Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (11 page)

“I did not have much time to stand on ceremony,” said Burt. “My only object was to get them safely on my ship.”

Captain Burt and the deckhands had to be quick, the oarsmen strong and alert, and still not each attempt went smoothly. The sea rose each time in a different way, coming at different angles to destroy the rhythm gained on the previous attempt. But the women and children were frightened enough to do as they were told, and some remained strong enough to try to get aboard themselves. Jane Harris watched for a chance to spring at the rigging and grab hold of a rope. “I caught the rigging with my hands, but my life-preserver under my arms was so large that I could not get between the ropes. I hung there for a few moments over the side of the ship, in almost equal peril as when I dangled at the end of a rope over the side of the steamer. I was every moment expecting to fall, when the captain caught hold of me, and pulled me in by cutting off my life-preserver.”

Mary Swan did not leap for the rigging but held out her hands to the captain and his mate, who caught hold of her. “But they slipped their hold, and I fell into the water. I was got hold of again and partially lifted out, but fell into the sea three times before I was finally rescued.”

“Captain Burt, with his mate, stood with open arms and a willing heart to receive us,” remembered Ada Hawley. “Captain Burt took my little Willy, and the mate received DeForest, playfully saying, as he passed him over the side, ‘He is all gold.’”

The
Marine
was deeply loaded and rolled badly in the high seas. When the women and children came off the lifeboat high in the air, the
captain and his mate set them down again in the seawater that constantly swept her deck. Then, despite their weariness, the crews pushed off, dug in their oars, and returned through heavy seas for more of the passengers. Meanwhile, the
Marine
drifted farther and farther in the storm, and lightning flickered in a close and darkening sky.

T
HE GAP BETWEEN
the
Central America
and the
Marine
widened, the wind pushing the smaller and much lighter brig at a faster pace. The now useless iron of the steamer’s engines and her hold full of water kept her low, and the gale force winds could not move a steamer with a hold full of water as readily as they could a sailing brig only a third its size. The oarsmen in the lifeboats could fight the wind and the sea just so long, and if the
Marine
could not hold position, Herndon would have to try to maneuver closer to the brig. The wind had somewhat subsided, and the heavier sails should now withstand even the fiercer gusts. About 4:00
P.M.
, he ordered the main spencer set, hoping to use the wind to keep the gap between the two ships from widening even more.

With the new sail set, Captain Herndon told passenger Theodore Payne to take the first boat that returned. He had a favor to ask, but first he wanted Payne to go into his office and fetch his gold watch and chain. When Payne brought them to the captain, Herndon said, “If you are saved, deliver them to my wife. Tell her to …”

But then he choked and his voice quit, and he stood silently, saying nothing. When he could speak again, he asked Payne to meet with the president of the steamship company and the agents, and to explain to them what had happened. After saying this much, he walked away a few steps and sat down on a bench, his head in his hands. In that position he remained only for a few moments. Then he arose and resumed giving orders, as the first lifeboat, helmed by the bos’n, John Black, had returned from the
Marine
.

W
ITH THE MEN
pushing to fill the first of the returning boats, the officers learned that three female steerage passengers still were on board. Theodore Payne went below to bring them up, and Ashby helped them into the sling and down to the bos’n’s waiting boat. An elderly Englishwoman,
Mary Ann Rudwell, was the last woman to come off the steamer. Her husband traveled with her, and she asked the captain that he be allowed to accompany her in the lifeboat to the brig. “He said he was very sorry,” she recalled, “but he could not permit a man to get into the boat until the very last woman had been taken from the vessel.”

In all of his moving about the ship, Herndon seemed unaware that husbands and fathers were being refused passage in the lifeboats, while unmarried men, including Judge Monson, had left the ship in earlier boats; that on this, John Black’s second trip, carrying the last three women, Black would also carry more than a dozen men. Billy Birch asked Ashby to allow him on the boat so he could join Virginia, and the engineer said he would do all he could, but Birch did not get on that lifeboat. Neither could Ansel Easton secure a seat to take him to Addie. But he found a pencil and scribbled a note on a small piece of blue paper, which he folded and gave to one of the last three women to leave, asking her please to deliver it to his wife upon arriving at the brig.

