Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (30 page)

As the storm’s intensity lessened late Saturday, Captain Johnsen tried to follow an eastern heading, but the wind had forced him to alter his course to just north of northeast. He had kept to the new course for a short while until the man-of-war hawk appeared in his rigging, and when the bird fluttered about his head for the third time, he resolved to reset his course to the original. As he explained later, “I regarded the appearance of the bird as an omen and an indication to me that I must change my course. I accordingly headed to the eastward direct. I should not have deviated from my course had not the bird visited my ship.”

The storm continued on the wane, and for the next few hours under full sail the ship followed her original course through heavy seas and a strong breeze, making another twenty miles due east. Around 1:00
A.M.
, with the helmsman on deck and the rest of the crew asleep below, strange cries near the vessel startled them awake, distinct cries, obviously not natural, but muffled by the wind and the splashing of the sea. Johnsen rushed topside. “In a moment the agonizing shrieks, as it seemed of a hundred human voices, were plainly distinguishable. I at once knew that we must be in the vicinity of a wreck, and immediately roused every man on board. In less than a minute I found that we were surrounded with persons floating in the water. The darkness of the night made it impossible to see them, but the voices calling for aid rang in my ears from every direction.”

Johnsen and his men secured ropes and tossed them over the side, and in a few minutes they had raised four men from the sea, not one of
whom could speak. A few minutes later they picked up another man, who cried out for his wife and something to eat. Johnsen reported later, “I could not learn from any of them from what vessel they were wrecked or what disaster had happened.” They heard more voices coming at them out of the dark, and Johnsen ordered his men to tie off the three life buoys and pitch them into the water, hang as many ropes from the sides of the ship as possible, and set out additional lanterns, so the ship could be seen from all sides.

They raised more men from the water ten feet to the deck, one of whom was a husky fellow they found floating on a board. He was the only one who could speak. He told Johnsen that about five hundred men had gone down in the sinking of a big steamer and that most of those men, he was certain, had perished, though many still remained alive floating on pieces of the wreck.

Johnsen had four small boats on his vessel, and he ordered his men to cut the lashes on one of them and lower it into the water. The moment it touched the waves, six men turned it keel up, but Johnsen rescued all six. He and his crew now stood alert at the gunwales port and starboard, but the heavy sea that continued to roll and the noise on board and the whistling of the wind through the rigging made the voices of exhausted men difficult to hear.

John George floated alone in the dark, when suddenly he heard a score of voices around him crying, “Ship ahoy!” When he raised his head, he saw lanterns hung from a ship no more than half a mile away. He began to shout with the others, but the lights glided silently by and soon receded in the distance. Then the lights turned round and headed back his way. With the ship approaching, he could make out six men clinging to a log of wood and also drifting toward the ship. The lights drew closer and closer, until he could make out her hull and saw one of her masts, and when she was but a short distance away, he saw two of the men on the log lose their grip and slip quietly into the sea. As he floated nearer and nearer to the ship and then shouted and felt himself being raised from the water, the other four men on the log must have shared the same fate as the first two, for he never saw them again. When he got on deck, he could not stand up.

“I do not know whether I cried or not,” he said, “but I know I was astonished to hear my own laughter ringing in my ears. I do not know why I laughed. That verse, ‘God moves in a mysterious way,’ kept passing in and out of me—through me, rather—as if I had been the pipe of an organ.”

Most of the men were so exhausted they had no strength left to assist in their own rescue. Seventeen-year-old Henry O’Connor had been in the water for seven hours when he floated near the bark and the sailors threw him a rope. He grabbed it, and as he did, two other men got hold. He asked them to let go, and they did so, and he twisted the rope around his waist, and held it to, until the crew hauled him up. He did not know if the crew also rescued the other two men. “When I got aboard, they helped me down into the cabin, as I was not able to walk. I went to sleep immediately.”

