow. We held on, all as mute as death in the boat. From time to time as we rose to the head of a sea I would take a look in the direction of the barque, and catch a glimpse of the windy spark of her flare, or of the meteoric sailing of a rocket over her mastheads. There should have been a moon, but the planet was without power to strike the faintest illumination into the heaps and rags of vapours which were pouring up like smoke over the edge of the raging Atlantic horizon. The picture of the parlour I had just left would sometimes arise before me: I figured my mother peering out at the black and throbbing scene of bay; I imagined good Mr. Trembath at her side, uttering such words of comfort and of hope as occurred to him; but such fancies as these seemed to be beaten away by the breath of the hurricane, as rapidly as they were formed. Should we be in time? If the vessel's cables parted she was doomed. Nay; if she should continue to drag another quarter of an hour, she would be on to the Twins, and go to pieces as a child's house of bricks falls to the touch of a hand! 'Ready about!' I roared. The helm was put down, the foresheet eased off, and round came the boat nobly on the very pinnacle of a surge, pausing a moment as she was there poised, and then plunging into the hollow to rise again with her foresail full, and heading some points to windward of the vessel we were now steering for. Through it we stormed, sea after sea bursting from the lifeboat's bow in pallid clouds which the wind sent whirling in shrieks—so articulate was the sound of the slinging spray—into the blackness landwards. Here and there a tiny spark of lamp flickering in the thick of the gloom told us the situation of Tintrenale; but there was nothing more to be seen that way; the land and the sky above it met in a deep, impenetrable dye, towards which, to leeward of us, the tall seas went flashing in long yearning coils, throbbing into mere pallidness when a cable's length distant. They had kindled another flare aboard the barque, or else had plied the old one with fresh fuel: she was visible by the light of the flames, the white of her furled canvas coming and going to the fluctuating fires; and I marked, with a heart that sank in me, the dreadful manner of her labouring. She was pitching bows under, and rolling too, and by the shining of the signal-fire upon her deck offered a most wonderful sight, rendered terrible also by a view that we could now get of a crowd of men hanging in a lump in her starboard fore-rigging. The second coxswain flashed a portfire that they might know the lifeboat was at hand, and we went plunging and sweeping down to a point some little distance ahead of the barque, the crowd of us irradiated by the stream of emerald-green flame. 'All ready with the anchor, lads?' I shouted. 'All ready, sir!' was the answer. 'Down foresail!' and as I gave this order I put the helm down and brought the boathead to wind about thirty fathoms ahead of the ship. 'Let go the anchor!' 'Unstep the foremast!' bawled the second coxswain, and, while this was doing, he and another swiftly lifted the mizzenmast out of its bearings and laid it along. 'Veer away cable handsomely!' I shouted; and pitching and foaming, now dropping into a hollow that seemed fifty feet deep, now appearing to scale a surge that lifted the boat's bow almost dead on end over her stern—all in a fashion to make the brain of the stoutest and most experienced among us reel again—we dropped alongside. In what followed there was so much confusion, so much uproar, such distraction of shouts in foreign and unintelligible accents, such a terrible washing of seas, such bewilderment born of the darkness, of the complicated demands upon the attention through need of keeping the boat clear of the huge chopping bows of the barque, through bawling to the men in the rigging and receiving answers which we could not understand, that this passage of my singular adventure could scarcely be less vague to me in memory if, instead of having been an actor in it, I had read it in a book. There were six or seven men, as well as I could make out, clustered in the fore-rigging. I believed I could see others in the mizzen-shrouds. This being my notion, my consuming anxiety was to drop the boat down on the quarter as quickly as possible, for it was not only that the Twins were within a cable's range astern, with the fury of the foam there making a kind of shining upon the water that might have passed for moonlight: such was the volume and height of the sea roaring betwixt the labouring ship and our boat, that at every toss of the little fabric, at every ponderous lean down of the great groaning black hull towering over us, we stood to be staved. The fellows in the fore-ringing seemed to be stupefied. We all of us yelled, 'Jump, jump! Watch as she rises, and jump for God's sake!' meanwhile keeping a turn of the cable so as to hold the boat abreast of them. It seemed an eternity before they understood, and yet a minute had not passed since we dropped down, when a cry broke from them, and first one jumped, and then another, and then the rest of them sprang, and there they were lying in a huddle in the bottom of the boat, one or two of them groaning dreadfully, as though from broken limbs, or worse injuries still, all of them motionless as they lay when they jumped, like folk nearly dead of terror and cold and pain. 