Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (7 page)

The Eastons decided that if the time came, they would go down together “hand in hand.”

“But,” said Ansel, “until all hope is past, we must work.”

Then he kissed his wife and, with Brown, joined the other men.

F
ROM THE GALLEY
and the staterooms, crewmen had rounded up scores of wash buckets and water pitchers. Herndon explained that some of the pumps continued to work well, but that they alone could not keep ahead of the water; they needed the supreme effort of each man to dry the hold. Hundreds of volunteers rose up and made their way past Captain Badger, who directed them to one of three bailing brigades: one forward to rise from steerage, one all the way up from the engine room, and a third that wound from the aft cabin hatches through the main cabin and up the gangway. All three lines would end on the weather deck, where the last man would dump the buckets with the wind, returning the water to the sea, and send the empty pails back down to be filled again.

In the saloon, they removed the grating over the forward hatchway, and in steerage they worked in water up to their knees. They passed the heavy buckets along quickly, developing a rhythm, heavy and spilling going up, lighter and swinging coming back down, hand over hand, the water coming up out of the hold.

Most of the men were miners who had left farms, where the work was hard, to seek fortunes in the Sierra Nevada, where the work proved harder still. Many of those who went west had not survived, but these men had, and the experience had hardened not only their bodies but also their spirit. They felt themselves a special breed: unafraid to face hardship and to endure. One passenger remembered, “The voices of the
workers rose merrily and powerful above the din of the storm and the lashing of the steamer’s sides by the waves.”

Song added a sense of camaraderie and dispelled thoughts of fear; song provided cadence and seemed to lighten the weight of the buckets. Most of the men were seasick and had had little or nothing to eat, but song and the energy of the other men helped them clear their heads and forget their hunger.

Captain Herndon seemed to be in all parts of the ship at once, assuaging the fears of the ladies in the main cabin, on deck ordering the crew, up and down the bailing lines, encouraging the men.

“Work on, m’boys,” he would say, “we have hope yet.”

Though one woman commented that she preferred to hear his voice on deck shouting commands, most of the women appreciated his visits to the main cabin to “cheer up the spirits of the passengers and to quiet their fears,” as one woman put it. “He did not try to disguise the danger, but he made us look more cheerfully at it than some other men might have done.”

Most of the women had been in bed seasick for almost three days, yet Friday afternoon, several of them demanded that they be allowed to stand shoulder to shoulder in the bailing lines with the men, but the men rebuffed them. So the women held on to the children and watched the line of men winding through the saloon. They searched the men’s faces for clues of the ship’s condition, waiting to hear that the men had gained on the water, waiting to feel again the rumble of the big steam engines deep in the heart of the ship. The men told the women that they were gaining on the water, that there was nothing to worry about, that the water could not gain on them. They told the women that word had come up with the buckets that the steam again had risen, and that they had the pumps working, and they offered that the storm must abate, that the wind had blown so hard, it could not continue much longer.

Annie McNeill, nineteen, remembered how the other women showed “great courage and self-composure; not a tear was shed by any of them. The men told us to be cheerful, that it would soon be all right; indeed, although we considered ourselves in imminent peril, we did not know the full extent of it. The men did all they could to keep that knowledge from us.”

News filtered back to the women that the men were gaining on the water so rapidly that the engineers thought they might be able to fire up the furnaces and get some steam into the boilers to power the wheels. And soon they felt the throb of an engine coming up through the decks. The vibrations gave everyone renewed hope, and the men seemed to work even harder. But the wheels went round two, maybe three, times and again they stopped, and the water came in even faster now and rose back over the furnaces and the boilers, and the engines stopped forever.

Upon feeling the engines die, the women dispatched a small boy up the gangway to inquire the reason. When he returned to the main cabin, he reported that a man had said they stopped “because the wheels were tired and wanted to rest a while.”

“He gave this answer,” said one woman, “partly because it was a little boy that we sent upstairs to ask him, and partly because he wanted to prevent exciting an alarm.”

But the women knew.

