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LOST SHIPS
AND
LONELY SEAS

THE WRECK OF THE “POLLY”

LOST SHIPS
AND
LONELY SEAS

BY
RALPH D. PAINE

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.

Copyright, 1920, 1921, by
The Century Co.

PRINTED IN U. S. A.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

LOST SHIPS AND LONELY SEAS

CHAPTER I
THE SINGULAR FATE OF THE BRIG POLLY

“Oh, night and day the ships come in,

The ships both great and small,

But never one among them brings

A word of him at all.

From Port o’ Spain and Trinidad,

From Rio or Funchal,

And along the coast of Barbary.”

Steam has not banished from the deep sea the ships that lift tall spires of canvas to win their way from port to port. The gleam of their topsails recalls the centuries in which men wrought with stubborn courage to fashion fabrics of wood and cordage that should survive the enmity of the implacable ocean and make the winds obedient. Their genius was unsung, their hard toil forgotten, but with each generation the sailing ship became nobler and more enduring, until it was a perfect thing. Its great days live in memory with a peculiar atmosphere of romance. Its humming shrouds were vibrant with the eternal call of the sea, and in a phantom fleet pass the towering East Indiaman, the hard-driven Atlantic packet, and the gracious clipper that fled before the Southern trades.

A hundred years ago every bay and inlet of the New England coast was building ships which fared bravely forth to the West Indies, to the roadsteads of Europe, to the mysterious havens of the Far East. They sailed in peril of pirate and privateer, and fought these rascals as sturdily as they battled with wicked weather. Coasts were unlighted, the seas uncharted, and navigation was mostly by guesswork, but these seamen were the flower of an American merchant marine whose deeds are heroic in the nation’s story. Great hearts in little ships, they dared and suffered with simple, uncomplaining fortitude. Shipwreck was an incident, and to be adrift in lonely seas or cast upon a barbarous shore was sadly commonplace. They lived the stuff that made fiction after they were gone.

Your fancy may be able to picture the brig Polly as she steered down Boston harbor in December, 1811, bound out to Santa Cruz with lumber and salted provisions for the slaves of the sugar plantations. She was only a hundred and thirty tons burden and perhaps eighty feet long. Rather clumsy to look at and roughly built was the Polly as compared with the larger ships that brought home the China tea and silks to the warehouses of Salem. Such a vessel was a community venture. The blacksmith, the rigger, and the calker took their pay in shares, or “pieces.” They became part owners, as did likewise the merchant who supplied stores and material; and when the brig was afloat, the master, the mate, and even the seamen were allowed cargo space for commodities that they might buy and sell to their own advantage. A voyage directly concerned a whole neighborhood.

Every coastwise village had a row of keel-blocks sloping to the tide. In winter weather too rough for fishing, when the farms lay idle, the Yankee Jack of all trades plied his axe and adz to shape the timbers and peg together such a little vessel as the Polly, in which to trade to London or Cadiz or the Windward Islands. Hampered by an unfriendly climate, hard put to it to grow sufficient food, with land immensely difficult to clear, the New-Englander was between the devil and the deep sea, and he sagaciously chose the latter. Elsewhere, in the early days, the forest was an enemy, to be destroyed with great pains. The pioneers of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine regarded it with favor as the stuff with which to make stout ships and the straight masts they “stepped” in them.

Nowadays, such a little craft as the Polly would be rigged as a schooner. The brig is obsolete, along with the quaint array of scows, ketches, pinks, brigantines, and sloops which once filled the harbors and hove their hempen cables short to the clank of windlass or capstan-pawl, while the brisk seamen sang a chantey to help the work along. The Polly had yards on both masts, and it was a bitter task to lie out in a gale of wind and reef the unwieldy single topsails. She would try for no record passages, but jogged sedately, and snugged down when the weather threatened.

On this tragic voyage she carried a small crew, Captain W. L. Cazneau, a mate, four sailors, and a cook who was a native Indian. No mention is to be found of any ill omens that forecasted disaster, such as a black cat, or a cross-eyed Finn in the forecastle. Two passengers were on board, “Mr. J. S. Hunt and a negro girl nine years old.” We know nothing whatever about Mr. Hunt, who may have been engaged in some trading “adventure” of his own. Perhaps his kinsfolk had waved him a fare-ye-well from the pier-head when the Polly warped out of her berth.

The lone piccaninny is more intriguing. She appeals to the imagination and inspires conjecture. Was she a waif of the slave traffic whom some benevolent merchant of Boston was sending to Santa Cruz to find a home beneath kindlier skies? Had she been entrusted to the care of Mr. Hunt? She is unexplained, a pitiful atom visible for an instant on the tide of human destiny. She amused the sailors, no doubt, and that austere, copper-hued cook may have unbent to give her a doughnut when she grinned at the galley-door.

Four days out from Boston, on December 15, the Polly had cleared the perilous sands of Cape Cod and the hidden shoals of the Georges. Mariners were profoundly grateful when they had safely worked offshore in the winter-time and were past Cape Cod, which bore a very evil repute in those days of square-rigged vessels. Captain Cazneau could recall that somber day of 1802 when three fine ships, the Ulysses, Brutus, and Volusia, sailing together from Salem for European ports, were wrecked next day on Cape Cod. The fate of those who were washed ashore alive was most melancholy. Several died of the cold, or were choked by the sand which covered them after they fell exhausted.

As in other regions where shipwrecks were common, some of the natives of Cape Cod regarded a ship on the beach as their rightful plunder. It was old Parson Lewis of Wellfleet, who, from his pulpit window, saw a vessel drive ashore on a stormy Sunday morning. “He closed his Bible, put on his outside garment, and descended from the pulpit, not explaining his intention until he was in the aisle, and then he cried out, ‘Start fair’ and took to his legs. The congregation understood and chased pell-mell after him.”

The brig Polly laid her course to the southward and sailed into the safer, milder waters of the Gulf Stream. The skipper’s load of anxiety was lightened. He had not been sighted and molested by the British men-of-war that cruised off Boston and New York to hold up Yankee merchantmen and impress stout seamen. This grievance was to flame in a righteous war only a few months later. Many a voyage was ruined, and ships had to limp back to port short-handed, because their best men had been kidnapped to serve in British ships. It was an age when might was right on the sea.

SEAMANSHIP WAS HELPLESS TO WARD OFF THE ATTACK OF THE STORM THAT LEFT THE BRIG A SODDEN HULK

The storm which overwhelmed the brig Polly came out of the southeast, when she was less than a week on the road to Santa Cruz. To be dismasted and waterlogged was no uncommon fate. It happens often nowadays, when the little schooners creep along the coast, from Maine and Nova Scotia ports, and dare the winter blows to earn their bread. Men suffer in open boats, as has been the seafarer’s hard lot for ages, and they drown with none to hear their cries, but they are seldom adrift more than a few days. The story of the Polly deserves to be rescued from oblivion because, so far as I am able to discover, it is unique in the spray-swept annals of maritime disaster.

Seamanship was helpless to ward off the attack of the storm that left the brig a sodden hulk. Courageously her crew shortened sail and made all secure when the sea and sky presaged a change of weather. These were no green hands, but men seasoned by the continual hazards of their calling. The wild gale smote them in the darkness of night. They tried to heave the vessel to, but she was battered and wrenched without mercy. Stout canvas was whirled away in fragments. The seams of the hull opened as she labored, and six feet of water flooded the hold. Leaking like a sieve, the Polly would never see port again.

Worse was to befall her. At midnight she was capsized, or thrown on her beam-ends, as the sailor’s lingo has it. She lay on her side while the clamorous seas washed clean over her. The skipper, the mate, the four seamen, and the cook somehow clung to the rigging and grimly refused to be drowned. They were of the old breed, “every hair a rope-yarn and every finger a fish-hook.” They even managed to find an ax and grope their way to the shrouds in the faint hope that the brig might right if the masts went overside. They hacked away, and came up to breathe now and then, until foremast and mainmast fell with a crash, and the wreck rolled level. Then they slashed with their knives at the tangle of spars and ropes until they drifted clear. As the waves rush across a half-tide rock, so they broke over the shattered brig, but she no longer wallowed on her side.

At last the stormy daylight broke. The mariners had survived, and they looked to find their two passengers, who had no other refuge than the cabin. Mr. Hunt was gone, blotted out with his affairs and his ambitions, whatever they were. The colored child they had vainly tried to find in the night. When the sea boiled into the cabin and filled it, she had climbed to the skylight in the roof, and there she clung like a bat. They hauled her out through a splintered gap, and sought tenderly to shelter her in a corner of the streaming deck, but she lived no more than a few hours. It was better that this bit of human flotsam should flutter out in this way than to linger a little longer in this forlorn derelict of a ship. The Polly could not sink, but she drifted as a mere bundle of boards with the ocean winds and currents, while seven men tenaciously fought off death and prayed for rescue.

The gale blew itself out, the sea rolled blue and gentle, and the wreck moved out into the Atlantic, having veered beyond the eastern edge of the Gulf Stream. There was raw salt pork and beef to eat, nothing else, barrels of which they fished out of the cargo. A keg of water which had been lashed to the quarter-deck was found to contain thirty gallons. This was all there was to drink, for the other water-casks had been smashed or carried away. The diet of meat pickled in brine aggravated the thirst of these castaways. For twelve days they chewed on this salty raw stuff, and then the Indian cook, Moho by name, actually succeeded in kindling a fire by rubbing two sticks together in some abstruse manner handed down by his ancestors. By splitting pine spars and a bit of oaken rail he was able to find in the heart of them wood which had not been dampened by the sea, and he sweated and grunted until the great deed was done. It was a trick which he was not at all sure of repeating unless the conditions were singularly favorable. Fortunately for the hapless crew of the Polly, their Puritan grandsires had failed in their amiable endeavor to exterminate the aborigine.

The tiny galley, or “camboose,” as they called it, was lashed to ring-bolts in the deck, and had not been washed into the sea when the brig was swept clean. So now they patched it up and got a blaze going in the brick oven. The meat could be boiled, and they ate it without stint, assuming that a hundred barrels of it remained in the hold. It had not been discovered that the stern-post of the vessel was staved in under water and all of the cargo excepting some of the lumber had floated out.

The cask of water was made to last eighteen days by serving out a quart a day to each man. Then an occasional rain-squall saved them for a little longer from perishing of thirst. At the end of forty days they had come to the last morsel of salt meat. The Polly was following an aimless course to the eastward, drifting slowly under the influence of the ocean winds and currents. These gave her also a southerly slant, so that she was caught by that vast movement of water which is known as the Gulf Stream Drift. It sets over toward the coast of Africa and sweeps into the Gulf of Guinea.

The derelict was moving away from the routes of trade to Europe into the almost trackless spaces beneath the tropic sun, where the sea glittered empty to the horizon. There was a remote chance that she might be descried by a low-hulled slaver crowding for the West Indies under a mighty press of sail, with her human freightage jammed between decks to endure the unspeakable horrors of the Middle Passage. Although the oceans were populous with ships a hundred years ago, trade flowed on habitual routes. Moreover, a wreck might pass unseen two or three miles away. From the quarter-deck of a small sailing ship there was no such circle of vision as extends from the bridge of a steamer forty or sixty feet above the water, where the officers gaze through high-powered binoculars.

The crew of the Polly stared at skies which yielded not the merciful gift of rain. They had strength to build them a sort of shelter of lumber, but whenever the weather was rough, they were drenched by the waves which played over the wreck. At the end of fifty days of this hardship and torment the seven were still alive, but then the mate, Mr. Paddock, languished and died. It surprised his companions, for, as the old record runs,

he was a man of robust constitution who had spent his life in fishing on the Grand Banks, was accustomed to endure privations, and appeared the most capable of standing the shocks of misfortune of any of the crew. In the meridian of life, being about thirty-five years old, it was reasonable to suppose that, instead of the first, he would have been the last to fall a sacrifice to hunger and thirst and exposure, but Heaven ordered it otherwise.

Singularly enough, the next to go was a young seaman, spare and active, who was also a fisherman by trade. His name was Howe. He survived six days longer than the mate, and “likewise died delirious and in dreadful distress.” Fleeting thunder-showers had come to save the others, and they had caught a large shark by means of a running bowline slipped over his tail while he nosed about the weedy hull. This they cut up and doled out for many days. It was certain, however, that unless they could obtain water to drink they would soon be all dead men on the Polly.

Captain Cazneau seems to have been a sailor of extraordinary resource and resolution. His was the unbreakable will to live and to endure which kept the vital spark flickering in his shipmates. Whenever there was strength enough among them, they groped in the water in the hold and cabin in the desperate hope of finding something to serve their needs. In this manner they salvaged an iron tea-kettle and one of the captain’s flint-lock pistols. Instead of flinging them away, he sat down to cogitate, a gaunt, famished wraith of a man who had kept his wits and knew what to do with them.

At length he took an iron pot from the galley, turned the tea-kettle upside down on it, and found that the rims failed to fit together. Undismayed, the skipper whittled a wooden collar with a seaman’s sheath-knife, and so joined the pot and the kettle. With strips of cloth and pitch scraped from the deck-beams, he was able to make a tight union where his round wooden frame set into the flaring rim of the pot. Then he knocked off the stock of the pistol and had the long barrel to use for a tube. This he rammed into the nozzle of the tea-kettle, and calked them as well as he could. The result was a crude apparatus for distilling seawater, when placed upon the bricked oven of the galley.