'Veer out now, my lads! veer out!' I cried; 'handsomely, that we may get smartly under the mizzen-shrouds.' 'There's nobody there, sir,' roared one of my men. No! I looked and found it had been an illusion of my sight, due to the flame of the flare that was burning fiercely on the main-deck. 'Are you all here?' I cried, addressing the dusky huddle of men at the bottom of the boat. Something was said, but the gale deafened me, and I could catch no meaning, no syllables indeed, in the answer. 'They'll all be here, sir,' shouted one of my crew; 'the port-davits are empty, and some'll have left in the boat.' A great sea swung us up at that instant flush with the level of the bulwark-rails, with a heel of the barque that disclosed her decks bare to the bright fires of the signal. 'They must be all here!' I cried; 'but look well. Is there one among you who can catch any signs of a living man on board?' They waited for the next upheaval of sea; then rose a shout: 'They're all here, sir, you'll find.' 'Heave ahead then, my lads!' by which I meant that they should haul upon the cable to drag the boat clear of the dreadful crushing, shearing chop of the overhanging bows of the barque. At that instant a head showed over the rail a little abaft the fore-shrouds, and the clear, piercing voice of a boy cried, with as good an English accent as I myself have, 'My father is ill and helpless in the cabin. Do not leave us!' 'No, no, we'll not leave you,' I instantly shouted in return, sending my voice fair to the lad from the height of a sea that pretty well brought his and my head on a level. 'How many are there of you?' 'Two,' was the answer. I had to wait for the boat to slide up to the summit of the next surge ere I could call out again. The black yawns betwixt us and the barque might have passed for valleys looked at from a hillside, so horribly hollow and deep were they; they were pale and yet dusky too, with sheets of foam; a soul-confounding noise of thunderous washing and seething rose up from them. When we were in one of those hollows the great mass of the dark fabric of the barque seemed to tower fifty feet above us, and we lay becalmed, hanging, while you might have counted five, in absolute stagnation, with the yell of the wind sweeping over our heads as though we were in the heart of a pit. 'Cannot your father help himself at all?' I bawled to the boy. 'He cannot stir; he must be lifted!' he answered in a shriek, for his high, clear, piercing cry thus sounded. 'By Heaven, then, lads,' I bawled to my men, 'there's no time to be lost! We must bundle the poor fellow over somehow, and help the lad. Nothing will have been done if we leave them behind us. Watch your chance and follow me, three of you!' At the instant of saying this I made a spring from off the height of the gratings on which I stood, and got into the fore-chains, the boat then being on the level of that platform; and as actively as a cat, for few young fellows had nimbler limbs, I scrambled over the bulwark on to the deck, just in time to escape a huge fold of rushing water that foamed sheer through the chains with a spite and weight that must instantly have settled my business for me. I was in the act of running along the deck to where the lad stood—that is to say, a little forward of the gangway, not doubting that the others of my crew whom I had called upon were following with as much alertness as I had exhibited, when I felt a shock as of a thump pass through the barque. 