“The sea broke over us in avalanches,” said Virginia Birch, “completely swamping the cabin and staterooms, and the vessel would be so completely buried that it was as dark as Erebus. The ladies never spoke a loud word and kept perfectly calm and collected. I never saw a calmer set of women in my life; one or two asked to be permitted to share in the labor of bailing, but were told by the gentlemen to keep quiet and all would yet be well.”

Many of the men had spent their years in California handling river rock. Buckets of water about twenty pounds apiece were not an unusual load for their muscles, but working in the bailing lines without rest had knotted the muscles in their shoulders and backs and in their forearms, yet they couldn’t stop. The water kept seeping into the ship, and the moment they hesitated, they lost another inch to the sea. After three hours, some of the men had grown weary of trying to keep their footing, trying to keep the buckets from spilling, trying to move the buckets fast enough to stay ahead of the rising water. No more than thirty of them had family on board the ship; most of them had no one to protect but themselves. Yet an unspoken code kept them in the bailing lines and at the pumps, as though but for their single efforts the
ship would go to the bottom, taking with her all of the women and children.

The women huddled in the main cabin all afternoon, waiting and watching the men, holding and comforting the children, and feeling the creaking and pounding of the ship. The men continued to pass the buckets, but their singing had long since stopped.

W
ITH THE SHIP
in the trough of the sea, making heavy lurches to leeward, and men bailing in lines all over the ship, Captain Herndon continued trying to bring her bow back into the oncoming swell. He ordered his men to hoist just enough canvas to edge the bow to starboard and get the ship off before the wind. But the moment they set the sail, the wind blew it to pieces. Then they lashed another sail to the deck and raised it up only enough to show canvas, but as soon as the sail had cleared the bulwarks, the wind ripped it out of its bolt ropes and tore it into tatters now horizontal and almost stiff in the storm.

Herndon ordered his men to abandon all further attempts to use sail and to work instead on setting a drag, or sea anchor, overboard to bring her around. For the drag, they needed to lash a heavy anchor to a stout yard in the rigging and toss it all overboard, but the heaviest anchors hung from the bow and the ship listed so far the men couldn’t reach them. Second Officer Frazer dropped the yard, bent a thick rope to it and to a smaller anchor, pushed it over, and paid out forty fathoms.

It was then approaching half past five, and the ship listed so far to starboard that no one could walk her deck. Her three heavy masts angled out over the water, nearly lancing the incoming waves as they swelled, crested, and broke over the ship. With sails and rigging no longer of use, Herndon told Badger to take an ax and cut down the foremast.

Badger, Frazer, and the bos’n, John Black, worked their way forward, leaning into the wind, grabbing hold as the ship lurched and the waves broke over her broadside and the water ran like a river at flood across her deck. First they cut away the rigging that held the foremast tight, then crouching and holding fast with one hand they hacked with axes at the tree-thick mast, until at last they heard a sharp crack and then another, and the tossing of the ship shook the mast at its splintering base, finally tumbling it over the fore rail.

But as the mast fell, the rigging they had cut free flew in the wind and snagged in an anchor rest; the mast somersaulted into the water and, ensnared in the rigging, shot under the ship and began to pound against her hull. “I do not doubt,” Frazer said later, “that when the foremast went under the ship’s bottom, she was injured by it, and probably the leak increased thereby. I don’t know such to be the fact, but she thumped there for some time.”

They now paid out another hundred fathoms on the sea anchor and made it fast around the stump that had been the foremast. But the heavy drag tugging at the starboard bow did nothing to bring up the ship’s head, and later that night, the thick line holding the drag would fray, unravel, and disappear into the sea. Herndon’s last attempt to right his ship was to spread bits of canvas in the aft rigging, a token gesture of desperation, for they were so small to avoid being shredded that they captured too little wind. With evening approaching, nothing that would bring the steamer’s head to wind remained in his power.

