Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (8 page)

About eleven o’clock that night, Addie remembered the bottles of wine and the crackers and biscuits and other foodstuffs she and Ansel had received as wedding presents. The hampers filled with these items were still in their stateroom. She made her way across the cabin and down to her stateroom and brought up all of the hampers filled with the packages of food and began passing them out to the exhausted men. The men stopped only for a few minutes to sit down, eat, and drink, and then began bailing again. At intervals throughout the night, Addie made the rounds with her hampers of food and wine, until the men had consumed it all.

“Mrs. Easton,” recalled Joseph Bassford, “furnished the men a large number of bottles of wine. The liberal bestowal of the wine, and
the spirit which prompted its donation, won the admiration of all. Not only was increased vigor given to the men, but it roused them to work still bravely on.”

All Friday night, hurricane winds ripped across the steamer’s decks, the storm waters crackling with phosphorescence, and every hour the water in her hold rose another six inches. But the bailing never stopped. Hand to hand to hand, the water-filled buckets passed up the gangways, out of steerage, out of the engine room, out of the second cabin, the empty buckets traveling down again to be refilled. Too exhausted to be heard above the shrillness of the wind, and perhaps too fearful to speak, the men worked on in silence as the ship tossed in a dark and relentless sea. From midnight till four on Saturday morning, they grew wearier and wearier from incessant labor and exposure to the storm, and the water gained fast. Yet they continued, and now the women offered encouragement by repeating, “Only another hour to sunrise.”

“Oh that long weary night!” wrote Addie. “How I counted the moments as they slowly dragged along! And as morning came, about three o’clock the Captain came in and said if they could keep up the ship about three or four hours longer, he thought we might be saved. The storm might cease and then perhaps they might get up steam, or when daylight came a vessel in sight might give us the blessed means of rescue. So they toiled on, and never was a daylight more gratefully welcomed than on that Saturday morning—the last that ever dawned on many a noble heart.”

ABOARD THE SS
CENTRAL AMERICA

S
ATURDAY
M
ORNING
, S
EPTEMBER
12, 1857

T
HROUGHOUT THE SHIP
, the coming of dawn fired the men’s spirits. They could see through the rain to the haze hanging along the horizon, the sea not cresting as high as before and the clouds beginning to thin. The wind had shifted and dropped, now blowing in at about forty knots from the west and southwest, though higher-velocity squalls within the storm still spun through to rock the ship. Captain Herndon pointed to the thinning clouds and predicted that their breaking up portended an end to the storm. He spoke to the men at the pumps; he cheered the men in the bailing lines. He told them he thought the storm was abating, and that if they would just continue to bail until noon, the steamer might be saved. He delivered the same message to the passengers in the main cabin: They must not abandon hope.

“This announcement caused a general cheer from the men at the pumps,” said Judge Monson, “and sent joy and gladness to the hearts of the lady passengers.”

Though the passengers received the captain’s comments with great cheer, Herndon knew his hope was false. He knew the sea would rise again and the wind would blow with even greater fury. He knew that a ship floating 750 tons of iron with water filling her hold, and more water constantly rushing in, could remain afloat but a short while longer. He also knew that every bucket of water tossed back into the sea gave the ship and her passengers a few more seconds afloat, and that in those hours gained, real hope might appear on the horizon. He was in a frequently traveled part of the ocean, and if he could keep the steamer afloat at least until the storm abated, he had a chance of saving everyone by transferring them to a passing ship.

About eight o’clock that morning, Captain Herndon went again to Judge Monson’s stateroom. In privacy, he told Monson they had no hope of surviving unless the storm ended soon or a vessel came in sight.

“I presume I was the only person on board to whom he communicated that fact,” said Monson. “The captain was perfectly calm, but intimated that it was only to keep up the courage of the passengers and crew until the last moment.”