Imagine those three surviving seamen and the stolid redskin of a cook watching the skipper while he methodically tinkered and puttered! It was absolutely the one and final chance of salvation. Their lips were black and cracked and swollen, their tongues lolled, and they could no more than wheeze when they tried to talk. There was now a less precarious way of making fire than by rubbing dry sticks together. This had failed them most of the time. The captain had saved the flint and steel from the stock of his pistol. There was tow or tarry oakum to be shredded fine and used for tinder. This smoldered and then burst into a tiny blaze when the sparks flew from the flint, and they knew that they would not lack the blessed boon of fire.

Together they lifted the precious contrivance of the pot and the kettle and tottered with it to the galley. There was an abundance of fuel from the lumber, which was hauled through a hatch and dried on deck. Soon the steam was gushing from the pistol-barrel, and they poured cool salt water over the upturned spout of the tea-kettle to cause condensation. Fresh water trickled from the end of the pistol-barrel, and they caught it in a tin cup. It was scarcely more than a drop at a time, but they stoked the oven and lugged buckets of salt water, watch and watch, by night and day. They roused in their sleep to go on with the task with a sort of dumb instinct. They were like wretched automatons.

So scanty was the allowance of water obtained that each man was limited to “four small wine glasses” a day, perhaps a pint. It was enough to permit them to live and suffer and hope. In the warm seas which now cradled the Polly the barnacles grew fast. The captain, the cook, and the three seamen scraped them off and for some time had no other food. They ate these shell-fish mostly raw, because cooking interfered with that tiny trickle of condensed water.

FRESH WATER TRICKLED FROM THE END OF THE PISTOL-BARREL, AND THEY CAUGHT IT IN A TIN CUP

The faithful cook was the next of the five to succumb. He expired in March, after they had been three months adrift, and the manner of his death was quiet and dignified, as befitted one who might have been a painted warrior in an earlier day. The account says of him:

On the 15th of March, according to their computation, poor Moho gave up the ghost, evidently from want of water, though with much less distress than the others, and in the full exercise of his reason. He very devoutly prayed and appeared perfectly resigned to the will of God who had so sorely afflicted him.

The story of the Polly is unstained by any horrid episode of cannibalism, which occurs now and then in the old chronicles of shipwreck. In more than one seaport the people used to point at some weather-beaten mariner who was reputed to have eaten the flesh of a comrade. It made a marked man of him, he was shunned, and the unholy notoriety followed him to other ships and ports. The sailors of the Polly did cut off a leg of the poor, departed Moho, and used it as bait for sharks, and they actually caught a huge shark by so doing.

It was soon after this that they found the other pistol of the pair, and employed the barrel to increase the capacity of the still. By lengthening the tube attached to the spout of the tea-kettle, they gained more cooling surface for condensation, and the flow of fresh water now amounted to “eight junk bottles full” every twenty-four hours. Besides this, wooden gutters were hung at the eaves of the galley and of the rough shed in which they lived, and whenever rain fell, it ran into empty casks.

The crew was dwindling fast. In April, another seaman, Johnson by name, slipped his moorings and passed on to the haven of Fiddler’s Green, where the souls of all dead mariners may sip their grog and spin their yarns and rest from the weariness of the sea. Three men were left aboard the Polly, the captain and two sailors.

The brig drifted into that fabled area of the Atlantic that is known as the Sargasso Sea, which extends between latitudes 16° and 38° North, between the Azores and the Antilles. Here the ocean currents are confused and seem to move in circles, with a great expanse of stagnant ocean, where the seaweed floats in tangled patches of red and brown and green. It was an old legend that ships once caught in the Sargasso Sea were unable to extricate themselves, and so rotted miserably and were never heard of again. Columbus knew better, for his caravels sailed through these broken carpets of weed, where the winds were so small and fitful that the Genoese sailors despaired of reaching anywhere. The myth persisted and it was not dispelled until the age of steam. The doldrums of the Sargasso Sea were the dread of sailing ships.

The days and weeks of blazing calms in this strange wilderness of ocean mattered not to the blindly errant wreck of the Polly. She was a dead ship that had outwitted her destiny. She had no masts and sails to push her through these acres of leathery kelp and bright masses of weed which had drifted from the Gulf and the Caribbean to come to rest in this solitary, watery waste. And yet to the captain and his two seamen this dreaded Sargasso Sea was beneficent. The stagnant weed swarmed with fish and gaudy crabs and mollusks. Here was food to be had for the mere harvesting of it. They hauled masses of weed over the broken bulwarks and picked off the crabs by hundreds. Fishing gear was an easy problem for these handy sailormen. They had found nails enough; hand-forged and malleable. In the galley they heated and hammered them to make fish-hooks, and the lines were of small stuff “unrove” from a length of halyard. And so they caught fish, and cooked them when the oven could be spared. Otherwise they ate them raw, which was not distasteful after they had become accustomed to it. The natives of the Hawaiian Islands prefer their fish that way. Besides this, they split a large number of small fish and dried them in the hot sun upon the roof of their shelter. The sea-salt which collected in the bottom of the still was rubbed into the fish. It was a bitter condiment, but it helped to preserve them against spoiling.

The season of spring advanced until the derelict Polly had been four months afloat and wandering, and the end of the voyage was a long way off. The minds and bodies of the castaways had adjusted themselves to the intolerable situation. The most amazing aspect of the experience is that these men remained sane. They must have maintained a certain order and routine of distilling water, of catching fish, of keeping track of the indistinguishable procession of the days and weeks. Captain Cazneau’s recollection was quite clear when he came to write down his account of what had happened. The one notable omission is the death of another sailor, name unknown, which must have occurred after April. The only seaman who survived to keep the skipper company was Samuel Badger.

“VOLUSIA” OFF SALEM, BUILT AT FALMOUTH, MASS., IN 1801, AND WRECKED AT CAPE COD IN 1802

From a painting in Marine Room, Peabody Museum, Salem

By way of making the best of it, these two indomitable seafarers continued to work on their rough deck-house, “which by constant improvement had become much more commodious.” A few bundles of hewn shingles were discovered in the hold, and a keg of nails was found lodged in a corner of the forecastle. The shelter was finally made tight and weather-proof, but, alas! there was no need of having it “more commodious.” It is obvious, also, that “when reduced to two only, they had a better supply of water.” How long they remained in the Sargasso Sea it is impossible to ascertain. Late in April it is recounted that “no friendly breeze wafted to their side the seaweed from which they could obtain crabs or insects.” The mysterious impulse of the currents plucked at the keel of the Polly and drew her clear of this region of calms and of ancient, fantastic sea-tales. She moved in the open Atlantic again, without guidance or destination, and yet she seemed inexplicably to be following an appointed course, as though fate decreed that she should find rescue waiting somewhere beyond the horizon.

The brig was drifting toward an ocean more frequented, where the Yankee ships bound out to the River Plate sailed in a long slant far over to the African coast to take advantage of the booming trade-winds. She was also wallowing in the direction of the route of the East Indiamen, which departed from English ports to make the far-distant voyage around the Cape of Good Hope. None of them sighted the speck of a derelict, which floated almost level with the sea and had no spars to make her visible. Captain Cazneau and his companion saw sails glimmer against the sky-line during the last thousand miles of drift, but they vanished like bits of cloud, and none passed near enough to bring salvation.

June found the Polly approaching the Canary Islands. The distance of her journey had been about two thousand miles, which would make the average rate of drift something more than three hundred miles a month, or ten miles per day. The season of spring and its apple blossoms had come and gone in New England, and the brig had long since been mourned as missing with all hands. It was on the twentieth of June that the skipper and his companion—two hairy, ragged apparitions—saw three ships which appeared to be heading in their direction. This was in latitude 28° North and longitude 13° West, and if you will look at a chart you will note that the wreck would soon have stranded on the coast of Africa. The three ships, in company, bore straight down at the pitiful little brig, which trailed fathoms of sea-growth along her hull. She must have seemed uncanny to those who beheld her and wondered at the living figures that moved upon the weather-scarred deck. She might have inspired “The Ancient Mariner.”

Not one ship, but three, came bowling down to hail the derelict. They manned the braces and swung the main-yards aback, beautiful, tall ships and smartly handled, and presently they lay hove to. The captain of the nearest one shouted a hail through his brass trumpet, but the skipper of the Polly had no voice to answer back. He sat weeping upon the coaming of a hatch. Although not given to emotion, he would have told you that it had been a hard voyage. A boat was dropped from the davits of this nearest ship, which flew the red ensign from her spanker-gaff. A few minutes later Captain Cazneau and Samuel Badger, able seaman, were alongside the good ship Fame of Hull, Captain Featherstone, and lusty arms pulled them up the ladder. It was six months to a day since the Polly had been thrown on her beam-ends and dismasted.

The three ships had been near together in light winds for several days, it seemed, and it occurred to their captains to dine together on board the Fame. And so the three skippers were there to give the survivors of the Polly a welcome and to marvel at the yarn they spun. The Fame was homeward bound from Rio Janeiro. It is pleasant to learn that Captain Cazneau and Samuel Badger “were received by these humane Englishmen with expressions of the most exalted sensibility.” The musty old narrative concludes:

Thus was ended the most shocking catastrophe which our seafaring history has recorded for many years, after a series of distresses from December 20 to the 20th of June, a period of one hundred and ninety-two days. Every attention was paid to the sufferers that generosity warmed with pity and fellow-feeling could dictate, on board the Fame. They were transferred from this ship to the brig Dromio and arrived in the United States in safety.

Here the curtain falls. I for one should like to hear more incidents of this astonishing cruise of the derelict Polly and also to know what happened to Captain Cazneau and Samuel Badger after they reached the port of Boston. Probably they went to sea again, and more than likely in a privateer to harry British merchantmen, for the recruiting officer was beating them up to the rendezvous with fife and drum, and in August of 1812 the frigate Constitution, with ruddy Captain Isaac Hull walking the poop in a gold-laced coat, was pounding the Guerrière to pieces in thirty minutes, with broadsides whose thunder echoed round the world.

“Ships are all right. It is the men in them,” said one of Joseph Conrad’s wise old mariners. This was supremely true of the little brig that endured and suffered so much, and among the humble heroes of blue water by no means the least worthy to be remembered are Captain Cazneau and Samuel Badger, able seaman, and Moho, the Indian cook.

CHAPTER II
HOW THE SCHOONER EXERTION FELL AMONG THIEVES

This is the story of a very shabby set of rascals who wrecked and plundered an honest little merchant vessel a hundred years ago and disgraced the profession of piracy. In truth, even in the heyday of the black flag and the Spanish Main, most pirates were no better than salt-water burglars who would rather run than fight. The glamour of romance has been kinder to them than they deserved. Their vocation had fallen to a low ebb indeed in the early part of the nineteenth century, when they still infested the storied waters of the Caribbean and struggled along, in some instances, on earnings no larger than those of a minister or school-teacher of to-day. Ambitious young men had ceased to follow piracy as a career. The distinguished leaders had long since vanished, most of them properly hanged in chains, and it was no longer possible to become a William Kidd, a Captain Ned England, or a Charles Vane.

The schooner Exertion, Captain Barnabas Lincoln, sailed from Boston, bound to Trinidad, Cuba, on November 13, 1821, with a crew consisting of Joshua Brackett, mate; David Warren, cook; and Thomas Young, George Reed, and Francis De Suze as able seamen. There was nothing in the cargo to tempt a self-respecting pirate; no pieces of eight or doubloons or jewels, but flour, beef, pork, lard, butter, fish, onions, potatoes, apples, hams, furniture, and shooks with a total invoiced value of eight thousand dollars. In this doleful modern era of the high cost of living, such a cargo would, of course persuade almost any honest householder to turn pirate if he thought there was a fighting chance of stowing all these valuables in his cellar.

The Exertion jogged along without incident for a five weeks’ passage, which brought her close to Cape Cruz and the end of the run, when a strange sail swept out of a channel among the sandy Cuban keys, with sweeps out and a deck filled with men. There were forty of them, unkempt, bewhiskered, and they appeared to be so many walking arsenals of muskets, blunderbusses, cutlasses, pistols, and dirks. Their schooner mounted two carronades, and flew a blue-and-white flag of the Republic of Mexico, which was a device popular among sea-rovers who were no better than they should be. It permitted liberty of action, something like a New Jersey charter which corporations have found elastic in times more recent.

Captain Lincoln hove the Exertion to and hoped for the best, having only five men and seven muskets with which to repel boarders. The United States was at peace with Mexico and Spain, and he tried to believe, as he tells us, that “the republican flag indicated both honor and friendship from those who wore it.” Alas! it was soon discovered that these were common pirates, for they sent a boat aboard in charge of the first lieutenant, Bolidar, with six or eight Spaniards, “armed with as many of the aforementioned weapons as they could well sling about their bodies.” The Exertion was ordered to follow the other schooner, the Mexican by name, and the two vessels came to anchor off Cay Largo, about thirty leagues from Trinidad.

There one of the pirates, the sailing-master, who called himself Nikola, remained in the Exertion to examine the captain’s papers. This forbidding person was, in fact, a Scotchman, as his speech readily disclosed, and he was curiously out of place among the dirty crew of Spanish renegades. In him the unlucky skipper of the Exertion had found a friend, of whom he said:

This Nikola had a countenance rather pleasing, although his beard and mustachios had a frightful appearance,—his face, apparently full of anxiety, indicated something in my favor. He gave me back my papers, saying, “Take good care of them, for I am afraid you have fallen into bad hands.”

