Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (6 page)

The waves swelled, then rose, then tapered into sharp hills just before the wind ripped the tops off and sent them flying as spindrift into the air. The troughs had deepened enough to provide a moment’s shelter from the wind, and in that moment the crew shot the storm spencer upward, and then the next wave swelled, lifting the ship again into the wind, where the howling filled the sail so suddenly and with such fury that within a minute it had been blown to pieces.

With the storm spencer blowing in tatters, Herndon ordered the third officer to spread more storm canvas low in the main and mizzen rigging to try again to bring her head to the sea. But the ship rode so high out of the water she still would not respond, and the storm canvas again blew apart. Unchecked by sail, the wind drove the rain and the salt spray like bullets across the deck, and the pitch of its whistle rose.

A
MIDSHIPS, DEEP INSIDE
the hold, even the shrillness of the wind died in the bubble and roar of the fire room. Here in the fulcrum of the ship’s pitch and roll, away from the wind, away from the rain, the temperature soared to 120 degrees.

Sidewheel steamers had no bulkheads, no watertight compartments athwartships to contain flooding in a small area should the ship take on water. Once water entered the bilge, it ran at will fore and aft and sloshed with the rocking of the ship from starboard to port. Shortly after ten o’clock that morning, with the black gang, stewards, and waiters all passing coal into the fire room, Ashby cranked up the starboard bilge pump with steam siphoned from the big boilers, and the pump started sucking water from the bilge and disgorging it back into the sea.

Ashby then inspected all of the pipes and the fittings and found them tight. He examined all of the metal plates covering the portholes and found no leak. As he searched for the source of the water, buckets of coal moved hand to hand to hand, steward to fireman to waiter, from the aft bunkers to the fire room, where the white-hot fire inhaled a bucket of coal and in seconds turned it to ash. No matter how many men joined the line, no matter how quickly their hands moved, no matter
how much sweat rolled down their blackened arms, the buckets of coal came too slowly to feed the voracious furnaces. Steam pressure was dropping.

The starboard pumps sucked up the water in the bilge, but the water rose faster than the pumps could send it back into the sea. With the coal now coming only in small buckets, the furnaces no longer burned hot enough to keep the boilers bubbling at peak. If seawater seeping into the bilge reached the furnaces, the water would cool the fires, the steam would condense, the pressure would drop, and the starboard wheel would spin slowly to a halt, leaving all power to the port wheel, which already spun in the air because of the cant of the ship to starboard. Then the ship would fall into the trough and be at the mercy of a merciless sea.

With the paddle wheels turning more slowly, Thomas Badger suspected problems in the hold and descended into the fire room to check the progress of the coal brigade. He was alarmed at how high the water already had risen in the lee bilge. He heard Ashby warn the men that if they did not move quicker, every man on board soon would be bailing. Badger yelled to Ashby, “Don’t wait till the ship’s full of water. Start the men to work bailing now!”

At noon, both forward and aft, water overflowed the floor of the coal bunkers, rolled back and forth in the lee bilge, popped out the floor plates in the fire room and left the firemen standing waist deep in the water, some of them holding on to iron bars lashed into place to keep their balance. The water now rushed into the hold so fast and the ship met the storm at such a severe angle that the waterline had reached the starboard furnace. The coal passers could hear the hot furnace hiss as the seawater splashed at its undersides, and the furnace boiled the water swirling around it. Steam began to rise in the hold.

Ashby and the engineers discovered that in some of the lower starboard cabins just above the engine room, the waves pounding into the heeled-over ship now were pumping water through the porthole covers, until some of the staterooms were waist deep, and that much water so high in the ship increased her heel to leeward, keeping her down. They battened the shutters, then chopped through the deck in the staterooms to send the water into the bilge and help right the ship.