Dr. Harvey and Second Officer Frazer still floated together, Frazer beyond exhaustion, chilled, and sleepy. But when they saw a lighted ship in the distance, they paddled together against the current, and Frazer still had enough strength in his hands to hold to a rope while they drew him out of the water. The sailors threw another rope to Dr. Harvey and raised him just even with the deck of the vessel when his cramped hands loosened and he fell. Three times he fell back into the water, twice sucking under the ship, until the crew threw over a ladder. “To which,” remembered the doctor, “as the last desperate effort, I tangled myself into in some way, and was taken on board at about three o’clock
A.M.
We were insensible for some time.”

The poet Oliver Manlove was picked up about an hour later. His first sight of the ship seemed an illusion, for all he saw was what looked like a star suddenly rise from the waves and in a moment disappear. Then he saw it rise again, and he realized it was a ship’s light, and that the bow of the ship was headed for him. He yelled and someone threw him a rope, and he grabbed hold and felt himself rising from the water, and when he was about six feet above the waves, his fingers unraveled from their grip and he fell and went under the bark. His life vest popped him up again and the sailors got him on deck, where he could hardly stand.

For hours, Captain Johnsen continued to tack among the driftwood, crossing the wind on one leg after another, keeping the bow of the
Ellen
working its way to windward, back to where the steamer had gone down. By four in the morning, he had rescued forty-four of the
Central America
’s passengers and crew. Out of the total, only two could stand up, talk, and help with the rescue of fellow survivors: One was the husky fellow on the board who had enlightened Johnsen on the shipwreck, merchant sea captain Thomas Badger; the other was Ansel Easton.

Easton had not seen the
Ellen
until she was suddenly before him as if dropped from the clouds. He grasped the rope thrown to him and ascended to the deck, where the crew offered him dry clothing, and he stayed on deck to help the other survivors. At times he went to the gunwale and shouted into the dark the names of his friends who had gone down. Mostly he yelled “Brown!” for aboard the steamer Robert Brown was his closest friend, the one who had brought him a good cork life vest on the hurricane deck moments before the ship went down. He told Captain Johnsen he had a friend he wanted to save, and he would pay the captain whatever he wanted if he would stay out there and try to find his friend. Johnsen refused compensation but said he would stay as long as there appeared to be someone left to save.

At daybreak they were still tacking back and forth through the debris, when they found one man alone and then two more together. A few more hours passed, and they found no one. The wind and the sea had steadily dropped throughout the night, the sun was approaching midmorning, and already the day was turning hot. Johnsen said he thought they had rescued all of the survivors they could and now should head for the nearest port. Easton persuaded him to tack just once more, and if they found no one, then they could sail for land. Johnsen came about for one last leg through the area with Easton at the rail shouting for Brown.

Around three in the morning, Captain Johnsen had seen two men on a hatchway, but before he could tack to get closer, they had disappeared. Now, six hours later, they saw the same hatchway, and Johnsen got close enough for a sailor to throw the two men a rope, which they caught, but they could not hold on. Johnsen had to tack twice more, and on the second,
the hatchway drifted alongside, and they pulled the two men on deck. One was a man named John Dement. The other was Robert Brown.

Until noon on Sunday they continued looking for survivors, but the wreckage was gone now, no sign of a hurricane or a tragedy in the gentle swells and breezes. Johnsen later reported, “As the morning advanced, and we found ourselves at a considerable distance from the place where the steamer sank, I bore down for it again. It was in longitude 76° 13′, latitude 31° 55′. I first took an observation at eight o’clock in the morning and again at noon. I saw the schooner spoken by the
Central America
before she went down, and do not think she picked up any passengers. After picking up all the persons I could discover, I sailed for Norfolk.”

