Part 23

“‘Stop lowering 14!’ our crew shouted; and the crew of No. 14, now only twenty feet above, cried out the same. The distance to the top, however, was some seventy feet, and the creaking of the pulleys must have deadened all sound to those above, for down she came, fifteen feet, ten feet, five feet, and a stoker and I reached up and touched the bottom of the swinging boat above our heads. The next drop would have brought her on our heads. Just before she dropped another stoker sprang to the ropes with open knife in hand. ‘One,’ I heard him say; and then ‘Two,’ as the knife cut through the pulley ropes.”

Almost immediately the exhaust stream carried the boat clear, and the other boat slipped into the water, on exactly the same spot that the first one had occupied. It was indeed a narrow shave, for the two boats almost rubbed gunwales.

Leaving the boats as they are being got away, let us go to some other part of the ship to see what is happening.

Down below, in the engine-room and stokeholds, begrimed heroes were working hard at their duty. The black squad always occupies the most dangerous place in a ship at such times; and to the credit of these men, who are hidden from the gaze of the people who stroll leisurely about decks, or while away the hours in concert room or card room, let it be said that they rarely fail in the moment of danger. On the _Titanic_, those men whose engine-rooms and stokeholds had not been flooded, and who knew they would be wanted, stayed below; the engines in the principal engine-room, which was still protected by its bulkhead, must be run to keep the pumps working and the dynamos running which supplied the electricity for light and the wireless. If the pumps could be kept going, then the vessel could float long enough for help to come; if the wireless could be kept working, then help could be appealed for across the ether waves; and while the men below strove, some at drawing fires to prevent explosions, others at stoking fires that were safe, up in the Marconi cabin two men were sticking to their posts. The men, Phillips and Bride, were heroes, and their names will be remembered while men remember the story of the _Titanic_.

They had sent out the first messages for assistance--SOS, the new call for ships at sea, changing it occasionally to CQD, the old signal. Then, when things grew more serious than ever, and the news was brought down to them, the instruments began to buzz out longer messages, that told ships scores of miles away what had happened, and what was happening. And now and again there came a voice from the ether through the apparatus on the operators’ heads, telling them that the signals had been caught, and that this ship and that ship was coming at full speed. From seventy miles away the _Carpathia’s_ operator sent such a message; from 300 miles away the _Olympic_ also sent her message saying that she was coming. And thus it went on, this long-distance conversation on which so much depended, and which might stop at any moment, for the captain had told Phillips and Bride that the dynamos might not be able to hold out very long. It was the last quarter of an hour, and Phillips, forgetting all about himself, refusing to think of escape, stood to his work, tapping out the messages, urging the rushing ships to put on every ounce of steam. And Bride, no less a hero, bethought him of Phillips’s safety. He went and got their lifebelts, put one on Phillips and one on himself.

Captain Smith looked in just then, and said: “Men, you have done your full duty; you can do no more! Abandon your cabin now. It is every man for himself. Look out for yourselves. I release you.”

“But Phillips clung on,” said Bride, “sending, sending. He clung on for about ten minutes after the captain released him. The water was then coming into our cabin.”

A hero? Every inch a hero and a man! But what of another man? The one who, creeping silently into that cabin, where a man stood hazarding his life, juggling with death, lest haply he might do some good for that helpless crowd above, tried to slip the lifebelt from the hero’s back? What of that man? He had had a lifebelt himself, but, too scared to fetch it, had thought of an easier way. Bride, catching him in the act, had a desire for blood. “I suddenly felt a passion not to let that man die a decent sailor’s death,” he said. “I wished he might have stretched a rope or walked a plank. I did my duty. I hope I finished him; but I do not know.”

Phillips went down with the ship he had tried to save. Bride, more fortunate, came through alive, as will be seen. He reached the deck just as the end came. The last boat had gone--and there remained on the ship some fifteen hundred souls, hundreds of them clinging now in terror to each other. The gay tunes of the orchestra changed to the solemn strains of a hymn. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the starboard was sinking, dipping deeper and deeper, the stern rising higher and higher, hundreds of people being clustered there, waiting for they dared not think what. The full terror of it all was now beginning to sink into minds that had refused to accept the possibility of disaster. The water lapped up higher and higher, and men scrambled up the sloping deck, seeking to outrace the water, which soon covered the bridge and carried the captain away from the ship, holding in his arm some poor, lonely babe who had been forgotten in the hurly-burly. “Boys!” he had cried lustily ere he went, unwillingly, for he would have stayed by his boat but for that wave that washed him overboard. “Boys, you can do no more! Look-out for yourselves!” And men prepared to cast themselves into the sea, realising now that there was no hope to be found in this ship on which so many hopes had been set. But, instead of jumping, they now found themselves compelled to hang on like grim death to anything that was at hand--rails, stanchions, deck-houses, ropes--to save themselves from being washed away, for the stern was now towering high above the water, and the deck seemed like a sheer precipice, down which one might slip--to death.