The pirates then sent a boat to the Exertion with more men and arms, leaving a heavy guard on board and taking Captain Lincoln and his Yankee seamen off to their own low, rakish craft, where they served out the rum and vainly tried to persuade them to enlist, with promise of dazzling booty. Captain Lincoln was not at all attracted by this business opportunity, and sadly he returned to his schooner, where he found Lieutenant Bolidar in the cabin and the place in a sorry mess. It is well known that, whatever their other virtues, pirates as a class had no manners. With a few exceptions the best of them lived like pigs and behaved like hooligans. The captain’s narrative declares:

They had emptied a case of liquors, and broken a cheese to pieces and crumbled it on the table and the cabin floor and, elated with their prize as they called it, they had drunk so much as to make them desperately abusive. I was permitted to lie down in my berth but, reader, if you have ever been awakened by a gang of armed desperadoes who have taken possession of your habitation in the midnight hour, you can imagine my feelings. Sleep was a stranger to me and anxiety was my guest. Bolidar, however, pretended friendship and flattered me with the prospect of being set at liberty, but I found him, as I suspected, a consummate hypocrite. Indeed, his very looks indicated it.

He was a stout and well-built man, of a dark swarthy complexion, with keen, ferocious eyes, huge whiskers and beard under his chin and on his lips. He was a Portuguese by birth but had become a naturalized Frenchman,—had a wife and children in France and was well-known there as commander of a first-rate privateer. His appearance was truly terrific. He could talk some English and had a most lion-like voice.

THE PIRATE CAPTAIN BOARDING THE CAPTURED “EXERTION”

Next day the scurvy knaves began plundering the Exertion of her cargo of potatoes, butter, apples, beans, and so on, ripped up the floors in search of more liquor, found some hard cider, and guzzled it until officers and men were in a fight, all tipsy together, and then simmered down to sing sentimental ditties in the twilight. Soon after this both schooners got under way and sailed to another haven in the lee of Brigantine Cay. Captain Lincoln now saw something more of the roving scapegrace of a Scotchman who called himself Nikola. He was a pirate with a sentimental streak in him and professed himself to be unhappy in his lawless employment and declared he had signed articles in the belief that he was bound privateering.

A theatrical person was the bewhiskered Nikola, who properly belonged to fiction of the romantic school. Sympathetic Captain Lincoln wrote that he

lamented most deeply his own situation, for he was one of those men whose early good impressions were not entirely effaced. He told me that those who had taken me were no better than pirates and their end would be the halter, but he added, with peculiar emotion, “I will never be hung as a pirate,” showing me a bottle of laudanum which he had found in my medicine chest and saying, “If we are overtaken, this shall cheat the hangman before we are condemned.”

Another day’s cruise to the eastward and the trim, taut little Exertion suffered the melancholy fate of shipwreck, not bravely in a gale, but mishandled and wantonly gutted by her captors. First she stranded on a bar while making in for a secluded creek, and was floated after throwing overboard the deck-load of shooks for making sugar-barrels. Then her sails were stripped, the rigging cut to pieces, and the masts chopped over the side lest they be sighted from seaward. After that the pirates hewed gaps in the deck and bulwarks in order to loot the rest of the cargo more easily, and the staunch schooner was left to bleach her bones on the Cuban coast.

The amiable Nikola found himself in trouble because of his friendly feeling for Captain Lincoln. The Spanish sailors tied him to a tree and were about to shoot him as a soft-hearted traitor who was guilty of unprofessional conduct, but a courageous French pirate surged into the picture with several men of his own opinion, and remarked that when the shooting began there would be other targets besides Nikola. This convinced the mob that it might be healthier to let the Scotchman alone.

The captain and crew of the Exertion were threatened and ill used, but there seemed to be no intention of making them walk the plank or hewing them down with cutlasses. What to do with them was a problem rather perplexing, which was proof that the trade of piracy had fallen from its former estate. These were thrifty freebooters, however, and the business was capably organized. There were even traces of the efficiency management which was to become the religion of the twentieth century. The pirates’ largest boat was manned by a crew which discarded some of its weapons, combed its whiskers, even washed its faces, and set off for the port of Principe in charge of the terrifying Bolidar.

The boat carried letters to a merchant by the name of Dominico who acted as the commercial agent of the industrious pirates and sold their plunder for them. A representative of his was kept on board the wicked schooner and went to sea with her, presumably to make sure of honest dealings, a sensible precaution in the case of such slippery gentry. The whole arrangement was most reprehensible, of course, but it had flourished on a much larger scale in the godly ports of Boston and New York during an earlier era.

It was to put a stop to such scandalous traffic that Richard Coote, Earl of Bellomont, had been sent out by King William III in 1695 as royal governor of the colonies of New York and Massachusetts. Colonial merchants, outwardly the pattern of respectability, were in secret partnership with the swarm of pirates which infested the American coast and waxed rich on the English commerce of the Indian Ocean.

“I send you, my Lord, to New York,” said King William to Bellomont, “because an honest and intrepid man is wanted to put these abuses down, and because I believe you to be such a man.”

As a result of these instructions, Captain William Kidd was employed to hunt the pirates down by sea while Governor Bellomont made it hot for the unscrupulous merchants ashore who were, no doubt, the ancestors of the modern American profiteers in food and clothing, who are also most respectable men. Captain Kidd was a merchant shipmaster of brave and honorable repute who had a comfortable home in Liberty Street, New York, was married to a widow of good family, and was highly esteemed by the Dutch and English people of the town. A shrewd trader who made money for his owners, he was also a fighting seaman of such proved mettle that he had been given command of privateers which cruised off the coasts of the colonies and harried the French in the West Indies. His excellent reputation and character are attested by official documents.

ARMED WITH AS MANY OF THE AFOREMENTIONED WEAPONS AS THEY COULD WELL SLING ABOUT THEIR BODIES

How Captain Kidd, sent out to catch pirates, was convicted of turning pirate himself rather than sail home empty-handed is another story. Fate has played strange tricks with the memory of this seventeenth-century seafarer who never cut a throat or scuttled a ship, and who was hanged at Execution Dock for the excessively unromantic crime of cracking the skull of his mutinous gunner with a wooden bucket.

Poor Captain Barnabas Lincoln of Boston, having lost his schooner and cargo, was righteously indignant at discovering how the infamous business was carried on. Said he:

I was informed by a line from Nikola that the pirates had a man on board, a native of Principe, who in the garb of a sailor was a partner with Dominico, but I could not get sight of him. This lets us a little into the plan by which this atrocious system has been conducted. Merchants having partners on board of these pirates! Thus pirates at sea and robbers on land are associated to destroy the peaceful trader.

Nikola remained true to Captain Lincoln, even sending him a letter from Principe to tell him about the disposition of the stolen cargo and what prices it was fetching. In this letter he revealed the fact that his true name was Jamieson and concluded with this romantic flight:

Perhaps in your old age, when you recline with ease in a corner of your cottage, you will have the goodness to drop a tear of pleasure to the memory of him whose highest ambition should have been to subscribe himself, though devoted to the gallows, your friend,

Nikola Monacre.

Another streak of sentiment was discovered in one of the Exertion’s sailors, Francis De Suze, a Portuguese, who finally weakened and decided to join the outlaws. He was won over by the artful persuasions of his fellow-countryman, Lieutenant Bolidar of the ferocious mien and lion-like voice. To Captain Lincoln he explained, with tears in his eyes:

“I shall do nothing but what I am compelled to do and will not aid in the least to hurt you or your vessel. I am very sorry to leave you.”

The pious master of the Exertion bore up under his troubles with a spirit truly admirable, but it was one thing after another, and under date of Sunday, December 30, he wrote in his diary:

This day, which particularly reminds Christians of the high duties of compassion and benevolence, is never observed by these pirates. This, of course, we might expect, as they do not often know when Sunday comes and if they do, it is spent in gambling. Early this morning, the merchant, as they call him, came with a large boat for more cargo. I was ordered into a boat with my crew, without any breakfast, and carried about three miles to a small island out of sight of the Exertion and left there by the side of a pond of thick, muddy water with nothing to eat but a few biscuits. One of the boat’s crew told us that the merchant was afraid of being recognized, and when he had gone the boat would return for us, but we passed the day in the greatest anxiety. At night, however, the boat came and took us again on board the Exertion where to our surprise and grief we found they had broken open the trunks and chests and taken all our wearing apparel, not leaving me even a shirt or a pair of pantaloons, nor sparing a small miniature of my wife which was in the trunk.

The pirate schooner was employed a few days later to fill her hold with cargo from the Exertion and hoist sail for Principe. They lifted the stuff out with a “Yo, ho, ho!” which made Captain Lincoln so unhappy that he pensively wrote:

How different was this sound from what it would have been had I been permitted to pass unmolested by these lawless plunderers and been favored with a safe arrival at the port of my destination where my cargo would have found an excellent sale. Then would the “yo, ho, ho!” on its discharging have been a delightful sound to me.

As a final touch to affect the modern reader with a sense of comedy and the captain with additional woe, the pirates fished out the Exertion’s consignments of furniture and, for lack of space below, sailed off with chairs lashed to the rail in rows and tables hung in the rigging. There now appears the figure of the pirate commander himself, for Bolidar was merely the lieutenant, or executive officer. To Captain Lincoln, gloomily watching the pirate schooner in the offing, with her picturesque garniture of hand-made New England furniture, came Bolidar with five men, his own personal armament consisting of a blunderbuss, cutlass, a long knife, and a pair of pistols. This fearsome lieutenant took Captain Lincoln by the arm, led him aside, and imparted:

“My capitan sends me for your wash.”

Properly resentful, the master of the Exertion replied:

“Damn your eyes! I have no clothes, nor any soap to wash with. You have stolen them all.”

“Ah, ha, but I will have your wash, pronto!” cried Bolidar, waving the blunderbuss. “What you call him that makes tick-tock, same as the clock?”

Disgustedly Captain Lincoln extracted his watch from the place where he had hidden it. The cloud had a silver lining, for Bolidar graciously handed over a small bundle at parting.

It contained a pair of linen drawers sent me by Nikola, also the Rev. Mr. Brooks’ Family Prayer Book. This gave me great satisfaction. Soon after, Bolidar returned with his captain who had one arm slung up, yet with as many implements of war as his diminutive self could conveniently carry. He told me (through an interpreter who was his prisoner) that on his last cruise he had fallen in with two Spanish privateers and beat them off, but had fourteen of his men killed and was himself wounded in the arm. Bolidar turned to me and said, “It is a d—n lie,” which words proved to be correct for his arm was not wounded and when I saw him again he had forgotten to sling it up.

An accurate and convincing portrait, this, and painted with very few strokes—the strutting little braggart of a pirate chief who resorted to such cheap and stagy tricks as bandaging his arm to make an impression! Having disposed of the cargo, it now transpired that the prisoners were to be marooned and left to perish. After all, the traditions of piracy had not been wholly lost and these sordid rascals were running true to form. With an inkling of this fate, Mr. Joshua Brackett, the mate of the Exertion, was heard to say:

“I cannot tell what awaits us, but it appears to me that the worst is to come.”

This is how Captain Lincoln quoted it in his diary, but the mate of the schooner, sorely tried as he must have been, was more likely to exclaim:

“I can’t fathom all their —— —— tricks, but it looks to me as if the bloody rogues had made up their minds to scupper us, and may they sizzle in hell for a million years!”

The pirate chief and his officers held a whispered conference and then spent the last night ashore in gambling, the diminutive leader “in hopes of getting back some of the five hundred dollars he had lost a few nights before; which made him unusually fractious.”

Before they were marooned, Captain Lincoln took pains to note down that the pirates were sporting new canvas trousers made from the light sails of the Exertion and that they had cut up the colors to make fancy belts to keep their money in, and he added this vivid little touch to the portrait of the chief, “The captain had on one of my best shirts, a cleaner one than I had ever seen him wear before.”

At sunset the crew of the Exertion, with several prisoners taken out of a Spanish merchant prize, were put into a boat. At this lamentable moment, Nikola stepped to the front again and said to Captain Lincoln:

“My friend, I will give you your book,” (a volume of Rev. Mr. Coleman’s sermons). “It is the only thing of yours that is in my possession. I dare not attempt anything more. Never mind, I may see you again before I die.”

There were eleven prisoners in all, without arms, and to sustain life only a ten-gallon keg of water, part of a barrel of flour, one ham, and a little salt fish, not forgetting the precious volume of Mr. Coleman’s sermons. They were carried to a tiny key, or islet, no more than a shoal of white sand an acre in extent and barely lifted above high tide, forty miles off the Cuban coast and well out of the track of vessels. No wonder that Captain Lincoln was moved to ejaculate:

“Look at us now, my friends, left benighted on a little spot of sand in the midst of the ocean, with every appearance of a violent thunder tempest and a boisterous night. Judge of my feelings and the circumstances which our band of sufferers now witnessed. Perhaps you can, and have pitied us. I assure you we were very wretched, and to depict the scene is beyond my power.”