A
T
7:00
P.M.
, nearly every man on the ship, over five hundred in all, was either in a bailing line or helping to run the deck pumps. Long lines of men coiled throughout the ship, up every gangway, some gangways supporting two lines, the buckets passing in both directions, the men’s arms moving like the myriad legs of a centipede. The heaving of the ship sometimes sent the men slamming into one another, and buckets slipped from their hands or banged together, spilling at their feet; waves broke over the ship, and water flooded back down the gangways.

All afternoon, they had seen the water drop, and the men in the hold had had to edge down closer to scoop the buckets. But at nightfall, the water fought them to a standstill, and after two hours of darkness, it was rising again. Still, without food or sleep, the men continued steadily into the night, moving muscles long past weary, stumbling as they tried just to hold their positions in line. Outside, howling through the darkness, the wind shifted and turned back out of the northeast, blowing heavily.

Earlier in the day, the women huddling with the children in the dining saloon had listened to the sloshing of the water, thinking it was the waves dashing against the sides of the ship; then the men were called
to bail, and the women realized that the water sounds came from the hold. Now the sounds grew louder as the water rose to the cabin beneath them.

“In that condition,” remembered Annie McNeill, “we remained all night, the sea running very high, and breaking over us, the wind blowing a perfect hurricane, the ship rolling and beating about, everything making a most fearful noise, the rigging and spars cracking and groaning, the dishes, lamps, furniture smashing and crashing together. It was an awful night, but the women still endured it without tears or moans.”

Angeline Bowley held and comforted her babies, Charles and Isabella, ages two and one. “We all appeared to grow more calm and resigned,” she said. “Those who had no children to take care of, and be anxious for, were quite as brave and hopeful as the men. But as for myself, I must confess that, being sick, and weak, and with these two helpless little ones clinging to me, I became somewhat discouraged and disheartened. A few of the ladies showed no signs of fear, and kept up to the last. It was wonderful to see their composure.”

Late that night, the women supplied the lines of men with what hard bread and fresh water they could find, and even a large supply of liquor and brandy made its way to the lines. A few of the men, dejected and exhausted, drank heavily, broke from the bailing lines, then hid themselves in staterooms and locked the doors. Others, very much sober, gave up in despair, and left the lines so fatigued they could hardly move. Most of the men worked until they were long past fit for it; they dropped to the deck, “as if they were dead,” and they lay there for minutes until Herndon or Badger called for more recruits. Herndon told them to relieve each other like men, and not to suffer one of them to drop in place, while another man stood idle. Then he asked if they wanted water, and had it brought to them, and they found fresh courage to rise again.

“Our only comfort,” said Angeline Bowley, “was that we knew the men were making every exertion in their power. They worked like horses. I never saw men work so hard in my life.”

Ada Hawley asked her husband, Frederick, if he was tired, and he replied, “Yes, I am tired, but I can work forty-eight hours in the same way if necessary. I am working for your life, for you and my
children.” While Frederick bailed, Ada calmed their two sons, two-year-old DeForest and five-month-old Willy.

Twice, Addie Easton and two other women started toward the bailing lines, determined to work alongside the men, but they were not allowed to do so. “I never wished so much to be a man,” remembered Addie. “We sat there I know not how long but until after dark, with no visible outward emotion at what seemed our inevitable fate, that a few hours only at most were between us and eternity. The bailing was continued vigorously all night, my own dear husband taking his turn and when exhausted returning to my side; and when a little rested again resuming his place. We talked with each other calmly, and mingled our prayers to him who was our only hope and refuge. He heard us and in answer gave us sweet consolation in these trying hours…. How little do we realize in our earthly security the preciousness when every human hope has fled, of trusting, whether we live or die in an almighty power. I could not think of anything I had ever done to merit his love but still I felt that we were in his hands and resigned to his will. All that fearful night we watched and prayed, not knowing but that every hour might be the last. My dear husband and I talked calmly of our dear, dear friends, of our brief happiness together, and hopes in the future. Life had never seemed so attractive or dear to either of us, yet I think we could both say ‘thy will be done.’ We resolved that when the moment came we would tie ourselves together and the same wave would engulf us both.”