Imagine the sight. A massive hulk, gleaming with a thousand lights, belching forth showers of sparks from a solitary funnel; a crowd of clinging figures; a crowd of figures, unable to cling, sliding down that steel road to death. Imagine the sounds. Hear the thud and the crash of the engines as, overbalanced, they tore themselves from their beds and hurled themselves across the ship, to pound against the steel sides and burst them with a deadening explosion; hear the horrific cracks as the decks bend; hear, from under water, a mighty explosion, followed quickly by another and another; hear the roar as the fire-spouting funnel tumbles into the sea; hear, above all, the cry torn from a thousand throats as the people on the stern of the boat felt the last tremors, the death-struggles of the leviathan! Imagine this sight and these sounds, and if you have the imagination of a Poe you will not have glimpsed a hundredth part of the terrors of that last two minutes of the life of the _Titanic_.

And the next minute there was no _Titanic_ afloat; but the sea was dotted about with hundreds of black dots, each dot a soul struggling for life, each striving to reach something that might be floating near it--deck-chairs, gratings, wreckage of all sorts, and every little bit worth its weight in gold to him who might be so fortunate as to get it. To follow all these people in their efforts for life is, of course, impossible. And there is no need, for each was but a picture of the other.

Mr. Lightoller, the second officer, had a remarkable experience. As the ship took her final plunge he had dived, to be drawn down against the grating that covered the blower of the exhaust. An explosion hurled him up to the surface again, where, having barely filled his lungs, he was sucked down again, and drawn to the side of the sinking ship, near the funnel draught pipes. Yet once more was he blown upwards by the force of a terrific explosion, and when he came to the surface he found himself near a collapsible boat; Lightoller clung to this, to which Bride himself and half a dozen other people were also hanging. It was capsized; but it provided some sort of refuge.

The gallant captain, who had gone overboard with the baby in his arms, fought his way through the swimming crowd, making for one of the boats which were still in the vicinity, hoping to effect some rescues. He went, not to save himself, but the child. He reached the boat, cried “Take the child,” handed it up to the willing hands outstretched for it, and then, refusing to be taken into the boat, cried “Let me go!” and swam back to where the ship had disappeared.

There were many acts of heroism in that dreadful sea. A man swam up to the capsized lifeboat, now overladen. “Will it hold another?” he asked. Those men on the boat knew, positively, that if one more man were on her, she would pitch them all off, and they said so, not jealously, not selfishly. And as unselfishly, the man who wanted to live cried: “All right! Good-bye! God bless you all!” And turned away, only to sink almost immediately.

Another man, clinging to a crate, heard someone ask: “Will it hold another?” He did not know; all he knew was that here was a man who loved life as he himself loved it; and the crate might offer a chance. “Try it!” he cried; “we’ll live or die together!”

The story of the great disaster is told, and yet there are some things which cannot be recounted--horrors, endings and partings. Into the Great Unknown many hundreds had gone. Fewer hundreds were saved by those giant ships rushing to their aid, brought by the call out of the vast silences of the night.

The appalling horror of it all staggered the world; but the great fact stood out that Man the Ingenious is no match for Nature the Mighty!

MYSTERIES OF THE SEA

Strange Disappearances of Ships at Sea

It is only to be expected that the sea, with all its glory and wonders, its tragedies and its romances, should have its mysteries too. Some of them have been cleared up; others remain unsolved to this day, despite all the ingenious attempts at explanation that have been made. Some of them go back to the distant past, such as the _Gloriana_ mystery. She was a British brig, and in 1775 the captain of a Greenland whaler ran across her amidst the ice-fields at 77 degrees north latitude. She was a weird spectacle as she picked her way through a narrow channel between two great icebergs, which seemed to be closing in to crush her, with no one making an attempt to steer her safely through the danger. The Greenlander looked in amazement. The _Gloriana’s_ sails were torn to shreds and frozen hard, her rigging was a tangled mass that had not been trimmed for Heaven knew how long; on her decks great mountains of snow were reared, and her sides glistened with ice; she was a spectral ship of the icy seas, a sight to strike fear into the heart of any superstitious sailor. For a while the captain of the whaler did not know what to do; the strange spectacle awed him; but clearly it was his duty to look into the matter, and at last, summoning up courage, he lowered a boat and rowed over to the _Gloriana_.

