Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (5 page)

“When the twilight came,” wrote Manlove, “if it could be called twilight, there was a raging storm such as we had never before seen. The waves and sky were crashing together.” That evening, the dining saloon was almost deserted. A few steerage passengers stood and ate their meals, their legs wide to brace themselves, their elbows pinning a plate. Seasickness had confined the Birches and the Eastons to their berths. Another woman described the time as rather unpleasant, although she felt no danger. “At least my husband said he thought there was no danger, as we had so strong a ship.”

Despite the weather, the nightly game of cards among the hardy souls in the main cabin went on as scheduled. At the captain’s table a game of whist ensued, and across from Captain Herndon sat his partner at whist, Judge Monson. Although taking tricks in a four-hand game of cards was tame for the judge’s propensity, he enjoyed a good turn of phrase and relished as well a good story, especially the telling of his own. Three times he had sailed east and back, and on an earlier voyage, he had befriended Captain Herndon. Now when he traveled, he always sat on Herndon’s left at table.

The weather little bothered Monson, for on each of his voyages east his ship had steamed into an equinoctial storm. Late summer was ripe for these West Indian cyclones to arise far out at sea and rush toward land, whipping the Atlantic white. Day after next, September 11, was the mean date for storm season.

While the card games continued long after dark, some of the first-and second-class passengers who had lain in their staterooms nauseated all day abandoned their rolling berths for the sofas in the main cabin. That night, said Virginia Birch, “I lay down on a sofa with my clothes on, and passed a very uncomfortable time, the vessel careening fearfully.”

Most passengers retired to their tiny staterooms or their cotlike berths in steerage, praying the weather would subside by morning so the dizziness in their heads and the nausea in their stomachs would go away and they could eat again and move about the ship without stumbling. “Down below,” remembered a steerage passenger, “nothing was to be heard but the crying of children and the moans of those suffering seasickness, and rising above all the sounds that proceeded from the inside of the vessel was the continued dashing and splashing of the waves against the sides of the ship, and the howling of the storm as the wind surged through the steamer’s rigging.”

That night the wind continued and the rains began. As darkness fell on the second day out of Havana, even the seamen began calling it a storm.

T
HE CURVATURE OF
the eastern shoreline fell away rapidly now as Captain Herndon angled from the mainland on a course for Cape
Hatteras. By Thursday morning the
Central America
had veered two hundred miles east of St. Augustine. High seas broke over the bow, sprayed across the decks, and splashed against the staterooms. Sometimes the steamer heeled so far that the housing over her paddle wheels rolled under water.

Trying to escape the cramped and humid below decks where scores of their fellow passengers had vomited, some passengers ventured up the rocking gangways to a weather deck constantly in sharp motion. They reminded themselves that the ocean is rarely benign and shipbuilders know this, that they build ships accordingly, that ten thousand ships had weathered a thousand storms just like this one.

At noon on Thursday the rain came in sideways, but the
Central America
remained on course, struggling against headwinds that had risen to over fifty knots. Despite the rain and the pitching deck, Second Officer Frazer shot the solar median again and calculated that since his observation the previous noon they had traveled another 215 nautical miles, steering almost due north by compass.

Two evenings before, the men had laughed at a woman for her timidity in the face of a little wind and sudden roll. “On Thursday,” she said, “when I went on deck, the gentlemen kept assuring us that there could not be any necessity for fear.” But by nightfall, even the men sensed that as violently as the wind blew and as high as the water around them now crested, the intensity of the storm had not peaked. That evening the inveterate card players, who the night before had indulged in whist and other amusements while the ship rocked through high seas, dispensed with the usual games to talk about the storm. “The storm was the leading topic of conference,” remembered Judge Monson. “Some expressed their apprehension, particularly the ladies, as to the safety of the steamer. Most of the gentlemen, myself among others, did everything to prevent any alarm among the passengers.”