They found a fragment of a thatched hut built by turtle fishermen, but now whipped bare by the winds, and it served as a slight shelter from the burning sun. Fire they kindled by means of a piece of cotton-wick yarn and a flint and steel. They dug holes for fresh water, but it was too salty to drink. At bedtime the captain read aloud selections from the Rev. Mr. Brooks’s Family Prayer-Book, and they slept in the sand when the scorpions, centipedes, lizards, and mosquitoes permitted.

Of driftwood, palmetto logs, and bits of board they fashioned a little raft and so explored the key nearest them. There they discovered some shooks, planks, and pieces of spar which had been in the Exertion’s deck-load and were thrown overboard when she grounded on the bar. With the amazing handiness of good seamen they proceeded to build a boat of this pitiful material. “Some of the Spaniards had secreted their long knives in their trouserlegs, which proved very useful in fitting timbers, and a gimblet of mine enabled us to use wooden pins,” explains Captain Lincoln. “And now our spirits began to revive, although water, water was continually in our minds. Our labor was extremely burdensome, and the Spaniards considerably peevish, but they would often say to me, ‘Never mind, Captain, bye-and-bye Americans or Spanish catch ’em and we go see ’em hung.’”

David Warren, the cook of the Exertion, had been ailing, and the cruel ordeal of being marooned was too much for him. The captain perceived that he was soon to leave them and suggested, as they sat by the fire:

“I think it most likely that we shall die here soon, David, but as some one of us may survive to carry the tidings to our friends, if you have anything to say respecting your family, now is the time.”

The young sailor—he was only twenty-six—replied to this: “I have a mother in Saco where I belong—she is a second time a widow. To-morrow, if you can spare a scrap of paper and a pencil, I will write something.”

No to-morrow came to him. He passed out in the night, and the skipper thought of his own wife and children in Boston. They dug a grave in the sand, made a coffin of shooks, and stood with bare heads while Captain Lincoln read the funeral prayer from the consolatory compilation of the Rev. Mr. Brooks. One of the Spanish prisoners, an old man named Manuel, made a wooden cross, and with great pains carved upon it the words, “Jesus Christ Hath Him Now,” and placed it at the head of the grave. There was the old Puritan strain in Captain Lincoln, who commented, “Although I did not believe in the mysterious influence of the cross, yet I was perfectly willing it should stand there.”

Enfeebled and lacking food and water, they stubbornly toiled at building the boat, which was shaped like a flat-iron. When at length they launched the wretched little box, it leaked like a basket, and, to their dismay, would hold no more than six of them and stay afloat, four to row, one to steer, and one to bail. Three Spaniards and a Frenchman argued that they should go in search of help because they were acquainted with the lay of the coast and could talk to the people. This was agreed to, and Mr. Brackett, the mate, was also selected to go, because the captain considered it his duty to stay with his men. The sixth man was Joseph Baxter, and there is no other mention of him in the narrative, so he must have been one of the prisoners who had been brought along from another prize. They were given a keg of water, “the least salty,” a few pancakes and salt fish, and embarked with the best wishes and prayers of the other survivors.

On the torrid key waited the captain, old Manuel, Thomas Young, and George Reed, while the painful days and the anxious nights dragged past until almost a week had gone. The flour-barrel was empty, and they were trying to exist on prickly pears and shell-fish, while the torments of thirst were agonizing. At last they sighted a boat drifting by about a mile distant, and hope flickered anew. The raft was shoved off, and two of them overhauled the empty boat, which seemed to offer a way of escape. Imagine their feelings at discovering that it was the same boat in which Mr. Brackett and the five men had rowed away to find rescue in the last extremity! It was full of water, without oars or paddles. No wonder that Captain Lincoln wrote in his journal next day:

“This morning was indeed the most gloomy I had ever experienced. There appeared hardly a ray of hope that my friend Brackett could return, seeing the boat was lost. Our provisions gone, our mouths parched extremely with thirst, our strength wasted, our spirits broken, and our hopes imprisoned within the circumference of this desolate island in the midst of an unfrequented ocean,—all these things gave to the scene the hue of death.”

Later in this same day a sail was seen against the blue horizon. The sloop boldly tacked among the tortuous shoals and was evidently heading for the islet. Soon she fired a gun, and the castaways took her to be another pirate vessel. She dropped anchor and lowered a boat in which three men pulled to the beach. “Thinking it no worse to die by sword than famine,” Captain Lincoln walked down to meet them. As the boat drove through the surf, the man in the bow jumped out, waded ashore, and rushed to embrace the captain.

It was none other than the Scotchman, Nikola Monacre, henceforth to be known by the reputable and rightful name of Jamieson! He had shorn off his ruffianly whiskers and abandoned his evil ways. The moment could have been no more dramatic, the coincidence any happier, if it had been contrived by a motion-picture director. To the modern reader it will come as an agreeable surprise, I fancy, for until now the character of Nikola, as conveyed in glimpses by Captain Lincoln, fails to win one’s implicit confidence. While among the pirates he seemed a bit mushy and impressionable, not quite the man to stand by through thick and thin and hew a way out of his difficulties; but this was an unfair judgment. He was leal and true to the last hair of his discarded mustachios. As though he surmised that Captain Lincoln might have formed the same opinion of him, the first words of this worthy hero were:

“Do you now believe that Jamieson is your friend? And are these all that are left of you? Ah, I suspected, and now I know what you were put here for!”

Captain Lincoln explained the absence of the mate and the five sailors who had vanished from the waterlogged boat. Jamieson had heard nothing of them and ventured the conjecture:

“How unfortunate! They must be lost, or some pirates have taken them.”

He called to the two comrades who had come ashore with him, Frenchmen and fine fellows, who also embraced the castaways and held to their parched lips a tea-kettle filled with wine, and then fed them sparingly with a dish of salt beef and potatoes. The others of the sloop’s crew were summoned ashore, and while they all sat on the beach and ate and drank, the admirable Jamieson spun the yarn of his own adventures. The pirates had captured four small coasting-vessels and, being short of prize-masters, had put him in charge of one of them, with a crew which included the two Frenchmen. The orders were to follow the piratical Mexican into a harbor.

His captured schooner leaked so much that Jamieson abandoned her and shifted to a sloop, in which he altered his course at night and so slipped clear of the pirates. First he sailed back to the wreck of the Exertion on the chance that Captain Lincoln might be there. Disappointed in this, he went to sea again and laid a course for the key on which the prisoners had been marooned.

“We had determined among ourselves,” he explained, “that, should an opportunity occur, we would come and save your lives, as we now have.”

All hands went aboard Jamieson’s sloop, and left the horrid place of their banishment over the stern. The first port of call was the inlet in which the Exertion lay stranded. She was a forlorn derelict, stripped of everything, and Captain Lincoln bade his luckless schooner a sorrowful farewell. While beating out of this passage, an armed brig was sighted five miles distant. She piped a boat away, which fired several musket-balls through the sloop’s mainsail as soon as they drew near each other, and it was suspected that these might be the same old pirates of the Mexican. Declining to surrender, Jamieson and Captain Lincoln served out muskets, and they peppered the strange boat in a brisk little encounter until the brig sent two more boats away, and resistance was seen to be futile.

The armed vessel turned out to be a lawful Spanish privateer, whose captain showed no resentment at the fusillade. Indeed, he was handsomely cordial, a very gentlemanly sailor, and invited Captain Lincoln and his men into the cabin for dinner, where he informed them that he had commanded a Yankee privateer out of Boston during the War of 1812. Jamieson and his crew, for reasons best known to themselves, signed articles as privateersmen and stayed in the brig. This was preferable to risking the halter ashore.

Captain Lincoln was landed at Trinidad, Cuba, where he found American friends and was soon able to secure a passage to Boston. It was not until months later that he learned of the safe arrival on the Cuban coast of Mr. Brackett, the mate, and the five men who had vanished in the open boat. What befell them at sea, and how they were picked up, is not revealed.

It would be a pity to dismiss the engaging Jamieson without some further knowledge of his checkered career. A year and a half after their parting, Captain Lincoln received a letter from him. He was living quietly in Montego Bay, Jamaica, and at the captain’s very urgent invitation he came to Boston for a visit. While in the privateer brig, as he told it, they had fought a Colombian eighteen-gun sloop-of-war for three hours. After a hammer-and-tongs engagement, both ships drew off, very much battered. The Spanish privateer limped into Santiago for repairs, and Jamieson was sent to a hospital with a bullet through his arm. From there he had made his way to Jamaica, where friends cared for him and kept him clear of the law.

He had the pleasure of seeing several of his old shipmates of the Mexican brought into Montego Bay, whence they were carried to Kingston and ceremoniously hanged by the neck. Among them was Baltizar, pilot of the pirate schooner, and in the words of Captain Lincoln:

“He was an old man, and as Jamieson said, it was a melancholy and heart-rending sight to see him borne to execution with those gray hairs which might have been venerable in virtuous old age, now a reproach and shame to this hoary villain, for he was full of years and old in iniquity.”

You may be sure that the picaresque Scotch rover, who had been so faithful and kind, found a warm welcome at the fireside of Captain Lincoln and in the taverns of the Boston waterside. He was contented to lead the humdrum life of virtue and sailed with the skipper as mate in a new schooner on several voyages to the West Indies. In his later years he tired of the offshore trade and joined the fishing-fleet out of Hingham during the summer months, while in the winter he taught navigation to the young sailors of the neighborhood who aspired to rise to a mate’s or master’s berth.

His grave is on the shore of Cape Cod, and as Captain Lincoln wrote of him, “Peace to his ashes. They rest in a strange land, far from his kindred and his native country.”

According to his own account, Jamieson was of a very respectable family in Greenock. His father was a cloth merchant of considerable wealth, but being left an orphan, he had run away to sea and engaged in an astonishing variety of adventures. Of him Captain Lincoln said:

He had received a polite education and was of a very gentlemanly deportment. He spoke several languages and was skilled in drawing and painting. He had travelled extensively and his wide fund of information made him a most entertaining companion. His observations on the character of different nations were very liberal; with a playful humorousness quite free from bigotry and narrow prejudice.

An entertaining companion and philosopher, indeed, whose outlook had been mellowed by the broadening influence of piracy, and you and I would like nothing better than to have sat down with this reformed gentleman of fortune a hundred years ago and listened to his playful comments on the virtues and the vices of mankind, and his wondrous yarns of men and ships and the winds that tramp the world.

Perhaps as he moved so sedately in the ordered life of Boston and Hingham, or fared to the southward again as mate of a trading-schooner, he shivered at recollection of that day in Kingston when ten of his old shipmates of the Mexican dangled from the gallows-tree and the populace crowded to enjoy the diverting spectacle. And in his dreams he may have heard the wailing voice of Pedro Nondre, when the rope broke and he fell to the ground alive: “Mercy! mercy! they kill me without cause! Oh, good Christians, protect me. Is there no Christian in this land? Muero innocente! Adios, para siempre adios!”

A true tale this, every word of it, as are all the others in this book, but lacking one essential thing to make it complete. There is no mention in the diary of Captain Lincoln to bring us the comforting assurance that Bolidar, the swaggering lieutenant, and his diminutive blackguard of a chief received the solicitous attention of the hangman, as they handsomely deserved.

CHAPTER III
THE TRAGEDY OF THE FRIGATE MEDUSA

Among the countless episodes of disaster at sea, the fate of the French frigate Medusa and her people still possesses a poignant and mournful distinction. Other ships have gone down with much greater loss of life, including such modern instances as the Titanic and the Lusitania, or have been missing with all hands, but the story of the Medusa casts a dark shadow across the chronicles of human suffering, even though a century has passed since the event. There are some enterprises which seem foredoomed to failure by a conspiracy of circumstances, as if a spell of evil enchantment had been woven to thwart and destroy them. Of such a kind was this most unhappy voyage.

As an incident of the final overthrow of Napoleon, Great Britain returned to France the colonial territory of Sénégal on the west coast of Africa, between Cape Blanco and the Gambia River. A French expedition was equipped and sent out to reoccupy and govern the little settlements and clearings which thinly fringed the tropical wilderness. It included officials, scientists, soldiers, servants, and laborers, who sailed from Rochefort in the Medusa frigate and three smaller vessels on the seventeenth of June, 1816.

The French Navy had been shattered and swept from the seas by the broadsides of Nelson’s fleets, and its morale had ebbed. This mission, moreover, was not a strictly naval affair, and the personnel of the frigate was recruited with no particular care. The seamen were the scrapings of the waterfront, and the officers had not been selected for efficiency. They were typical neither of the French arms nor people. It seemed a commonplace task, no doubt, to sail with the summer breezes on a voyage not much farther than the Cape Verd Islands and disembark the passengers and cargo.

Captain de Chaumareys of the Medusa was a light-hearted, agreeable shipmate, but he appears to have been a most indifferent seaman and a worse master of men and emergencies. When no more than ten days out from port he discovered that his reckoning had set him thirty leagues, or almost a hundred miles, out of his course. This was not enough to condemn him utterly, because navigation was a crude art a century ago and ships blundered about the high seas and found their way to port in the most astonishing manner. But Captain de Chaumareys was not made cautious by his error, and he drove along with fatuous confidence in his ability and would pay no heed to the opinions of his officers. He also managed to lose touch with the three smaller ships of the squadron, and they vanished from his ken. It was one fatal mischance after another.