If he had been amazed before, he was staggered now. Clambering up the ice-cold side, he glanced in at a porthole and saw a man sitting at the cabin table, holding a pen as though about to write in the log-book that lay open before him. But there was no sign of life about the man. He was stiff, cold, dead! The Greenlander, stiffening himself up to the task before him, got aboard, walked gingerly, awesomely into the cabin and found himself standing by the side of a dead man, frozen hard. Peering over the dead man’s shoulder, he found that the last entry in the log was dated Nov. 11, 1762--thirteen long years before! What had happened? How came it that this man sitting in his cabin, writing, had met death so suddenly that he could not finish entering his log? The Greenlander could not say; no one could ever tell; and the mystery was made no clearer when it was found that there were several other dead bodies about, one of them being a woman. And not one showed any sign that would lead to the solution of the mystery of how they had met their death.

Then take the _Marie Celeste_, which, leaving New York on Nov. 7, 1872, with a cargo of petroleum and alcohol, was met a month later off the Azores by the brig _Dei Gratia_. Hailing her, the captain of the latter ship received no answer, and something arousing his curiosity, he went aboard--to find not a soul on her. To heighten the mystery, there were no evidences of mutiny, panic or disorder of any kind; the log showed nothing that could have caused the desertion of the ship, the last entry being dated ten days before the _Dei Gratia_ came up with her. One boat was missing, and that alone showed how the crew, five men, and the captain and his wife and child had gone. All the gear was in order, her rigging being properly made fast, her companion-ways were open. Down in the cabin a little organ had open music lying in front of it, a sewing-machine had a piece of unfinished work in it, the men’s chests in the fo’c’sle were unopened and not ransacked, the captain’s dinner was half cooked in the galley.

And all was silent. Though a score or more theories have been advanced, no one has yet cleared up the mystery of what tragic happening had taken place on the _Marie Celeste_ to make her crew desert her.

These mysteries of the sea are not all of an early date; even recent years have them on record. Thus in 1910 the _Inverness-shire_, which left Hamburg in March, bound for Saint Rosalia, in California, was met off the Falkland Islands in June by the Italian steamer _Verina_, with no living being aboard except a few cats. She, too, was in perfect order so far as arrangement went. Food was in a pot on the galley fire, an open copy of the “Ancient Mariner” lay on the captain’s table, as though he had been interrupted in his reading of the weird tale of the sea. Perhaps he could tell a weirder one than that. The sails were set, the deck shipshape, the cargo intact, and from the pack of cards which lay scattered about the mess-room table it would seem that the crew had been disturbed in a quiet game. And the explanation of it all? It was said that the crew, thirty of them, had become obsessed with the idea that the ship was unlucky; they broke out into mutiny, refused to obey orders, and the ship was deserted. In due course the _Verina_ towed her into Port Stanley, where, of course, she received her share in the salvage.

In 1913 the tank steamer _Roumanian_ came across a ship which was acting so queerly that the captain decided to investigate. It was ten days out from Port Arthur. The strange ship was a sailing vessel, but though some of her sails were set, they answered no useful purpose, for she was buffeted about at the will of the fickle winds. It took the _Roumanian_ an hour or two to catch up with the erratic ship, and when she did so her captain boarded and found that she was the _Remittent_, a Norwegian barque. She was crewless, and the explanation of her queer actions was that the rudder was unlashed and was banging about as the vessel swung to the waves. There was nothing missing; her papers were all intact, her cargo was there, her water was fresh, her provisions plenty; and yet there wasn’t a man aboard, and no indication as to why there wasn’t. And all her lifeboats swung at the davits. Inquiries later showed that the _Remittent_ had left Rio Grande do Sul on Oct. 25, 1912, with a captain and a crew of six men. The _Roumanian_ towed her for many days, and then, a gale breaking upon them, had to cast her adrift, a danger to all shipping.

It is this aspect of the unmanned ship that makes her a thing to be disposed of. Whether derelict or simply deserted, she is a menace to other ships; she may loom out of the darkest night and crash into another vessel, to the danger of all aboard. On the other hand, she may voyage for months--nay, years--and never come into collision. For instance, the _Fannie E. Woolsten_, an American ship, was wrecked in 1891 off the United States coast, whence her battered hulk drifted across the Atlantic, passed down the coasts of Europe, and then swung out across the Atlantic again, going ashore a hundred or so miles north of the place where she had been wrecked, having covered 10,000 miles in her strange cruise.

PRINTED BY CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED, LA BELLE SAUVAGE, LONDON, E.C. F 35.415

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.