Herndon ordered the flag lowered and then hoisted again upside down, a signal of distress to passing ships that might be able to assist. He ordered the bos’n to rig pulleys from the mizzen stay and to run lines down each of the three aft hatchways. To the pulleys they attached pork barrels and beef barrels and lowered them to men waiting with buckets and pans to fill them with seawater from the hold. Then a gang of fifty men topside heaved on the lines to hoist the barrels to the upper deck, where they dumped the water and lowered the barrels again. Each minute now, four hundred gallons of water left the ship in barrels.

By midmorning they had nine rigs operating, in the aft hatches, over the fore hatch, between decks, and coming up from the engine room. And three gangs continued to pass buckets hand to hand. The women offered again to join the men in the bailing lines, and again the men refused. But Thomas Badger noted, “They cheered us up in our labors by their calmness in these trying times. And the men worked with such
increased vigor that for the next two hours the water in the hold noticeably dropped.

Captain Herndon continued to visit the bailing lines and the barrel gangs, cheering everyone to push beyond their limits and to keep hoping. But about ten o’clock Herndon was in his quarters when Badger reported to him that although the storm appeared to be abating, the water in the ship was once again gaining on the men rapidly. The engines, the boilers, the furnaces were immersed in fourteen feet of seawater, and the water had risen to within four feet of the second cabin floor.

“The vessel must go down,” said Badger.

“I believe she must,” agreed Herndon. “I have made up my mind to that.”

As the two men talked, Chief Engineer Ashby rushed into the captain’s quarters.

Badger said to him, “The ship will sink.”

The remark seemed to startle Ashby. “She shan’t sink!” shouted the engineer. “I’ll be damned if she shall! We must all go to work and bail her out!”

Badger replied that he wished talking in that manner would make the waters recede, but he and all the rest on board had been hard at work all night bailing, and still the water was rising. No one knew when, but the ship would go down.

In front of these two men, Herndon allowed his true feelings to show. He too was dealing with his mortality and thoughts of never again seeing his wife, Francis, or his daughter, Ellen. He was tired and dejected and seemed resigned to his fate. He told Badger and Ashby that it was hard to leave his family this way, but, of course, that could not be helped; he was the captain, and as long as others could be saved, he would not leave his ship.

But outside his quarters, Herndon was the forthright commander. He might lose his ship, the mail, and millions in gold, but he still had nearly six hundred souls entrusted to his keeping, and until that final moment when the sea closed over the decks of the
Central America
and dragged them all into eternity, he still harbored a waning hope that lives might be saved. On deck and in the cabin he exuded enthusiasm and
control and talked as if only a short amount of time separated the dismal and trying present from a glorious and certain rescue. The passengers caught his hope and themselves clung to little things that buoyed that hope.

Addie Easton wrote of Saturday morning. “How we thanked God for his mercy and the daylight for its cheering presence. Then commenced renewed exertions. Barrels were rigged through the skylight—three of them—and for a time they seemed to gain on the water, or at all events, it did not increase. The clouds began to disperse, and the wind to lull. Every countenance changed and brightened, and all labored more heartily and cheerfully. The steamer nearly righted. How I watched to see the lamps hang level! But no sail in sight yet. We talked of another steamer that floated eleven days water logged, and felt more hopeful.”

T
HEIR HOPE LASTED
but a few hours. By noon, the clouds had thickened again overhead, and the wind blew fiercely, and the sea swelled even higher, and as hard as they worked, more than five hundred men could not keep up with the water rushing into the hold. The
Central America
now sat so low that the sea had begun to seep through the starboard portholes, and some of the cabins were three feet deep in water.

“Alas,” wrote Addie, “even with all our increased efforts, it was soon evident that the water was gaining, and to our unspeakable dismay the fury of the storm returned.”

Without complaint, without demonstration, one woman solemnly gathered her children in their small stateroom, “thinking that if we went down we would all go together.”

When her husband left Captain Herndon’s quarters and came to comfort her, Jane Badger said to him, “I am prepared to die.” But her husband was short with her; it would not help for anyone to abandon hope. Hundreds of men continued to work, and their efforts could not cease, or, yes, everyone would die. He had to help keep them going. Before his wife could finish, Badger turned away and climbed again to the hurricane deck, and though she tried not to let the other women see her, Jane Badger wept. Then after moments of struggling to control herself, she turned to a woman near her and in a strained but cheerful countenance she said, “The Lord is merciful. Perhaps some vessel will come in sight, and we may yet be saved.”