About dark, the seas breaking over the steamer spilled into the staterooms, forcing some of the first- and second-class passengers to abandon their cabins. Just after the sky went black, the first officer turned over the watch to Second Officer Frazer and handed him a
piece of paper. Written on the paper were the headings Frazer was to follow as he steered the ship through the storm till he left the bridge at midnight.

A
GRAY DAWN
broke on Friday with storm winds blowing out of the north northeast at over sixty knots, as the steamer pitched and rolled in waves whitened by wind and pelted by heavy rain. Thick foam blew across the surface of the sea in long streaks, sometimes flying whiplike into the air. Each evening had brought renewed hope from the passengers that they would awake the following morning to find the winds had lessened and the sea subsided; yet every morning the wind had blown with an even greater fury than the day before, and the sea had risen higher until the waves now towered above the ship.

The bow plunged into the oncoming sea, the deck heaving and falling away sharply. Waves exploded high into the air, salt spray mixing with rain, and the wind drove it all with a furious whistle through the bare rigging. Since late Tuesday night, the wind and the sea had slowed the progress of the
Central America
, but she had held her course. When Second Officer Frazer left his four-hour watch at eight o’clock that Friday morning, he estimated the ship’s position as latitude 31° 45′ N and longitude 78° 15′ W, or 175 miles east of Savannah.

As Frazer departed the wheelhouse, a friend of the Eastons named Robert Brown sat near the top of a hatchway, beholding the fury of the storm. “The wind was very strong,” he remembered, “but the sea was excessively high.” Yet as the steamer took on the sea, he heard no creaking in her hull. “She all the time had her head to the sea and acted handsomely, and never appeared to even strain.” Brown, a merchant from Sacramento, was so pleased with how she came up proud to meet the waves, he resolved that the next time he sailed for California he would delay his trip for two weeks, if necessary, to await the departure of the
Central America
.

Thomas Badger clutched his wife, Jane, and fought for footing on the pitching and rain-soaked deck. Shielding his eyes from the stinging spray, he studied the incoming waves and the bowsprit soaring to meet them. A powerfully built man, Badger had been a sailor for twenty-five
years, a captain for the last ten, commanding his own three-masted bark in the burgeoning Pacific coast trade routes. He had sailed in many a storm and twice had traveled aboard the
Central America
, though he had never seen her perform in high seas. Like his bark, she carried full sail; but unlike a true sailing vessel she also carried 750 tons of iron in her engine works, and that could make her an unwieldy beast. Badger had come topside to satisfy himself that she still could match the sea in a tempest.

Badger judged the wind by reading the surface of the sea, and that morning he saw the air filled with foam and the sea completely white with driving spray, and he estimated they now had entered “a perfect hurricane.” He reported that “the sea ran mountains high” and the wind was “directly ahead,” but the ship’s behavior impressed him as it had Robert Brown. She “came up finely, and was not strained perceptibly by the wind or the roughness of the sea.” Badger could feel the enormous engines pounding, and he could see the giant paddle wheels “working regularly and slowly.” As long as coal fired the boilers and the two massive engines churned the wheels with a full head of steam, he knew that Captain Herndon could lay her on the wind, let her bow take on the sea, and ride out any storm.

Working his way along the rainswept deck, Badger encountered the ship’s chief engineer, George Ashby, hurrying headlong against the storm to report to Captain Herndon. Ashby had kept the furnaces hot and the steam pumping the pistons down in the engine room since the ship first went to sea as the
George Law
in October 1853. He was now on his forty-fourth voyage, and Badger knew him from previous travels on the ship.

Above the shrillness of the storm, Badger called to Ashby. As hard as it now was blowing, he yelled, it would blow harder still.

“Let it blow,” shouted Ashby. “We’re ready for it.”

But at that moment, Ashby was less convinced than his words made him sound. Minutes earlier he had discovered something he could not tell Thomas Badger. He had just issued several orders to his men in the engine room, then rushed topside looking for Captain Herndon because the captain had to know immediately, but if word got out, Ashby’s discovery would alarm the passengers: The ship had
sprung a leak, water was rising in the bilge, and Ashby could not find the source.