'She has struck!' thought I. But hardly was I sensible of this tremor through the vessel, when there arose a wild and dreadful cry from alongside—heavenly God! how am I to describe that shocking noise of human distress? I fled to the rail and looked over; it was all boiling water under me, with just a sight of the black line of the gunwale or of the keel of the lifeboat; but there was such a raging of foam, such a thickness of seething yeast smoking into the hurricane as though some volcanic eruption had happened right under the barque, filling the air with steam, that there was nothing whatever to be seen saving just that dark glance of keel or gunwale, as I have said, which, however, vanished as I looked in the depth of the hissing spumy smother. I knew by this that the lifeboat must have been staved and filled by a sudden fling of her against the massive sides of the barque; for she was a self-righting craft, and, though she might have thrown every soul in her out as she rolled over, yet she would have rose buoyant again, emptying herself as she leapt to the surge, and there she would have been alongside, without a living creature in her if you will, but a good boat, and riding stoutly to her cable. But she had been stove, and now she was gone! The blazing tar-barrel on the main-deck enabled me to see my way to rush aft. I cried to the lad as I sped: 'The boat is staved; all hands of her are overboard and drowning! Heave ropes' ends over the side! fling life-buoys!' And thus shouting, scarcely knowing, indeed, what I called out, so confounded was I, so shocked, so horrified, so heartbroken, I may say, by the suddenness and the fearfulness of this disaster, I reached the quarter of the barque and overhung it; but I could see nothing. The cloudy boiling rose and fell, and with every mighty drop of the great square counter of the barque, the sea swept in a roar from either hand of her with a cataractal fury that would rush whatever was afloat in it dozens of fathoms distant at every scend. Here and there now I believe I could distinguish some small black object, but the nearer pallid waters dimmed into a blackness at a little distance, and, if those dark points which I observed were the heads of swimmers, then such was the headlong race of the surge they were swept into the throbbing dusk ere I could make sure of them. I stood as one paralyzed from head to foot. My inability to be of the least service to my poor comrades and the unhappy Danes caused me to feel as though the very heart in me had ceased to beat. The young fellow came to my side. 'What is to be done?' he cried. 'Nothing!' I answered in a passion of grief. 'What can be done? God grant that many of them will reach the shore! The hurl of the sea is landwards, and their life-belts will float them. But your people are doomed.' 'And so are we!' he exclaimed shrilly, yet without perceptible terror, with nothing worse than wild excitement in his accents. 'There are rocks directly under our stern. Are you a sailor?' 'No!' 'O, du gode Gud! what is to be done?' cried the lad. I cast my eyes despairingly around. The tar-barrel was still burning bravely upon the deck, defying the ceaseless sweeping of spray from over the bows; the windy unearthly light tinctured the ship with its sickly sallow hue to the height of her lower yards, and the whole ghastly body of her was to be seen as she rolled and plunged under a sky that was the blacker for the light of the distress-flare, and upon a sea whose vast spreads of creaming brows would again and again come charging along to the very height of the bulwark rail. In the midst of this pause on my part, and while every instinct of self-preservation in me was blindly flinging itself, so to speak, against the black and horrible situation that imprisoned me, and while I was hopelessly endeavouring to consider what was to be done to save the young fellow alongside of me from destruction—for, as to his father, it was impossible to extend my sympathies at such a moment to one whom I had not seen, who did not appeal to me, as it were, in form and voice for succour—I say, in the midst of this pause of hopeless deliberation, the roar of the hurricane ceased on a sudden. Nothing more, I was sure, was signified by this than a lull, to be followed by some fierce chop round, or by the continuance of the westerly tempest with a bitterer spite in the renewed rush of it. The lull may have lasted ten or fifteen seconds. In that time I do not know that there was a breath of air to be felt outside the violent eddyings and draughts occasioned by the sickening motions of the barque. I looked up at the sky, and spied the leanest phantom of a star that glimmered for the space of a single swing of a pendulum, and then vanished behind a rushing roll of vapour of a midnight hue, winging with incredible velocity from the land. So insupportable was the movement of the deck that I was forced to support myself by a belaying-pin, or I must have been thrown. My companion clung to a similar pin close beside me. The thunder of running and colliding waters rose into that magical hush of tempest; I could hear the booming of the surf as far as Hurricane Point and the caldron-like noises of the waters round about the rocks astern of us. 