As the prospect of salvation grew darker, the bailing continued throughout the ship, but time and the sea finally had beaten all hope out of the men. They showed little fear, little anguish, working methodically on, resigned to their fate, and almost too exhausted to care. A few more left the bailing lines and returned to their berths or locked themselves in their staterooms. Deeply fatigued and spiritually broken, they refused to come out.

The men still bailing no longer labored under the delusion that their efforts would allow the engineers to start the engines once again. Now every bucketful of water thrown overboard simply bought time and only a sliver of it, but most of the men preferred the exhaustion of their labor to the anxiety of sitting and awaiting whatever fate had in store.

They had been passing the buckets or manning the pumps or hauling the barrels up on pulleys with little rest and no sleep for twenty-four hours, when, nearing two o’clock on the afternoon of Saturday, September 12, they heard the cry, “Sail ho!”

O
N THE TWENTY-NINTH
day of August, the
Marine
, a two-masted brig, had departed Cárdenas, Cuba, bound for Boston and carrying barrels of concentrated molasses squeezed from sugar cane. She ran 120 feet from stern to bow. Captain Hiram Burt and his crew of five had left port at daybreak, sailing on a benign sea for twelve days before they encountered heavy seas off Savannah, where the vessel creaked and rolled, and water casks lashed to the deck broke loose and smashed or bounced into the sea. She took so much water over the bow, the crew had to cut away some of her bulwarks on the starboard side to drain her decks. On Friday morning, a heavy sea ripped away the flying jibboom, the foresails, and all of the rigging. Then the wind and the rain struck, carrying away the mainyard and the main topsail, and when they had cleared away the wreckage and got the bilge pumps running, they discovered that several barrels of molasses had cracked open, and the water siphoned out of the hold had turned the color of mahogany.

By late Friday afternoon, remembered Captain Burt, “it was blowing a complete hurricane.” He ordered all of the canvas taken in and had the vessel lying to under bare poles, trying to hold her with the wind
on her bow so the heavy seas did not break aboard. “But the gale,” reported Burt, “continued with unabated violence during the night.”

Just before daybreak on Saturday, the storm moderated slightly, and at 5:00
A.M.
, Captain Burt adjudged it best for the preservation of his ship and cargo to put her before the wind, and bore away for Norfolk to repair damages. By noon the wind had dropped to the force of a moderate gale, but the sea ran heavy, and with little sail left and the wind still fierce, Captain Burt had the
Marine
scudding under bare poles, carried onward only by the following sea.

Aboard the
Central America
, Herndon had lookouts watching the horizon. In early afternoon one spied a distant dot, which quickly grew to be another ship tossing in the storm. The lookout bellowed, “Sail ho!” shocking all of those passengers and crew within earshot, the shock spreading across the deck and along the bailing gangs and through the main cabin where the women and children huddled. News of the sighted ship cut through the passengers’ grim resignment so sharply that passengers and crew alike suddenly laughed and cried and denied it was true all at the same time. No specter of good fortune had ever appeared so magnificently in the lives of so many doomed souls.

“Such a sudden hope,” said one woman, “where nothing but death had stared us in the face, at once overcame our self-control; there was shrieking, crying, weeping; agonies of joy, where late was nothing but agonies of death. The severe calmness that had set on each cheek was displaced by the flush of excitement, profuse tears, and the embrace of friends, mothers and children, husbands and wives. The excitement pervaded the whole ship.”

Addie Easton remembered, “We were on the verge of despair again, when about two o’clock in the afternoon was heard a joyful cry of ‘a sail, a sail!’ and in a few moments, it was seen bearing down towards us, and they gave it three cheers. For the first time during all the storm my eyes filled and I wept tears of joy and thankfulness. Strong men wept, women laughed and cried and it seemed for a few moments as if there would be a panic on the deck. A stern word from the captain brought order and every eye eagerly watched the vessel drawing near.”