Searching in the hold, Badger had found an opening to the sea around the shaft that supported the starboard wheel. Every time the ship rolled to starboard, seawater pumped through the opening. He reported this to the engineers, then hurried topside to speak with Captain Herndon about organizing the passengers into a bailing gang. The engineers packed the hole around the shaft with blankets and old sails, and the pumping action of the ship rolling into the oncoming sea blew out the packing and they packed it again, but it blew out again and again, until engineers remained at the shaft, constantly replugging the leak. Still the water rose, and no one could find another source. Perhaps the pounding and twisting of the ship had worked the oakum out of her seams or even separated her planking. The hull itself seemed to be leaking, and no one could stop it.

S
CORES OF PASSENGERS
once seeking refuge down in the forward hold had long since fled the stench of vomit, the heat, and the incessant pounding of the hull. Abandoning their steerage berths, they had pulled themselves and their belongings up dark and jerking gangways to the dining saloon, where the air was less stifling and the ride less harsh. Some of the first- and second-class passengers had been driven out of their cabins by water rising along the starboard perimeter; others had left their cramped and tossing staterooms for the seemingly greater safety of the saloon and to share their mounting fears with other passengers. Outside, the morning sky remained dark; inside, the oil lamps dimly lit the growing number of passengers huddling in fear where three nights earlier they had gathered to eat and celebrate the beginning of the last leg home.

At noon, Second Officer Frazer returned to the weather deck to resume his watch, steering the ship into the storm. Thirty minutes later, Captain Herndon fought his way to the wheelhouse, and found Frazer muscling the wheel, still trying to bring the ship head to wind.

“It’s no use,” shouted Herndon. “I’ve been trying all morning.”

Frazer asked the captain if he should try a different tact, keeping off before the wind.

Herndon departed the wheelhouse into the storm, still shouting, “Do whatever you can to keep her away!”

Gathering below in ever larger groups, their eyes searching upward into the dark beams of the saloon, the passengers listened: to the wind,
to the waves, to the water hissing across the deck. Other than the jolts from confused seas slamming the hull, their only understanding of the storm came through their now heightened sense of sound.

Billy and Virginia Birch had left their cabin and spent Wednesday and Thursday nights in the saloon on a railroad bench. “On Friday morning,” remembered Virginia, “the vessel careened over on her starboard side and we heard the beams crack. Shortly afterwards we were told that the vessel had sprung a leak.”

Since Wednesday, the Eastons had lain sick in the privacy of their stateroom along the starboard side of the ship. About noon on Friday, a big sea knocked the ship down, those gathered in the saloon heard loud pops, like the beams cracking, and the Eastons’ stateroom canted, just as Addie glanced at their porthole to see that it was under water.

“Ansel,” she cried, “we’re sinking!”

The steamer had listed so far to starboard neither could lie in a berth or even sit up. Forgetting their seasickness, they threw wrappers over their nightclothes and struggled out the cabin door to the saloon.

“I had always heard that the
‘Law
’ was such a staunch vessel,” remembered Addie, “that I did not apprehend any serious cause for alarm until we opened the door of our stateroom and saw such a scene as I shall never forget. Without one word from anyone, I saw at once from the appalled faces that we were in imminent peril. I do not remember but one woman in tears. The rest sat silent, pictures of despair.”

Ansel told Addie they had to get to the upper side. He threw his arm about her, and their friend Robert Brown helped the two of them reach a settee on the far side of the cabin. They sat down, their hands clasped, and uttered not a word.

The steamer was pummeled so thoroughly by the sea, raked so furiously by the wind, and filled so high with rolling water that amid all of the clamor, most of the passengers gathered in the saloon did not know that the engines had all but stopped.

T
HE WATER SOON
swamped the starboard fires, the flooded hold rocking with every incoming sea and sending the water in waves over to lap at the port fires. Then the furnaces turned more of the rising water to steam; vapor hissed in the hold, entering the ash pits, choking off the
fresh air, extinguishing the port fires, and one by one dowsing the oil lamps until the men could hardly see, could hardly breathe, the firemen and the bucket gangs baking in a blackness that heaved all around them.