On the first of July, when the frigate crossed the tropic of Cancer, the debonair captain made it an excuse for a holiday and took personal charge of the gaieties which so absorbed him that he turned over the command of the ship to M. Richefort, one of the civilian officials who had seen naval service. There was a feeling of uneasiness on board, for all the fiddling and singing and dancing, and the officers discussed it over their wine in the ward-room and the passengers were aware of it in the cabins, “while the crew performed the fantastic ceremonies usual on such occasions although the frigate was surrounded by all the unseen perils of the ocean. A few persons, aware of the danger, remonstrated, but without effect, even when it was ascertained that the Medusa was on the bank of Arguin.”

The ship was, in fact, entrapped among the shoals and reefs which extended like a labyrinth far out from the African coast. It was an area of many disasters to stout ships, whose crews had been taken captive or killed by savage tribes, if they survived the hostility of the sea. M. Richefort, who was so obligingly acting as commander of the Medusa, insisted that there were a hundred fathoms of water under the keel and not the slightest cause for anxiety, and they still danced on deck to the scraping of the fiddles.

With a crash that flung the merry-makers this way and that, and brought the spars tumbling about their ears, the Medusa struck in only sixteen feet of water, and the deadly sands had inextricably gripped her. She was a lost ship on this bright day of calm seas and sunny weather and the sailors blithely tripping it heel-and-toe. It was soon realized that the frigate might pound to pieces in the first gale of wind, and that advantage had best be taken of the quiescent ocean to get away from her. The coast was known to be no more than forty miles distant, and the hope of escape was strong.

There was ample time in which to abandon ship with some order and method, to break out provisions and water-barrels, to build a number of buoyant rafts and carefully equip them, to safeguard the lives of the people as far as possible. The frigate carried carpenters, mechanics, and other artisans, and all manner of tools for the colony of Sénégal. Hundreds of people had been saved from other ships in situations even more desperate than this. There had been strong men, unwavering authority, and disciplined obedience in them, however, but this doomed frigate was like a madhouse, and panic ran from deck to deck. The crew was slack at best, but it could not be held altogether responsible for the demoralization. The soldiers and laborers were Spanish, French, Italian, and negroes, many of whom had probably been in prison or the convict hulks, and were sent to Africa for their country’s good.

The frigate had five seaworthy boats, which were hurriedly launched and filled with people whose only thought was to save their own skins. In one of them was the governor of Sénégal and his family, and in another were placed four children and the wives of the officials. In this respect the ancient chivalry of the sea was lived up to. There were heroes among the French army officers, as might have been expected, for they kept clear of the struggle for the boats, and succeeded in holding most of their men, who were assigned to the one raft which had been frantically thrown together.

The five boats shoved off and waited for the raft, which it was proposed to take in tow. Barrels of bread and wine and water had been hoisted on deck, but in the confusion almost all the stores were thrown into the boats. M. Correard, geographical engineer attached to the expedition, had gallantly volunteered to take chances with his own men on the raft. He had kept his wits about him, and delayed to ask Captain de Chaumareys whether navigation instruments and charts had been provided for the raft. He was assured that a naval officer was attending to these essentials and would be in charge of the party. Forgetting his duty entirely, this faithless officer scrambled into one of the boats, and the raft was left without means of guidance.

There are cowards in all services, afloat and ashore, but they are seldom conspicuous. Among those who fled away in the boats was the gay Captain de Chaumareys, who oozed through a port-hole without delaying a moment. In this manner he disappeared from the narrative, the last glimpse of him as framed in the port-hole while his ship was still crowded with terrified castaways for whom there were no boats. He was a feather-brained poltroon who, by accident, happened to be a Frenchman.

BOATS WERE FILLED WITH MEN WHOSE ONLY THOUGHT WAS TO SAVE THEIR SKINS

There were intrepid men in the Medusa who bullied the others into helping make a raft. The best that they could do was to launch a pitiful contrivance of spars and planks held together by lashings. It was sixty-five feet long and twenty broad, not even decked over, twisting and working to the motion of the waves which slapped over it or splashed between the timbers when the ocean was smooth. As soon as it floated alongside the frigate, one hundred and fifty persons wildly jammed themselves upon it, standing in water to their waists and in danger of slipping between the spars and planks. The only part of the raft which was unsubmerged when laden had room for no more than fifteen men to lie down upon it.

The weather was still calm, and the ship rested solidly upon her sandy bed, the upper decks clear of water. It seems incredible that no barrels of beef and biscuit were lashed to the timbers of the raft, no water-casks rolled from the tiers and swung overside. A kind of mob hysteria swept these people along, and the men of resolution were carried with it. They were unaccustomed to the sea, and a frenzied fear of it stampeded them. The flimsy, wave-washed raft floated away from the Medusa with only biscuit enough for one scanty meal and a few casks of wine. The stage was set, as one might say, for inevitable horrors.

One of the boats which was not so crowded as the others had the grace to row back to the ship with orders to take off a few, if there were men still aboard. To the surprise of the lieutenant in the boat, sixty men had been left behind because there was not even a foothold for them upon the raft. The boat managed to stow all but seventeen of them, who were very drunk by this time and preferred to stand by the ship and the spirit-room. The fear of death had ceased to trouble them.

For the moment let us shift the scene to survey the fate of these seventeen poor wretches who were abandoned on board of the Medusa. The five boats reached the African coast and most of their company lived to find Sénégal. The governor bethought himself that a large amount of specie had been left in the wreck, and he sent a little vessel off; but lack of provisions and bad weather drove her twice back to port, so that fifty-two days, more than seven weeks, had passed before the Medusa was sighted, her upper works still above water.

Three of the seventeen men were found alive, “but they lived in separate corners of the hulk and never met but to run at each other with drawn knives.” Several others had sailed off on a tiny raft which was cast up on the coast of the Sahara, but the men were drowned. A lone sailor drifted away on a hencoop as the craft of his choice, and foundered in sight of the frigate. All the rest had died of too little food and too much rum, after the provisions had been lost or spoiled by the breaking up of the ship.

It was understood that the raft, with its burden of one hundred and fifty souls, was to be taken in tow by the five boats strung in a line, and this flotilla would make for the nearest coast, which might have been reached in two or three days of favoring weather. After a few hours of slow, but encouraging, progress, the tow-line of the captain’s boat parted. Instead of making fast to the raft again, all the other boats cast off their cables and, under sail and oar, set off to the eastward to save themselves. The miserable people who beheld this desertion denounced it as an act of cruelty and perfidy beyond belief. It may have been in the captain’s mind to make haste and send a vessel to pick up the castaways, but his previous behavior had been such that he scarcely deserves the benefit of the doubt.

On the makeshift raft there were those who knew how to die like Frenchmen and gentlemen. What they endured has been handed down to us in the personal accounts of M. Correard and M. Savigny, colonial officials who wrote with that touch, vivid and dramatic, which is the gift of many of their race. Even in translation it is profoundly moving. When they saw the boats forsake them and vanish at the edge of the azure horizon, a stupor fell upon these unfortunate people as they clung to one another with arms locked and bodies pressed together so that they might not be washed off the raft.

A small group in whom nobility of character burned like an unquenchable flame assumed the leadership, attempting to maintain some sort of discipline and decency, to ration the precious wine, to make the raft more seaworthy. One of the artisans had a pocket compass, which he displayed amid shouts of joy, but it slipped from his fingers and was lost. They had no chart or any other resource of the kind.

“The first day passed in a manner sufficiently tranquil. We talked of the means by which we would save ourselves; we spoke of it as a certain circumstance, which reanimated our courage; and we sustained that of the soldiers by cherishing in them the hope of being able, in a short time, to revenge themselves on those who had abandoned them.... In the evening our hearts and our prayers, by a feeling natural to the unfortunate, were turned toward Heaven. Surrounded by inevitable dangers, we addressed that invisible Being who has established the order of the universe. Our vows were fervent and we experienced from our prayers the cheering influence of hope. It is necessary to have been in similar circumstances before one can rightly imagine what a solace to the hearts of the sufferers is the sublime idea of a God protecting the afflicted.”

Such were the reflections of a little group of devout and high-minded Frenchmen whose example helped to steady the rest of the castaways in the early hours of their ordeal. During the first night the wind increased, and the sea became so boisterous that the waves gushed and roared across the raft, most of which was three feet under water. A few ropes were stretched for the people to cling to, but they were washed to and fro, and many were caught and killed or cruelly hurt between the grinding timbers. Others were swept into the sea. Twenty of the company had perished before dawn. Two ship’s boys and a baker, after bidding farewell to their comrades, threw themselves into the ocean as the easier end. A survivor wrote:

“During the whole of this night we struggled against death, holding ourselves closely to those spars which were firmly bound together; tossed by the waves from one end to the other, and sometimes precipitated into the sea; floating between life and death, mourning over our misfortunes, certain of perishing, yet contending for the remainder of existence with that cruel element which had determined to swallow us up. Such was our situation till break of day.”

Already the minds of some of the castaways were affected. When the day came clear and beautiful, they saw visions of ships, of green shores, of loved ones at home. While the ocean granted them a respite, the emotion of hope strongly revived, and their manifold woes were forgotten as they gazed landward or waited for sight of a sail.

“Two young men raised and recognized their father who had fallen and was lying insensible among the feet of the soldiers. They believed him to be dead and their despair was expressed in the most affecting manner. He slowly revived and was restored to life in response to the prayers of his sons who supported him closely folded in their arms. This touching scene of filial piety drew our tears.”

The second night again brought clouds and squally weather, which agitated the ocean and swept the raft. In a wailing mass the people were dashed to and fro and were crushed or drowned. The ruffianly soldiers and sailors broached the wine-casks, and so lost such last glimmerings of reason as terror had not deprived them of. They insanely attacked the other survivors, and at intervals a battle raged all night long, with sabers, knives, and bayonets. The brave M. Correard had fallen into a swoon of exhaustion, but was aroused by the cries of “To arms, comrades! Rally, or we are lost!” He mustered a small force of loyal laborers and a few officers and led them in a charge. The rebels surrounded them, but were beaten back after much bloodshed. The scenes were thus depicted by the pen of M. Savigny:

The day had been beautiful and no one seemed to doubt that the boats would appear in the course of it, to relieve us from our perilous state; but the evening approached and none was seen. From that moment a spirit of sedition spread from man to man, and manifested itself by the most furious shouts. Night came on, the heavens were obscured by thick clouds, the wind rose and with it the sea. The waves broke over us every moment, numbers were carried into the sea, particularly at the ends of the raft, and the crowding towards the centre of it was so great that several poor people were smothered by the pressure of their comrades who were unable to keep their legs.

Firmly persuaded that they were all on the point of being drowned, both soldiers and sailors resolved to soothe their last moments by drinking until they lost their reason. Excited by the fumes acting on empty stomachs and heads already disordered by danger, they now became deaf to the voice of reason and boldly declared their intention to murder their officers and then cut the ropes which bound the raft together. One of them, seizing an axe, actually began the dreadful work. This was the signal for revolt. The officers rushed forward to quell the tumult and the mutineer with the axe was the first to fall, his head split by a sabre.

The passengers joined the officers but the mutineers were still the greater number. Luckily they were but badly armed, or the few bayonets and sabres of the opposite party could not have kept them at bay. One fellow, detected in secretly cutting the ropes, was immediately flung overboard. Others destroyed the shrouds and halliards of the sail, and the mast, deprived of support, fell upon a captain of infantry and broke his thigh. He was instantly seized by the soldiers and thrown into the sea, but the officers saved him. A furious assault was now made upon the mutineers, many of whom were cut down.

At length this fit of desperation subsided into weeping cowardice. They cried out for mercy and asked for forgiveness upon their knees. It was now midnight and order appeared to be restored, but after an hour of deceitful calm the insurrection burst forth anew. The mutineers ran upon the officers like madmen, each having a knife or sabre in his hand, and such was the fury of the assailants that they tore with their teeth the flesh and even the clothing of their adversaries. There was no time for hesitation, a general slaughter took place, and the raft was strewn with dead bodies.

There was one woman on the raft, and the villains had thrown her overboard during the struggle, together with her husband, who had heroically defended her. M. Correard, gashed with saber-wounds as he was, leaped into the sea with a rope and rescued the wife, while Lavilette, the head workman, swam after the husband and hauled him to the raft.

THE BRIG, WHICH HAD MADE A LONG TACK AND WAS NOW STEERING STRAIGHT TOWARD THE RAFT

The first thing the poor woman did, after recovering her senses, was to acquaint herself with the name of the person who had saved her and to express to him her liveliest gratitude. Finding that her words but ill reflected her feelings, she recollected that she had in her pocket a little snuff and instantly offered it to him. Touched with the gift but unable to use it, M. Correard gave it to a wounded sailor, which served him two or three days. But it is impossible to describe a still more affecting scene,—the joy this unfortunate couple testified when they were again conscious, at finding they were both saved.

The woman was a native of the Swiss Alps who had followed the armies of France as a sutler, or vivandière, for twenty years, through many of Napoleon’s campaigns. Bronzed, intrepid, facing death with a gesture, she said to M. Correard:

I am a useful woman, you see, a veteran of great and glorious wars. Therefore, if you please, be so good as to continue to preserve my life. Ah, if you knew how often I have ventured upon the fields of battle and braved the bullets to carry assistance to our gallant men! Whether they had money or not, I always let them have my goods. Sometimes a battle would deprive me of my poor debtors, but after the victory others would pay me double or triple for what they had consumed before the engagement. Thus I came in for a share of the victories.