'Has the storm ceased?' cried my companion. 'Oh, beloved father, we may be spared yet!' he added, extending his disengaged hand towards the deck-house, as he apostrophized the helpless man who lay there. Amazed as I was by this instant cessation of the gale, I could yet find mind enough to be struck by my companion's manner, by his words, and now, I may say, by his voice also. I was about to address him; but, as my lips parted, there was a vivid flash of lightning that threw out the whole scene of bay, cliff, foreshore, and town, with the line of the horizon seawards, in a dazzle of violet; a crash of thunder followed; but, before its ear-splitting reverberation had ceased, the echoes of it were drowned in the bellowing of the gale coming directly off the land. What is there in words to express the fury of this outfly? It met the heave of the landward-running seas, and swept them into smoke, and the air grew as white and thick with spume as though a heavy snowstorm were blowing horizontally along. It took the barque and swung her; her labouring was so prodigious as she was thrust by this fresh hurricane broadside round to the surge, that I imagined every second she would founder under my feet. I felt a shock: my companion cried, 'One of the cables has parted!' A moment later I felt the same indescribable tremble running through the planks on which we stood. 'Is that the other cable gone, do you think?' I shouted. 'There is a lead-line over the side,' he cried; 'it will tell us if we are adrift.' I followed him to near the mizzen rigging; neither of us durst let go with one hand until we had a grip of something else with the other; it was now not only the weight of the wind that would have laid us prone and pinned us to the deck—a pyramidal sea had sprung up as though by enchantment, and each apex as it soared about the bows and sides was blown inboards in very avalanches of water, which with each violent roll of the vessel poured in a solid body to the rail, one side or the other, again and again, to the height of our waist. My companion extended his hand over the bulwarks, and cried out: 'Here is the lead-line. It stretches towards the bows. Oh, sir, we are adrift! we are blowing out to sea!' I put my hand over and grasped the line, and instantly knew by the angle of it that the lad was right. By no other means would he have been able to get at the truth. The weight of lead, by resting on the bottom, immediately told if the barque was dragging. All around was white water; the blackness of the night drooped to the very spit of the brine; not a light was to be perceived, not the vaguest outline of the cliff; and the whole scene of darkness was the more bewildering for the throb of the near yeast upon the eyesight. 'Is your binnacle-light burning?' I cried. The lad answered, 'Yes.' 'Then,' I shouted, 'we must find out the quarter the gale has shifted into and get her stern on to it, and clear Hurricane Point, if Almighty God will permit. There may be safety in the open; there is none here.' With the utmost labour and distress we made our way aft. The flare had been extinguished by the heavy falls of water, and it was worse than walking blindfolded. The binnacle-light was burning—this was, indeed, to be expected. The barque was plunging directly head to wind, and a glance at the card enabled me to know that the gale was blowing almost due east, having shifted, as these cyclonic ragings often do, right into the quarter opposite whence it had come. 'We must endeavour to get her before it,' I cried; 'but I am no sailor. There may come another shift, and we ought to clear the land while the hurricane holds as it does. What is to be done?' 'Will she pay off if the helm is put hard over?' he answered. 'Let us try it!' He seized the spokes on one side; I put my shoulder to the wheel on the other, and thus we jammed and secured the helm into the posture called by sailors 'hard a-starboard.' She fell off, indeed—into the trough, and there she lay, amid such a diabolical play of water, such lashings of seas on both sides, as it is not in mortal pen to portray! Had we been in the open ocean, a better attitude than the barque herself had taken up we could not have wished for. She was, indeed, 'hove-to,' as the sea-expression is, giving something of her bow to the wind, and was in that posture which the shipmaster will put his vessel into in such a tempest as was now blowing. But, unhappily, the land was on either hand of us, and though our drift might be straight out to sea, I could not be sure that it was. The tide would be making to the west and north; the coils and pyramids and leapings of surge had also a sort of yearning and leaning towards north-west, as if in sympathy with the tide; the deadly terrace of Hurricane Point lay that way; and so the leaving of the barque in the trough of the sea might come, indeed, to cost us our lives, which had only just been spared by the shift in the storm of wind. 