T
HE STORM WAS
one of the fiercest in recent memory. A smaller steamer, the
Southerner
, put into Charleston in distress, her stack, her paddle-boxes, and her lifeboats washed away, part of her cargo thrown overboard, and six feet of water in her hold. The storm had destroyed so much of the
Southerner
that a crew patched her together only enough to sail her back to New York without passengers or cargo and dismantle her. A mate on another ship testified that “the gale was one of the severest we ever experienced.” The
Columbia
, bound from New York to Charleston, hit the storm about Frying Pan Shoals, forty miles out from the mouth of the Cape Fear River, and one member of the crew called it “the most driving hurricane we have ever seen or conceived. It prostrated the awful seas which had come from the broad ocean and appeared to sweep its surface along in spray and foam with lightning power and velocity.” The editor of the
Charleston Daily Courier
called it a storm “of almost unprecedented fury and violence.”

Onshore, the steamship company and the citizenry knew nothing of the tragedy at sea, nothing of the rescue or the final moments; they had only the news telegraphed from New Orleans to New York that the
Central America
had arrived safely in Havana and had departed under full steam on the 8th of September.

An hour after the
Central America
departed Havana, another smaller steamer, the
Empire City
, had also left the harbor bound for New York. At sunset of the first day, the
Empire City
’s Captain John McGowan could still see smoke from the stack of the bigger steamer to
the north. But the next day and the next, the
Empire City
had fallen farther behind. When the storm reached its height, the sea had broken over the decks of the
Empire City
, sweeping away the forward houses on her paddle guards and her entire starboard paddle-box. The wind had blown to pieces every one of her sails, water had swirled through the cabins, she had run out of coal, Captain McGowan had burned every chair, every table, everything movable, even the wheelhouses, to keep up steam, and the ship had pitched and rolled so violently that the bolts anchoring her boilers had snapped in two. But she had not foundered and fallen into the trough of the sea. Still afloat, she had limped into Norfolk. During the ensuing week, she was repaired and outfitted, and McGowan was directed to return to the steamship routes in search of the
Central America
.

Before departing Norfolk early Friday morning, September 18, McGowan was asleep in his quarters aboard the
Empire City
when a loud rap at his door awakened him.

“Who is it?” he yelled.

A voice said, “Easton.”

Captain McGowan knew Ansel Easton, because Ansel supplied the steamship lines with fixtures and furnishings and frequently traveled aboard the steamers back east. The morning that both ships lay at anchor in Havana, McGowan had boarded to congratulate the Eastons on their marriage.

McGowan leaped out of bed and swung open the door and saw Ansel there with four other men, all of them dirty and haggard, their clothes stiff from hours in the salt water and days of baking in the sun.

“My God, man,” he shouted, “where did you come from?”

The men crowded into McGowan’s quarters without sitting and told him of the sinking and their rescue by the crew of the bark
Ellen
and their arrival off Cape Henry only the day before. In Chesapeake Bay, Easton had hailed a pilot boat and paid the captain to ferry them into Norfolk from the
Ellen
, which still was under tow in the bay. When Ansel had spied the
Empire City
at anchor, he had stopped the pilot boat to find McGowan and ask after the
Marine
. Ansel had not seen the brig since he floated free of the steamer and thought he descried her lights far to the lee. When McGowan assured him that news of her fate had
not reached Norfolk, Ansel and the other men returned to the pilot boat to resume their trip into Norfolk.

W
HILE OTHER SHIPS
weathered the storm and reported back to ports along the East Coast, the
Marine
sat becalmed from Tuesday through Thursday. The winds that had driven down the
Central America
and ripped her sails into tatters had dropped to a strong breeze and then a fresh breeze and then dwindled and then disappeared altogether, leaving a hot, insidious stillness.

As the
Marine
sat becalmed, the stewardess Lucy Dawson died. She had fallen three times trying to get into the lifeboat and was pinched between the boat and the side of the steamer. Some said she died of fright; some said fever. She was the only woman who did not survive.

On Wednesday they spoke the
Euphrasia
, a brig bound for New Orleans, and her captain, refusing payment, supplied them with two barrels of sea biscuits, two barrels of potatoes, three hams, six chickens, cheese, water, and a quantity of coffee, tea, and sugar. He then offered to take any passengers who desired on to New Orleans.