It was during a lull of the dreadful conflict among these pitiful castaways that M. Savigny was moved to exclaim:

The moon lighted with her melancholy rays this disastrous raft, this narrow space on which were found united so many torturing anxieties, a madness so insensate, a courage so heroic, and the most generous, the most amiable sentiments of nature and humanity.

Another night came, and the crazed mutineers made an attack even more savage. It was not altogether impelled by the blind instinct of survival, for again they tried to tear the raft apart and destroy themselves with it. They were so many ravening beasts. Those who resisted them displayed many instances of brave and beautiful self-sacrifice. One of the loyal laborers was seized by four of the rebels, who were about to kill him, but Lavilette, formerly a sergeant of Napoleon’s Old Guard, rushed in and subdued them with the butt of a carbine and so saved the victim of their rage.

A young lieutenant fell into the hands of these maniacs, and again there were volunteers to rush in against overwhelming numbers and effect a rescue, regardless of their grievous wounds. Bleeding and exhausted, M. Coudin had fallen upon a barrel, but he still held in his arms a twelve-year-old sailor-boy whom he was trying to shield from harm. The rebels tossed them both into the sea, but M. Coudin clung to the lad and insisted that he be placed upon the raft before he permitted himself to be helped.

During these periods of hideous combat among men who should have been brethren and comrades in tribulation, as many as sixty of them were drowned or died of their wounds. Only two of these belonged to the little party of finely tempered souls who had shown themselves to be greatly heroic. They had withstood one onslaught after another, and there were never more than twenty of them, in honor preferring one another, untouched by the murderous delirium which had afflicted the others.

True, they saw phantasms and talked wildly, but the illusions were peaceful. M. Correard imagined that he was traveling through the lovely, fruitful fields of Italy. One of the officers said to him, quite calmly, “I recollect that we were abandoned by the boats, but there is no cause for anxiety. I am writing a letter to the Government, and in a few hours we shall be saved.” And while they were babbling of the cafés of Paris and Bordeaux and ordering the most elaborate meals, they chewed the leather of the shoulder-belts and cartridges, and famine took its daily toll of them. In these circumstances it was inevitable that sooner or later they would begin devouring one another for food. The details are repugnant, and it is just as well to pass over them. With this same feeling in mind, one of the survivors confessed:

It was necessary, however, that some extreme measure should be adopted to support our miserable existence. We shudder with horror on finding ourselves under the necessity of recording that which we put into practice. We feel the pen drop from our hands, a deadly coldness freezes all our limbs, and our hair stands on end. Readers, we entreat you not to entertain, for men already too unhappy, a sentiment of indignation; but to grieve for them, and to shed a tear of pity over their sad lot.

On the fourth day a dozen more had died, and the survivors were “extremely feeble, and bore upon their faces the stamp of approaching dissolution.” Shipwrecked crews have lived much longer than this without food, but the situation of these sufferers was peculiarly dreadful. And yet one of them could say:

This day was serene and the ocean slumbered. Our hearts were in harmony with the comforting aspect of the heavens and received anew a ray of hope. A shoal of flying fish passed under our raft and as there was an infinite number of openings between the pieces which composed it, the fish were entangled in great numbers. We threw ourselves upon them and took about two hundred and put them in an empty barrel. This food seemed delicious, but one man would have required a score. Our first emotion was to give thanks to God for this unhoped for favor.

An ounce of gunpowder was discovered, and the sunshine dried it, so that with a steel and gun-flints a fire was kindled in a wetted cask and some of the little fish were cooked. This was the only food vouchsafed them, a mere shadow of substance among so many, “but the night was made tolerable and might have been happy if it had not been signalized by a new massacre.”

A mob of Spaniards, Italians, and negroes had hatched a plot to throw all the others into the sea and so obtain the raft and what wine was left. The black men argued that the coast was near and that they could traverse it without danger from the natives and so act as guides. The leader of this outbreak was a Spaniard, who placed himself behind the mast, made the sign of the cross with one hand, waved a knife in the other, and invoked the name of God as the signal to rush forward and begin the affray. Two faithful French sailors, who were forewarned of this eruption, lost not a moment in grappling with this devout desperado, and he was thrown into the sea along with an Asiatic of gigantic stature who was suspected of being another ringleader. A third instigator of the mob, perceiving that the plot was discovered, armed himself with a boarding-ax, hacked his way free, and plunged into the ocean.

The rest of the mutineers were hardier lunatics, and they fought wildly in the attempt to kill one of the officers, under the delusion that he was a Lieutenant Danglass, whom they had hated for his harsh manners while aboard the Medusa. At length they were repulsed, but when the morning came only thirty persons remained alive of the one hundred and fifty who had left the frigate. Occasional glimpses of reason prevailed, as when two soldiers were caught in the act of stealing wine from the only cask left, and were put to death after a summary courtmartial conducted with singular regard for form and ceremony.

Among those who mercifully passed out at the end of a week was the twelve-year-old sailor-boy, whose name was Leon. M. Savigny describes it so tenderly that the passage is worth quoting:

He died like a lamp which ceases to burn for want of aliment. All spoke in favor of this young and amiable creature who merited a better fate. His angelic form, his musical voice, the interest inspired by an age so infantile, increased still more by the courage he had shown and the services he had performed, (for he had already made a campaign in the East Indies), moved us all with the deepest pity for this young victim. Our old soldiers, and all the people in general, did everything they could to prolong his existence. Neither the wine of which they deprived themselves without regret, nor all the other means they employed, could arrest his melancholy doom.

He expired in the arms of his friend, M. Coudin, who had not ceased to give him the most unwearied attention. Whilst he had strength to move he ran incessantly from one side to the other, loudly calling for his mother, for water and for food. He trod upon the feet and legs of his wounded companions who in their turn uttered cries of anguish, but these were rarely mingled with threats or reproaches. They freely pardoned all that the poor little lad caused them to suffer.

When the number of the living was reduced to twenty-seven, a solemn discussion was held, and a conclusion reached upon which it is not for us to pass judgment. It was evident that fifteen of the number were likely to live a few days longer, which gave them a tangible hope of rescue. The other twelve were about to die, all of them severely wounded and bereft of reason. There was still some wine in the last cask. To divide it with these doomed twelve was to deprive the fifteen stronger men of the chance of survival. It was decided to give these dying people to the merciful obliteration of the sea. The execution of this decree was undertaken by three soldiers and a sailor, chosen by lot, while the others wept and turned away their faces.

Among those whose feeble spark of life was snuffed out in this manner was that militant woman, the sutler who had followed Napoleon to the plains of Italy. Both she and her husband had been fatally wounded during the last night of the mutiny, and so they went out of life together, which was as they would have wished it. More than once in war the hopelessly wounded have been put out of the way in preference to leaving them in the wake of a retreat or burdening a column with them. In this tragedy of the sea the decision was held to be justifiable when the French Government investigated the circumstances.

With so few of them remaining, the fifteen survivors were able to assemble themselves upon a little platform raised in the center of the raft and to build a slight protection of plank and spars. To rehearse their sufferings at greater length would be to repel the modern reader. It is only in fiction that shipwreck can be employed as a theme for romance and enjoyable adventure. The reality is apt to be very stark and grim. It is more congenial to remember such fine bits as this, when the handful of them huddled upon the tiny platform in the final days of their agony:

On this new theatre we resolved to meet death in a manner becoming Frenchmen and with perfect resignation. Our time was almost wholly spent in talking of our beloved and unhappy country. All our wishes, our prayers, were for the prosperity of France.

It was the gallant M. Correard who assured his comrades that his presentiment of rescue was still unshaken, that a series of events so unheard of could not be destined to oblivion and that Providence would certainly preserve a few to tell to the world the melancholy story of the raft. In the bottom of a sack were found thirty cloves of garlic, which were distributed as a precious alleviation, and there was rejoicing over a little bottle of tooth-wash containing cinnamon and aromatics. A drop of it on the tongue produced an agreeable feeling,

and for a short time removed the thirst which destroyed us. Thus we sought with avidity an empty vial which one of us possessed and in which had once been some essence of roses. Every one, as he got hold of it, respired with delight the odor it exhaled, which imparted to his senses the most soothing impressions. Emaciated by privations, the slightest comfort was to us a supreme happiness.

On the ninth day they saw a butterfly of a species familiar to the gardens of France, and it fluttered to rest upon the mast. It was a harbinger of land and an omen of deliverance in their wistful sight. Other butterflies visited them, but the winds and currents failed to set them in close to the coast, and there was never a glimpse of a sail. They existed in quietude, with no more brawls or mutinies, until sixteen days had passed since the wreck of the Medusa. Then a captain of infantry, scanning the sea with aching eyes, saw the distant gleam of canvas.

Soon they were able to perceive that it was a brig, and they took it to be the Argus of their own squadron, which they had been hoping would be sent in search of them. They made a flag out of fragments of clothing, and a seaman climbed to the top of the mast and waved it until his strength failed. The vessel grew larger through half an hour of tears and supplication, and then its course was suddenly altered, and it dropped below the sky-line.

Despair overwhelmed them. They laid themselves down under a covering of sail-cloth and refused to glance at the ocean which had mocked them. It was proposed to write their names and a brief account of their experience upon a plank and affix it to the mast on the chance that the tidings might some day reach their government and their families in France.

It was the master gunner who crawled out, two hours later, and trembled as he stared at the brig which had made a long tack and was now steering straight toward the raft. The others dragged themselves to their feet, forgetting their sores and wounds and weakness, and embraced one another. From the foremast of the brig flew an ensign, which they joyously recognized, and they cried, as you might have expected of them, “It is, then, to Frenchmen that we shall owe our deliverance.”

The Argus, which had been sent out by the governor of Sénégal, rounded to no more than a pistol-shot from the raft while the crew “ranged upon the deck and in the shrouds announced to us by the waving of their hands and hats, the pleasure they felt at coming to the assistance of their unfortunate countrymen.”

Fifteen men were taken on board the brig of the hundred and fifty who had shoved away from the frigate Medusa a little more than a fortnight earlier. There was no more fiddling and dancing on deck for “these helpless creatures almost naked, their bodies shrivelled by the rays of the sun, ten of them scarcely able to move, their limbs stripped of skin, their eyes hollow and almost savage, and the long beards giving them an air almost hideous.”

They were most tenderly cared for by the surgeon of the Argus, but six of them died after reaching the African port of St. Louis. Only nine of the castaways of the Medusa’s raft, therefore, lived to return to France. Their minds and bodies were marked with the scars of that experience, which you will find mentioned very frequently in the old records of shipwreck and disaster. It was an episode in human history, the best and the worst of it, and a reminder of man’s eternal conflict with the sea.

CHAPTER IV
THE WRECK OF THE BLENDEN HALL, EAST INDIAMAN

In this harassing modern age of a world turned upside down and bedeviled with one more problem after another, fancy turns with fond regret to those lucky sailormen who lingered on little, sea-girt isles and lorded it as monarchs of all they surveyed. Many an old forecastle had a Robinson Crusoe, hairy and brown and tattooed, who could spin strange yarns of years serenely passed among the untutored natives of the Indian Ocean or the South Seas. Now and then one of them had lived in more solitary fashion on some remote, unpeopled strand, a hermit cast up by the sea, and was actually contented because he had freed himself of the tyranny of bosses and wages and trousers and all the other shackles of civilization.

Alas! there are no more realms like these. The wireless mast lifts above the palm-trees, and the steamer whistle blows to recall the tourists from the beaches where the trade-winds sweep. There are still some very lonely places on the watery globe, however, and one of them is the tiny group of three volcanic islands in the South Atlantic which is known as Tristan da Cunha. These bleak rocks lie two thousand miles west of the Cape of Good Hope and four thousand miles to the northeast of Cape Horn. They loom abruptly from a tempestuous ocean, which lashes the stark, black cliffs, and there are no harbors, only an occasional fringe of beach a few yards wide.

Tristan, the largest of the group, lifts a snow-clad peak almost eight thousand feet above the sea as a warning to mariners to steer wide of the cruel reefs. It has a small plateau where green things grow, and living streams and cascades of fresh water. The islands were discovered as early as 1506 by the Portuguese admiral, Tristan da Cunha, and in later years the Dutch navigators and the pioneers of the British East India Company hove to in passing, but it was not thought worth while to hoist a flag over the group.

It remained for a Yankee sailor, Jonathan Lambert of Salem, to choose Tristan da Cunha as his abiding-place and to issue a formal proclamation of his sovereignty to the other nations of the world. Said he, “I ground my right and claim on the sure and rational ground of absolute occupancy.” This was undeniable, and the British Empire rests upon foundations no more convincing. Jonathan Lambert was of the breed of Salem seafarers who had first carried the American flag to India, Java, Sumatra, and Japan, who opened the trade with the Fiji Islands and Madagascar, who had been the trail-breakers in diverting the commerce of South America and China to Yankee ships. They had sailed where no other merchantmen dared go, they had anchored where no one else dreamed of seeking trade.