S
TEAM ENGINES RAN
on water converted to vapor, which cooled and condensed on the metal surfaces as water droplets, then combined and enlarged and joined with small leaks in the machinery, all of it dripping from the boilers and the massive pistons, sliding along the metal pipes, down the funnels and the flues, and finally collecting in the bilge. A steamship never ran dry. When the bilge water reached a certain level, the pumps sucked it up and spewed it back into the sea.

But Ashby had discovered that the water in the bilge was far deeper than normal; either a leak had formed somewhere in the machinery, or seawater was seeping into the hold. If the pumps worked properly, and the leak was not too great, they could control it. But the water alone was not the focus of Ashby’s concern, and this was the other problem he refrained from mentioning to Badger.

The engines sat on oak timbers as thick as half a dozen railroad ties and occupied the steamer’s entire midship, port to starboard: two furnaces, two boilers, and the stack, 750 tons of sweating iron, forty feet across and rising in the hold sixteen feet off the flooring above the bilge. Piled high in the bunkers aft of the engines, the
Central America
also carried several hundred tons of anthracite coal. Besides powering the ship, the coal provided ballast; but as the coal heavers wheeled coal from the bunkers to feed the voracious furnaces, and as the furnaces sent the tons of coal up the stack as smoke and ash, the
Central America
lightened and rose higher. Steamers sometimes rose so high in the water, the paddle wheels could barely scrape the surface.

Although before leaving New York the coal porters always filled the
Central America
’s bunkers with enough coal to fire the steam engines all the way down to Aspinwall and back again, on her return voyages, she often came onto the coast a high or “crank” ship, one that heeled too far to the wind. That was her reputation. In a gale, or even in a moderate blow with the wind abeam and the ship lightened, she careened considerably. Since leaving Havana three days earlier, with her hull pounding against a head sea and struggling against an ever increasing wind, the ship had burned even more coal than usual, so she was
lighter and higher in the water. The tons of forty-niner gold she had picked up in Panama were hardly enough to compensate for the dwindling coal. The blow had heeled her over, and the water rapidly collecting in her bilge was settling on the starboard side, tending to keep her there.

To move the coal from the bunkers to the fire room, where the firemen shoveled it into the furnaces, the coal heavers had to push wheel-barrows filled with coal as much as a hundred feet. But the high seas coming over the bow and the hurricane winds hauling from the northeast had caused the ship to list at such an angle that the heavers had difficulty pushing the barrows of coal. The barrows slipped and spilt, and the men lost their footing. They couldn’t move the coal fast enough to keep up steam.

Before he left the engine room to find Captain Herndon, Ashby had called in the off watches of firemen and heavers, ordered the barrows abandoned and the men to form a line and pass the coal in buckets hand to hand down to the furnaces. But the heavers could pass little more coal in many small buckets than they could in the coal barrows. They had difficulty even keeping their balance in the hot, dimly lit hold that rocked at their feet.

When Ashby reported the rising water to Captain Herndon, the captain immediately ordered waiters and stewards into the hold to form a second line of coal heavers. Few passengers wanted food, and the waiters had little to serve other than hard bread anyhow, because the water in the hold had risen high enough to dampen the stores of food.

I
N A STORM
, the ship rode most safely and easily if the captain headed into the sea and brought the wind onto the weather bow, using her engines just enough to hold her in that position. But as the careening of the ship and the inrushing waters slowed the flow of coal to the furnaces and the steam began dropping in the boilers, the paddle wheels turned more slowly. If Herndon lost his engines, the only way he could hope to hold position on the incoming sea was to use sail, and he couldn’t wait for the engines to stop before he tried to hoist some of his canvas. After sending the waiters and stewards into the hold, he ordered the storm spencer run up the mizzen mast. The storm spencer was the strongest
and heaviest of all the sails. With it unfurled aft, Herndon hoped to blow his stern to port and use the wind to keep the bow of the steamer headed into the oncoming sea.