The port wheel still turned but ever slower, and with the coal now impossible to pass, Captain Herndon ordered teams of crewmen into steerage to rip out berth slats and break them into smaller pieces, which they carried into the fire room and stuffed into the port furnace. If they could keep at least one engine turning, and if their pumps could get ahead of the water in the hold, they could wait out the storm. But the kindling they tossed into the fireboxes burned with far less intensity than anthracite coal. Eventually, the fire only smoldered and the engines turned but a few more revolutions, and then the rising water extinguished the fires.

Outside, the hurricane winds beat the rigging against the masts and drove down on the
Central America
as if trying to crush her against the surface of the sea. No horizon now, only lead-colored clouds roiling above a lead-colored sea that swelled into overhanging cliffs of water.

B
Y EARLY AFTERNOON
, Captain Herndon could no longer point the bowsprit of the
Central America
into the wind. He fought simply to maintain his direction without facing the blast, but the wind blew the steamer off course to the southeast, where her huge engines finally cooled and she foundered in the trough of the sea. Waves once split by the prow of the ship now rose nearly the size of foothills on the broadsides and came crashing down on top of her from stem to stern.

Hundreds of passengers now huddled in the central dining saloon, waiting for a report and trying to comfort each other until it came. Suddenly, they heard from above a crash so loud they thought the ship was headed to the bottom at once. The cry ran through the cabin that she was sinking. Then the splintering sound subsided, and afterward they learned that a heavy sea had ripped one of the lifeboats from its davits and sent it skidding across the deck to crash into the deckhouse above them before sweeping it overboard.

Shortly after this, Captain Herndon appeared at the door to Judge Monson’s stateroom on the lower deck, a chronometer and sextant in his hands. He kept the instruments in his quarters on the weather deck,
two rooms on either side of the main mast. He had a favor to ask of Monson. “He asked permission to remove his instruments there from his stateroom on the upper deck,” remembered the judge. “There was a possibility, he said, that his stateroom, from its exposed position, might be swept away, and his instruments. I complied with the request of course, and the instruments were removed accordingly.”

In the main cabin the few women who had experienced bad weather at sea tried to comfort others, assuring them that the
Central America
was a strong ship that had plowed its way through many a gale. Seemingly unaware of the storm and certainly not frightened by the rocking of the ship, two little girls about nine years old sat eating at one of the tables. Amid the anxious looks and pallor of sickness, they braced themselves against the table, fastened their plates with their elbows, and seemed to enjoy the confusion.

One older woman watching them recalled later, “When the dishes flew about smashing and crashing as they fell to the floor, the girls laughed merrily, thinking it was rare sport. They were decidedly jolly, little realizing the danger in which they stood.”

As the little girls sat merrily at the table, the captain’s boy rushed into the saloon and cried out, “All hands down below to pass buckets!”

“At this,” said one woman, “the women burst out into lamentations, knowing then that the vessel was in peril.”

Within seconds of the captain’s boy leaving, Herndon himself appeared at the door of the dining saloon. He announced loudly but calmly, “All men prepare for bailing the ship. The engines have stopped …”

A murmur went round the room. The thought surprised Addie. She turned to Ansel. “What does that mean?”

“… but we hope to reduce the water and start them again,” continued Herndon. “She’s a sturdy vessel and if we can keep up steam we shall weather the gale.”

Though the
Central America
had leaked for hours and eight to ten feet of water now filled her hold, few of the passengers knew of the leak until that moment. Upon hearing Captain Herndon’s plea, several men in the cabin stood up, pulled off their coats, and approached the gangway. The captain walked over to one passenger and remarked with a smile, “You must take off your broadcloth and go to work now.”

Ansel Easton and his friend Robert Brown rose to join the other men. Before her husband could leave, Addie said to him, “Ansel, if you hadn’t married me, you wouldn’t be in all this trouble.”

“If I knew it all beforehand,” replied Ansel, “I should do the same again.”

“Here in the midst of mortal peril,” remembered Addie, “with death before me, with all the joys of life, so wonderfully loved, disappearing, those words made even the storm and shipwreck nothing.”