It was therefore nothing extraordinary for Jonathan Lambert to tire of roving the wide seas and to set himself up in business as the king of Tristan da Cunha which had neither ruler nor subjects. What his ambitions were and how a melancholy end overtook them is to be found in the sea-journal of Captain John White, who sailed the American brig Franklin out to China in 1819. He wrote:

On March 12th we saw and passed the island of Tristan da Cunha which was taken possession of in 1810 by Jonathan Lambert. He published a document setting forth his rights to the soil and invited navigators of all nations whose routes might lie near that ocean to touch at his settlement for supplies which he anticipated his industry would draw from the earth and the adjacent sea. He signified his readiness to receive in payment for his produce, which consisted of vegetables, fruit and fish, whatever might be convenient for the visitors to part with which could be in any way useful to him.

In order to carry out his plan, Jonathan Lambert took with him to the island various implements of husbandry, seeds of the most useful plants, tropical trees for transplanting, etc. After he had been on his island for about two years it was apparent that his efforts would be crowned with success, but unfortunately he was drowned, with his one associate, while visiting one of the nearby islands.

Another adventurous seaman, Thomas Currie, succeeded to this lonely principality by right of occupation, and was joined by two others. They lived contentedly and raised wheat and oats and pigs until in the War of 1812 the American naval vessels began to use Tristan da Cunha as a base from which to harry British commerce in the South Atlantic. Then Great Britain formally annexed the group, and kept a garrison of a hundred men there for two years.

When the garrison was withdrawn, Corporal William Glass of the Royal Artillery was left behind at his own request, with his wife and children, and two privates decided to join him as the beginnings of a colony. A few other rovers or shipwrecked sailors drifted to Tristan da Cunha from time to time, and they found girls at St. Helena and Cape Town who were willing to marry them, so that there was created a peaceful, unworldly little community on this far-away island over which Corporal William Glass ruled as a wise and benevolent patriarch.

The Blenden Hall was a stout ship bound out from England to Bombay in 1820, an East Indiaman of the stately fleet that flew the house flag of the Honorable Company. Their era was soon to pass, with all its color and romance, the leisurely voyage, the ceremonious formality and discipline, the pleasant sociability. The swifter Yankee merchant ships, hard driven under clouds of cotton duck, used to rush past these jogging East India “tea-wagons,” which shortened sail at sunset and snugged down for the night. They carried crews for a man-of-war, what with the midshipmen, the purser, the master-at-arms, the armorer, the calker, the butcher, baker, poulterer, gunner’s mates, sail-maker, six officers to assist the commander, and Indian servants to wait on them.

The passengers enjoyed more comfort and luxury in these handsome old sailing ships than the modern reader might suppose. The cabins were much more spacious than the liner’s state-rooms of to-day, the saloon was ornate with rugs and teakwood, with silver plate and the finest napery, and dinner was an elaborate affair, with a band of music, and the commander and the officers in the Company’s dress uniform of blue coat and gold buttons, with waistcoats and breeches of buff. Wines, ale, beer, and brandy were served without cost to the passengers, and the large staff of cooks and stewards was able to find in the storerooms and pantries such a varied stock of provisions as beef, pork, bacon, and tongues, bread, cheese, butter, herrings, and salmon, confectionery, oatmeal, oranges, and dried and preserved fruits, while a live cow or two supplied cream for the coffee, and the hen-coops stowed in the long-boat contributed fresh eggs.

The Blenden Hall was commanded by Captain Alexander Greig, a sailor and a gentleman of the old school, who had laid by a comfortable fortune during his long service. The trading ventures and perquisites of the master of an East Indiaman often yielded an income which a modern bank president would view with profound respect. The captain’s son, young Alexander Greig, sailed as a passenger on this last voyage of the Blenden Hall. He was a high-spirited lad, bound out to join the army in India, and life was one zestful adventure after another. The modern youngster may well envy him his luck in being shipwrecked on a desert island, where he wrote a diary, using penguin’s blood for ink and quill feathers for pens.

If the tale were fiction instead of fact, the beginning could be no more auspiciously romantic.

Captain Greig and his son left their English country home in their “travelling carriage” for the journey to Gravesend to join the ship. While crossing Bexley Heath they made their pistols ready, for the stretch of road was notorious for highwaymen, and as young Alexander Greig enjoyably tells us:

I soon observed that my father’s attention had been attracted by two horsemen riding across the Heath at full gallop, and notwithstanding the postilion was evidently exerting himself to outstrip our pursuers, they appeared to gain fast upon us. And in fifteen minutes they called loudly to him to stop, one of them at the same time discharging a pistol to bring us to. My father, after urging the postilion to drive faster (and we seemed then almost to fly across the Heath) told me to be prepared to receive the man on the left, “for,” said he, “we will give them a warm reception, at any rate.”

I was just about to follow his advice when I fancied that the men allowed us to gain ground and were out of pistol-shot, as I could see them curbing their horses while they discussed the prudence of keeping up the pursuit. It was fortunate for them that they did so, for one of them would have received the contents of my Joe Manton, as I was resolved not to fire till he came so close to the carriage that I could make sure of my man.

At the next tavern they described the adventure, and when young Greig mentioned that one of the rascals wore a red waistcoat with white stripes, the landlord exclaimed:

“Jem Turner, by the Lord Harry! Aye, as sure as fate! There is two hundred pounds reward for him, dead or alive. The boldest rascal that rides the Heath!”

Captain Greig concluded, no doubt, that he was safer at sea again. The Blenden Hall was ready to sail, and several of her passengers came on board at Gravesend, while the others were taken on from Deal while the ship tarried in the Downs. Sixteen in all were of a social station which permitted them to meet at the cuddy table for dinner while the ship’s band played “The Roast Beef of Old England” and Captain Greig pledged their health in good Madeira. With a most precocious taste for gossip, young Greig managed to portray his fellow-voyagers in an intimate manner that would be hard to match in the true tales of the sea.

It is just as well to let you gain some slight acquaintance with them before the curtain rises on the tragedy of the shipwreck. The most conspicuous figure was Mrs. Lock, wife of a commodore somewhere on foreign service. She was very fat, with a hurricane of a temper, and of mixed blood in which the tar brush was undeniable. Her English was badly broken, and her manners were startling. She had been the commodore’s cook in his Indian bungalow, so the rumor ran, until for reasons inscrutable he decided to marry her. Such a person was enough to set the ship’s society by the ears. Social caste and station were matters of immense importance. The emotions of Dr. Law, a fussy old bachelor of a half-pay naval surgeon, were quite beyond words, although he was heard to mutter:

“A vulgar black woman, by Jove! And, damme, she flung her arms around me when she was taken seasick at table.”

There was also consternation among such exclusive persons as Captain Miles, and six assistant surgeons in the Honorable Company’s military service, Major Reid of the Poonah Auxiliary Forces, and Quartermaster Hormby and his lady, of his Majesty’s foot. The dignified commander of the Blenden Hall felt it necessary to explain that passage for the chocolate-hued spouse of the erring commodore had been obtained under false pretenses. As if this were not enough, another social shock was in store.

Lieutenant Painter, a bluff, good-humored naval man, had come on board at Gravesend. While the ship was anchored in the Downs, he was one of the passengers who asked the captain to set them ashore in the cutter for a stroll in Deal. When they returned to the boat, Lieutenant Painter was missing. Nothing whatever was heard of him for two days, and Captain Greig felt seriously alarmed. Then a boatman brought off a letter in which the gallant lieutenant explained that he had been

most actively engaged not only in beginning but in finishing a courtship and that it was his intention to join the ship before dinner when he would do himself the honor to introduce Mrs. Painter to the captain and passengers. He requested that a larger cabin could be prepared, in which he could “stow away his better half.”

There was great excitement and curiosity in the cuddy of the Blenden Hall as the dinner-hour drew near. The impetuous romance of the brisk Lieutenant Painter was sensational. At length a boat was pulled alongside, and a chair rigged and lowered from the lofty deck. The boatswain piped, and the lovely burden was safely hoisted to the poop, followed by the beaming lieutenant, who scrambled up the gangway. First impressions were favorable. The bride was young and handsome. Her physical charms were so robust, however, that she stood a foot taller than her bantam of a husband, and the audience was amused when she grasped his arm and heartily exclaimed:

“Come, little Painter, let me see this fine cabin of yours.”

It was soon perceived that the vigorous Mrs. Painter was not a lady. The dreadful truth was not revealed, however, until a grizzled Deal boatman was discovered lingering at the gangway. When one of the mates asked him his errand, he answered:

“Why, I only want to say goodbye to my gel, Bet, but I suppose the gold-buttoned swab of a leftenant has turned her ’ead. Blowed if I reckoned my own darter ’ud forget me.”

Hiding in her cabin, the daughter wished to avoid such a farewell scene, but she could hear the old man ramble on:

“She ’as no occasion to feel ashamed of her father. I’ve been a Deal boatman these fifty years and brought up a large family respectably, as Captain Greig well knows.”

At this the emotional Mrs. Painter rushed on deck to embrace her humble sire and weep in his gray whiskers, a scene which the fastidious passengers found too painful to witness. Henceforth, through varied scenes of shipwreck and suffering, the dominant figures were to be the youthful, upstanding Mrs. Painter and the dusky and corpulent Mrs. Lock, heroines of two rash marriages, and foreordained to hate each other with a ferocity which not even the daily fear of death could diminish. In the presence of such protagonists as these, the ship’s company was like a Greek chorus. There was something almost superb in such a feminine feud. It was no peevish quarrel over the tea-cups. Moreover, it could have no dull moments, because both women had vocabularies of singular force and emphasis. The forecastle of the Blenden Hall could do no better in its most lurid moments.

It began with an affectionate intimacy, then squalls and reconciliations, while the stately East Indiaman jogged to the southward and the band played on deck for dancing after dinner. How far these two stormy women were responsible must be left to conjecture, but there seems to have been a vast deal of squabbling and bad blood among the passengers, as indicated by the following entry in the journal of young Alexander Greig, the captain’s son:

Although I endeavored to detach myself, as much as possible, from any particular party (by giving two entertainments a week in my private cabin and sending around a general invitation) I received one or two polite requests to meet the writers at the first port we might touch at and to grant them the satisfaction due from one gentleman to another, &c., &c., for alleged affronts that I had unconsciously committed. For the life of me I could not have defined what the affronts were, but I wrote each party an answer that I should be happy to accept, and then deposited their beautiful gilt-edged little notes in my desk.

There was an occasional diversion which patched up a truce, such as meeting with an armed brig which was suspected to be a pirate. The chief officer, in the mizzen-rigging with a telescope, shouted down that the brig was cleared for action. The second mate rushed forward and yelled to the boatswain to pipe all hands on deck. The gunner served out pistols and cutlasses to the seamen and the passengers, boarding-pikes were stacked along the heavy bulwarks, and the battery of six eighteen-pounders was loaded with grape and canister. Things looked even more serious when the brig hauled down a British ensign and tacked to get the weather gage of the East Indiaman.

Some of the passengers were frightened, and others professed an eagerness to engage in a “set-to.” Dr. Law, the half-pay naval surgeon, strode the deck with a drawn sword. He was filled with valor and Scotch whisky, and offered to wager any man a hundred guineas that he would be the first to board the enemy. Mrs. Commodore Lock waddled about uttering loud lamentations, and vowed that a friend of hers had been eaten alive by pirates. Nightfall closed down, however, before the brig could overtake the Blenden Hall, which surged before the wind with studding-sails spread.

Captain Greig was in some doubt as to his reckoning, because of thick weather, when the ship had entered the lonely expanse of the South Atlantic, and he therefore steered for a sight of Tristan da Cunha in order to make certain of his position. He proceeded cautiously, but soon after breakfast, on July 23, 1820, breakers were descried close at hand. The wind died, and the ship was drifting. Anchors were let go, but the water was too deep to find holding-ground, and a dense fog obscured the sea. The ship struck in breakers so violent that the decks were swept, the boats smashed, and the houses filled with water. The masts were promptly cut away, but the Blenden Hall was rapidly pounding to death with a broken back. All hands rushed forward and crowded upon the forecastle just before the rest of the ship was wrenched asunder and floated away.

Two seamen had been killed by falling spars, but all the rest of the ship’s company, eighty souls of them, were alive and praying for rescue. After several hours of misery, a few sailors managed to knock a raft together and so reached the shore, which had disclosed itself as frightfully forbidding and desolate. The ship had been wrecked among the reefs of Inaccessible Island, one of the Tristan da Cunha group. By a sort of miracle the bow of the ship finally detached itself from among the rocks and washed toward the tiny strip of beach. Clinging to the stout timbers of the forecastle, all the survivors were safely delivered from the terrors of the sea.

Through the first night they could only shiver in the rain and wonder what fate had befallen them. At dawn they began to explore the island, which appeared to be no more than a gigantic rock, black and savage, which towered into the clouds. Fresh water was found, but hunger menaced them. The first bit of flotsam from the wreck was a case of “Hibbert’s Celebrated Bottled Porter,” which was a beverage with a kick to it, and for the moment life looked not quite so dismal. On the beach were huge sea-lions, creatures twenty feet in length, but there was no way to slay and use them for food. Many sea-birds were killed with clubs and eaten raw, which postponed famine for the time.

And now there floated ashore bales of red broadcloth, which was promptly cut up for clothing. It was grotesque to see the sailors and passengers parading in gorgeous tunics and robes of crimson, with white turbans fashioned from bolts of muslin. With bamboo-poles, also washed from the ship, Captain Greig set his men to making tents for the women. There was very little material, however, and most of the people sat around in a sort of wretched stupor, drenched, benumbed, hopeless. Several barrels of strong liquors came rolling in with the surf, and the sailors, of course, drank all they could hold. One of them, an old barnacle named John Dulliver, showed a streak of marked sagacity. After tapping a barrel of Holland gin and guzzling to the limit of his stowage space, he stove in one end, emptied the barrel, and crawled snugly into it to slumber. This seemed such a brilliant notion that as fast as the ship’s water-barrels drifted ashore they were tenanted by castaways who resembled so many hermit-crabs.