When the boat was nearly filled with passengers, Ashby himself went up to the captain and insisted he be allowed to go to the brig in that boat. Captain Herndon replied that as a senior member of the crew he had no right to do that, that it was his duty to stick to his post.

“If you let me go,” said Ashby, “I will bring back the two boats and all the small boats that can be spared from the brig.”

Captain Herndon questioned whether he could trust the engineer. Ashby promised to do everything he could to bring the brig closer and to make sure the lifeboats returned; besides, with the engines silent and the engine room immersed in seawater and the women and children now evacuated, he had nothing to do, and the captain needed someone aboard the brig to ensure that her crew was doing everything it could to rescue those passengers remaining aboard the
Central America
. Herndon finally consented.

Ashby said, “I promise you, Captain, most solemnly, that I will come back to the steamer and not desert her.”

He seized a rope and slid down to the boat. A steerage passenger, who had given an assistant engineer six hundred dollars for the promise of a seat on the first returning lifeboat, saw Ashby swing down. He saw no other lifeboats and figured this would be his last chance to exercise the
privilege he had paid for. He leaped for the same rope and quickly lowered himself into the boat, landing almost on top of Ashby.

Ashby yelled, “You son of a bitch,” drew his dirk, grabbed the man by the throat, and threatened to kill him if he did not jump overboard. Then he looked up and threatened to take the life of any man who dared jump for the boat. Herndon saw the incident and yelled to Ashby to put the knife away.

The oarsmen shoved off. Joseph Bassford, holding a knife and trying to fasten around his waist a money belt containing two thousand dollars in gold, saw that the boat had been cut loose, so he stuffed the whole belt into the side pocket of his coat, leaped from the steamer deck, and landed in the boat. But somehow in his haste to make the boat, he dislodged the money belt and the belt hit the gray water as hard as he hit the boat, and it sank instantly.

Captain Herndon walked forward along the rail of the steamer and shouted to Ashby one more time, “I will depend on your returning with the boats!”

To which Ashby replied, “Captain! You may depend your life on my returning!”

T
HE OTHER TWO
lifeboats returned, the first coming alongside forward. Now that the women and children had been safely ferried to the brig, the captain and his officers no longer assisted the passengers with a rope sling. The only way down was to jump. Passengers and firemen and stewards crowded the deck, watching for a boat and an opportunity to leap.

When the second boat came in aft, two of its oarsmen had succumbed to exhaustion. The helmsman had instructed them to lay on the same oar and pull the best they could, which they managed to do. But the trip from the
Marine
had taken two and a half hours, and when they came alongside, a wave jammed the boat against the side of the ship, knocking off part of the gunwale and stoving in some of the timbers. The boat began to leak, and they had to set two men to work bailing her out. Just then five passengers and three firemen jumped from the steamer deck into the boat, and Captain Herndon yelled to the helmsman to shove off before more passengers could jump and swamp the boat.

Perhaps the reason even more men did not jump is because they felt safer on the big ship. The lifeboats seemed so small next to the steamer and the waves threw them at will, and the
Marine
was a long way off and drifting farther. The wind had somewhat abated, and this increased their hopes that the brig soon could maneuver back to the steamer and take them all safely on board, and they wouldn’t have to make the journey across open sea.

Herndon estimated that the
Central America
could stay afloat no longer than midmorning of the following day. Saving his ship was now beyond his power, but the lives of five hundred men remained in his hands, men who had worked beyond exhaustion with little food and no sleep, while the wives and children of mostly other men could be safely evacuated. Herndon now wanted to provide these men with every means possible of saving themselves.