'She does not answer the helm,' I cried to my young companion. 'Her head will pay off,' he answered, 'if we can manage to hoist a fragment of sail forward. It must be done, sir. Will you help me?' 'God knows I will do anything!' I cried. 'Show me what is to be done. We must save our lives if we can. There may be a chance out on the ocean for us.' Without another word he went forward, and I followed him. We had to pause often to preserve ourselves from being floated off our feet. The flood, which washed white betwixt the rails, lifted the rigging off the pins, and sent the ropes snaking about the decks, and our movements were as much hampered as though we fought our way through a jungle. The foam all about us, outside and inboards, put a wild, cold glimmer into the air, which enabled us to distinguish outlines. In fact, at moments the whole shape of the barque, from her bulwarks to some distance up her masts, would show like a sketch in ink upon white paper as she leaned off the slant of the sea and painted her figure upon the hill of froth thundering away from her on the lee-side. My companion paused for a moment or two under the shelter of the caboose or galley, to tell me what he meant to do. We then crawled on to the forecastle, and he bade me hold by a rope which he put into my hand, and await his return. I watched him creep into the 'eyes' of the vessel and get upon the bowsprit, but after that I lost sight of him, for the seas smoked so fiercely all about the ship's head—to every plunge of her bows there rose so shrouding a thickness of foam—that the air was a fog of crystals where the lad was, and had he gone overboard he could not have vanished more utterly from my sight. Indeed, I could not tell whether he was gone or not, and a feeling of horror possessed me when I thought of being left alone in the vessel with a sick and useless man lying somewhere aft, and with the rage and darkness of the dreadful storm around me, the chance of striking upon Hurricane Point, and no better hope at the best than what was to be got out of thinking of the midnight breast of the storming Atlantic. After a few minutes there was the noise of the rattling of canvas resembling a volley of small shot fired off the bows. The figure of the lad came from the bowsprit out of a burst of spray that soared in steam into the wind. 'Only a fragment must be hoisted!' he exclaimed with his mouth at my ear. 'Pull with me!' I put my weight upon the rope, and together we rose a few feet of the sail upon the stay—it was the foretopmast staysail, as I afterwards discovered. 'Enough!' cried my companion in his clear, penetrating voice; 'if it will but hold till the vessel pays off, all will be well. We dare not ask for more.' He secured the rope we had dragged upon to a pin, and I followed him aft, finding leisure even in that time of distress and horror to wonder at the coolness, the intrepidity of soul, that was expressed in his clear unfaltering speech, in the keen judgment and instant resolution of a lad whose age, as I might gather from his voice, could scarcely exceed fifteen or sixteen years. Between us we seized the wheel afresh, one on either side of it, and waited. But we were not to be kept long in suspense. Indeed, even before we had grasped the helm, the barque was paying off. The rag of canvas held nobly, and to the impulse of it the big bows of the vessel rounded away from the gale, and in a few minutes she was dead before it, pitching furiously, with the sea snapping and foaming to her taffrail and quarters. But the thickness of her yards, with the canvas rolled up on them, the thickness of the masts, too, the spread of the tops, the complicated gear of shroud, backstay, and running rigging—all offered resistance enough to the dark and living gale that was bellowing right over the stern to put something of the speed of an arrow into the keel of the fabric. Through it she madly raced, with pallid clouds blowing about her bows, and white peaks hissing along her sides, and a wake of snow under her counter heaving to half the height of the mizzenmast with the hurl of the seas, and a ceaseless blowing of froth over our heads as the lad and I stood together grasping the wheel, steering the vessel into the darkness of the great Atlantic Ocean, with our eyes upon the compass-card, whose illuminated disc showed the course on which we were being flashed forwards by the storm to be a trifle south of west. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.