For six days the party forlornly existed in continuous rain, with no means of kindling a fire, and eating raw pork that was cast up by the sea and such birds as they could obtain. Then a case of surgical instruments was found on the beach, and it contained a providential flint and steel. Fire was made, and spears were contrived of poles, with knives lashed to them, so that the monstrous sea-lions could be killed and used for food. There were millions of penguins, and their eggs could be had for the gathering. It was hard, revolting fare, but other castaways had lived for months and even years on food no worse, and the horrors of famine were averted.

Captain Greig was taken ill, and his authority therefore amounted to little. His officers were not the men for such a crisis as this, and they do not appear to have been able to master it. The sailors were insolent and lazy, no doubt of it, and young Mr. Greig devotes many pages of his diary to abuse of them. It is quite evident, however, that the officers and passengers felt themselves to be superior beings and expected the sailors to wait on them as menials. In such a situation as this one man was as good as another, and the doctrines of caste and rank properly belonged in the discard. It was rather pitiful and absurd, as one catches glimpses of it in the ingenuous narrative of the very young Mr. Greig.

For a few days after the wreck it was hail fellow, well met, but Jack, once put upon an equality, began to take unwarrantable liberties, and as familiarity is generally the forerunner of contempt, so it proved in this case. Quarrels soon began and the passengers now took the opposite course of attempting to issue orders to the sailors and treating them as servants. This exasperated the crew and they swore that no earthly power should ever induce them to render the least assistance to the passengers. Large sums of money were offered the sailors to forage for provisions, but I am firmly persuaded that the man who accepted such an offer would have been murdered by his comrades. Mrs. Lock, for instance, incensed a seaman by telling him,—“You common sailor, why you no wait on lady? You ought to wait on officer’s lady! You refuse me, captain will flog you plenty.”

Inaccessible Island was properly named, and one week after another passed without the sight of a sail or any tangible hope of rescue. Flimsy shelters were contrived, and nobody died of cold or hunger, but they were a gaunt, unkempt company, with much illness among them. Arrayed in their makeshift garments of crimson broadcloth, the camp was more like a travesty than a tragedy. No hardship could dull the militant spirits of Mrs. Commodore Lock and that young and handsome virago, Mrs. Lieutenant Painter. During one of their clashes, which was about to come to blows, the little lieutenant was trying to drag his strapping spouse into their tent while several passengers laid hold of the ponderous Mrs. Lock. Poor Captain Greig was heard to murmur:

“Thank God we have almost no respectable ladies with us to witness such scenes as these!”

Mrs. Lock had two small children with her, and it pleased the fancy of Mrs. Painter to say that, in her opinion, the paternity of the offspring would have been better established if the commodore had offered marriage a few years earlier. Mrs. Painter put it even more forcefully than this. At the deadly insult Mrs. Lock broke out in impassioned accents:

“What you think? That vile hussy of a Painter woman, she say me no Commodore Lock’s wife. Me lose my—what you call it—wedding ’tifcate on board ship, so me no have proof now—but when we come to Bombay, my commodore he kicks dirty little Painter out of the service, and me get ten thousand rupees of defamation damage. That Painter woman’s father am a common, dirty boatman!”

At this Mrs. Painter, with lofty disdain, let fall the remark: “Behold the she-devil and her two little imps!”

The sailors felt so little respect for the commodore’s wife that one of them coarsely observed, within her hearing:

“If we run short of them penguins’ eggs, Bill, and there ain’t nothin’ else to eat, we’ll pop the old girl’s young ’uns into the pot for a bit of broth.”

This was reported to Captain Greig by the explosive Mrs. Lock, who declared that the sailors had called her names much stronger than “old girl.” The chivalrous commander was resolved that no man of his crew should insult a woman and go unpunished, wherefore he mustered the seamen loyal to him, and they maintained order while the boatswain gave the chief offender fifty lashes on the bare back with a rope’s-end. The dreary exile was further enlivened by the discovery that Lieutenant Painter’s tent had been robbed of jewelry and other valuables. A formal trial was held, with young Alexander Greig as judge and a water-cask as the official bench. A sailor named Joseph Fowler was accused of the theft, and Mrs. Lock surged into the proceedings by announcing that, in her opinion, the relations of Mrs. Painter and this common sailorman had been a public scandal.

“Very ladylike of you, I’m sure, Mrs. Lock,” cried Mrs. Painter, “but what could a person expect?”

Such episodes as these were trivial when compared with the tragic problem of survival and escape from Inaccessible Island. Exploring parties had climbed the lofty peak, and in clear weather were able to discern the snow-clad summit of the larger island of Tristan, only fifteen miles distant, which was known to be inhabited. It might have been a thousand miles away, however, for the lack of tools and material had discouraged any efforts to build a boat. In a mood of despair a flagstaff was set up on the southwestern promontory, which faced the open ocean, and a bottle tied to it which contained this message:

On the N. W. side of this island are the remaining part of the crew and passengers of the Blenden Hall, wrecked 23rd July, 1821. Should this fall into the hands of the humane, we trust, by the assistance of God, they will do all in their power to relieve us, and the prayers of many unfortunate sufferers will always be for them.

Signed,
Alexander Greig, Commander.

This was a month after the shipwreck. Another month passed, and the ship’s cook, Joseph Nibbs, a colored man, had begun to build a clumsy little cockle-shell which he called a punt. For tools he managed to find a hand-saw, a chisel, a bolt for a hammer, and a heavy iron hinge ground sharp on the rocks for an ax. It seems extraordinary that this enterprise should have been left to a sea-cook, what with the carpenter and all the officers who should have taken the initiative. At any rate, this handy Joseph Nibbs pegged his boat together and went fishing in it. This appears to have shamed the others into activity, and the carpenter set about building a larger boat. It was the heroic cook, however, who decided to risk the voyage to Tristan in his little floating coffin, and his farewell speech was reported as follows:

GOVERNOR GLASS AND HIS RESIDENCE

“I little thought, Captain Greig, ever to see this day; but I will bring relief to you and young Mr. Alexander, if I perish in the attempt. If I never see you again, sir, God bless you for your kindness to me during the years we have been shipmates.”

In the punt with the cook went five volunteers, three able seamen, the gunner, and the sail-maker, but not one of the ship’s officers. These six fine fellows were ready to risk their lives for others, but the quarter-deck failed to share in the splendid action. The punt hoisted sail, the cook and his comrades shouted three cheers, and they stood out from the lee of the island to face a heavy sea. This was the last ever seen of them. They must have perished soon after.

The castaways waited week after week, desperately hungry and wholly discouraged. Meanwhile the carpenter had finished his boat, but delayed his voyage until certain of fine weather, and wasted much time in skirting the island in the hope of finding some trace of the cook. It was late in October, almost three months after the loss of the Blenden Hall, before the carpenter attempted to reach Tristan. Nine men were with him, five able seamen, the boatswain, the steward, a boatswain’s mate, and a carpenter’s mate. Again the list was conspicuous for the absence of an officer.

On the following day two boats were seen approaching Inaccessible Island. They were stanch whale-boats, in one of which was the ruler of Tristan da Cunha, Corporal William Glass, late of the Royal Artillery. He brought provisions and a warm welcome to his kingdom. It was found that more than one trip would be necessary to transport the castaways to Tristan. In the first boat-load were Mrs. Lock and Mrs. Painter, whose animosities were lulled by the blessed fact of rescue. It was an armistice during which they wept on each other’s necks and mingled their prayers of thanksgiving while the crew of the Blenden Hall sang “God Save the King.”

All hands were safely landed at Tristan where they found a neat hamlet of stone cottages thatched with straw, and green fields of grain and potatoes. Mrs. Glass was the only woman of the colony in which there were five Englishmen and two American sailors. To provide for eighty shipwrecked people severely taxed their resources but the spirit of hospitality was most cordially displayed. The captain and the passengers signed an agreement to pay Governor Glass at the rate of two shillings and sixpence per day for board and lodging, which was no more than fair, but nothing was said about the sailors. They were expected to pay for their keep by working as farm-hands. This rubbed the long-suffering tars the wrong way, and as the diary explains it:

“The passengers walking about at their ease was a sight to which Jack could not long submit; at last they all struck, declaring that they would not work unless their ‘mortal enemies’ were compelled to do the same. Upon this, the captain begged Governor Glass to be firm with them and on no account to serve out any provisions unless they returned to their duty. Consequently several meetings with a great deal of ill feeling took place upon the subject, and when prayers were read the following Sunday at Government House, every sailor absented himself.”

Food was refused the striking seamen until they threatened to break into the potato sheds and then burn the settlement. The boatswain and his lash tamed the mutiny after Joseph Fowler had been tied up and his back cut to ribbons with nine dozen blows of the rope’s-end. After this the seamen marched off to another part of the island and fed themselves by fishing and hunting wild goats and pigs. To their simple minds there was no good reason why they should sweat at building stone walls and digging potatoes while Captain Miles and the six assistant surgeons of the Honorable East India Company, Major Reid of the Poonah Auxiliary Forces, and Quartermaster Hormby of his Majesty’s foot were strolling about in idleness.

For lack of something better to do, the passengers began to find fault with the food supplied by the worthy Governor Glass, and this caused much difficulty and several formal conferences and protests. He promised to do better, and honestly tried to, bearing the situation with unfailing good humor and courtesy. If the rations were scrimped, it was no doubt because he feared he might be eaten out of house and home and left without reserve supplies.

On New Year’s day there was a notable celebration, when the four children of the Glass family were formally christened by Dr. Hatch of the Blenden Hall, who had taken holy orders in his youth. Governor Glass wore his scarlet uniform of the Royal Artillery, “Mrs. Lock stuck so many white feathers in her hair that it resembled a cauliflower, while Mrs. Painter sported a white turban of such ample dimensions that the Grand Sultan himself might have envied her.” Bonfires blazed, flags flew from every roof, and the islanders were dressed in their best.

On January 9 the English merchant ship Nerinae hove to off Tristan da Cunha to fill her water-casks. She was bound from Buenos Aires to Table Bay with a hold filled with live mules. Uncomfortable shipmates these, but the people of the Blenden Hall were not in a captious mood. They were taken on board, and sailed away from Governor Glass after spending three months with him, and it is to be fancied that he felt no profound regrets.

A bit of romance touched the parting scenes. The night before the Nerinae sailed from Tristan, the pretty maid servant of Mrs. Lock slipped ashore in a boat, with what few belongings she had, and joined her sailor sweetheart, Stephen White, who had decided to remain behind on the island. This Peggy was a Portuguese half-caste from Madras who is referred to in the diary as a “female attendant.” Seaman White is called a worthless fellow, but this may be taken for what it is worth. The important fact is that he had found a sweetheart during the weary exile on Inaccessible Island and that they were resolved to stay together and let the rest of the world go hang. Governor Glass was quite competent to unite them in the bonds of a marriage that was proper in the sight of God.

There is one final glimpse of Mrs. Lock and Mrs. Painter shortly before the good ship Nerinae, with her freightage of mules and castaways, anchored in Table Bay.

The two ladies having for a considerable time been very quiet, Captain Greig thought he would make another trial at reconciliation, and begged Mrs. Lock to shake hands with Mrs. Painter which the latter was willing to do, but the commodore’s wife declared, “Me do anything Captain like, but me will bring action for defamation against little Painter and his damn wife, please God me ever get back to Bombay.”

Mrs. Lock used to say that she fully expected to find her dear commodore dead with grief. Mrs. Painter repeatedly retorted that it was far more likely she would find him with another wife, but she might make up her mind it would not be a black one.

Thus concludes the story of the Blenden Hall, East Indiaman, but it is so interwoven with the fortunes of Tristan da Cunha and its colonists that further tidings of them may prove interesting. In 1824, four years after the wreck of the East Indiaman, an author and artist of New Zealand, Augustus Earle, was accidentally marooned at Tristan, and stayed six months as the guest of Governor Glass before another ship touched there. He had sailed from Rio for Cape Town in a sloop, the Duke of Gloucester, which passed so close to the island in calm weather that the thrifty skipper concluded to land and buy a few tons of potatoes for the Cape market.

The artistic passenger went ashore to stroll about with dog and gun while the sailors were loading potatoes into the boat. A sudden storm swept the sea, and the boat was caught offshore, but managed to reach the sloop, which was driven far from the island and gave up trying to beat back to it. The skipper was a practical man and it was foolish to delay the voyage for such a useless creature as an author and artist. Mr. Augustus Earle was compelled to make the best of the awkward situation, and he seems to have enjoyed his protracted visit of half a year.

The village then consisted of five or six thatched cottages “which had an air of comfort, cleanliness, and plenty truly English.” The young sailor Stephen White, whom the Blenden Hall had left behind with his precious Peggy, was still happy in his bargain, and their babies were playing with the lusty little flock of the Glass family. The island was no longer a hermit’s retreat. The marooned artist noted that “children there were in abundance, and just one year older than another.” Small wonder that he saw little of the two women, who were fully occupied with their domestic duties.