Even before the last of the women had been taken from the ship, he had ordered that life preservers be brought up and distributed to all of the men. He ordered the hurricane deck cut away, the doors ripped from their hinges, the hatch covers pulled off, the gratings removed, the planking lashed together, so that if the ship sank, plenty of rafts would be in the water for survivors to cling to. The once proud steamer, her boats gone, her foremast cut down, her sails in tatters, her furniture and dishes broken, her staterooms deep in seawater, her engines long silent, now had her very decks peeled away.

A
T FOUR IN
the afternoon, with the wind still blowing heavy and the sea high, Captain Samuel Stone of the schooner
El Dorado
faintly descried a ship off his windward bow but could not discern the character of the vessel. Ravaged herself by the storm, the square-built schooner plowed into the wind and white-capped swells, her bulwarks stove, her foresail shredded, her bowsprit leaking, and her hull caked nearly up to its chains with barnacles. Waves came over her quarter rail, and seawater infested her cargo of cotton. For half an hour, Captain Stone watched the other ship through his glass. “She was a steamer, with all her colors set as signals of distress. As soon as I saw this I hauled my wind, and shaped my course for the distressed vessel; I could see that she was disabled, and was deep in the water.”

Just after six o’clock, a watchman in the rigging aboard the
Central America
spotted the
El Dorado
, the small schooner plowing through the storm toward the crippled steamer.

About six-thirty that evening, Captain Stone gave orders to stand by the main sheet, to heave the vessel to, and his helmsman brought the
El Dorado
within fifty feet of the steamer, so close, remembered one passenger, he could have flung a cracker onto her deck.

Captain Stone hailed the captain of the steamer. “Can I render any assistance?”

Herndon called back, “Lie by me till morning for I am in a sinking condition.”

The
El Dorado
’s first mate remembered the steamer captain’s voice being “as steady as if he had the best vessel in the world under him, in a smooth sea.”

“Immediately,” said Captain Stone, “I gave the order to put the wheel hard down and haul aft the main sheet and hove to, directly under his lee, say about a gunshot distant. I warned him to commence at once putting his passengers on board, supposing that he had good boats, while I had but one, a small jollyboat, which would not live in the high sea then running for a moment.”

Again came the captain’s reply, “No, no, lie by me till morning.”

Stone held as tight to the steamer as he could but within a minute or two began drifting away. He expected someone from the steamer to throw a line for him to make fast, but in the few precious seconds that passed as the schooner swept by, no one from the steamer tried to throw a line. Captain Stone assumed that the steamer captain would rather wait until daylight to begin launching his lifeboats than risk losing men overboard in the darkness. He yelled, “Set your lights,” and by then had drifted out of hailing distance.

“During the time that I was talking with the captain I could hear the passengers crying and halloing, sounding like one simultaneous burst of shouting.”

As they moved slowly away, the seamen of the
El Dorado
estimated the crowd on the steamer’s deck at seven hundred, and even above the din of the wind and the waves they could hear a roar of voices rising. The schooner was trying to hold position as Captain Stone prepared to receive
the steamer’s passengers at first light the following morning. Rain fell and the captain ordered his men to catch the water running from the top of the deckhouse over the schooner’s cabin, so that they might be supplied with fresh water. Then he went forward and gave the mate orders to get ready to throw over their cargo to make room for the passengers. He told the steward to be careful of every drop of fresh water and the provisions, “as we should have that whole ship’s company on board in the morning.”

Captain Herndon now went around his ship asking the men to stand by her till morning, that he thought he could keep her afloat if they just continued to bail. At daybreak they would see the early light wash in colors across the receding clouds and the waves lying down and the wind abating, the
Central America
still afloat under them. “We all agreed to do so,” said one passenger, “and continued to bail.” Herndon directed James Frazer to take charge of the arms chest and every half hour to send up a rocket.

Lights had been set on both vessels, for in a sky already darkened by storm, night was coming on.