Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (9 page)

Captain Herndon stood on the quarterdeck, his glass aimed to the northeast at a speck tossing on the sea. He ordered the signal guns fired
at once and a second flag of distress hoisted. The signal guns could be heard for miles across open water, but in the storm the smoke from the guns dissipated immediately in the wind, and the howling muffled their report. However, storm skies loomed so dark overhead that the brilliant flash from the muzzles caught the eye of Captain Burt. As he scudded to the southwest in early afternoon, a ship had hove into sight off his lee bow, and as he drew closer, he saw that it was a steamer flying a signal of distress. Captain Burt kept off for the steamer to render assistance if he could. For over an hour, he maneuvered his crippled ship through high waves with little more than a rudder, even that all but useless in a following sea.

At so great a distance, Captain Herndon had no idea of the size of the brig: whether she could hold merely a few or as many as all six hundred. And the sea remained so high that some questioned how they could ever board the other ship. When he was certain the captain of the brig had seen his signal, Herndon turned to Judge Monson, who stood at his side on the quarterdeck, and told him to come immediately to the captain’s stateroom.

“He said he was afraid there might be a rush of passengers for the small boats,” remembered Monson. “He wanted the ladies and children saved first. He desired, he said, some of the passengers to assist in preventing a rush for the boats.”

Herndon had five lifeboats left, and he assumed the brig also carried boats the crew could launch. He told Monson he had to transfer all of the passengers to the brig, because he estimated the
Central America
could remain afloat no longer than another fifteen hours. As he talked with Monson, the brig approached off his weather bow.

At about 3:00
P.M.
, Captain Burt spoke to the steamship and found it was the
Central America
in a sinking condition. He rounded her stern less than one hundred feet out and hove to under her starboard lee. From their heaving, slippery deck, the passengers could see the faces of Captain Burt and his crew. The
Marine
, less than half the size of the
Central America
, waterlogged and partially dismasted, the jibboom snapped off, her captain with very little command over her and shipping nearly every sea, had appeared suddenly out of the storm as the salvation for which no one had dared hope. As she passed under the stern, the passengers cheered, believing now they all were safe.

Captain Herndon hailed the brig and, according to Burt, “with all the calmness of an ordinary occasion,” shouted into the storm, “‘We are in a sinking condition. You must lay by us until morning.’”

Captain Burt shouted back, “‘I will stay by you as long as I can.’”

M
EN HAVE ALWAYS
pondered how they will act under fire, and mostly the reality when it comes is far more sober and sickening than imagined, and the acts are much less quick and noble. When a ship seemed destined to sink, the captain and his officers often had to hold the crew and the male passengers at gunpoint to keep them away from the lifeboats until they could safely remove all of the women and children. Sometimes not even the captain and crew acted nobly. Four nights earlier, Herndon had jokingly turned the dinner conversation from shipwrecks to topics more pleasant by declaring that if his ship ever went down he would be under her keel. It was a charming seaman’s segue, and from the mouths of perhaps most men it would have remained no more than that. But the remark had been prompted by the sinking of another steamer three years back, when the captain and crew had commandeered the lifeboats, and 259 of the 282 passengers, including all of the women and children, had perished. Herndon’s friends knew that for three years the story had haunted him. He was now in the middle of an even bigger disaster, but he had already determined that surviving by less than honorable means was not worth a lifetime of scorn.

Customary for the day, but grossly inadequate, the
Central America
carried six lifeboats, five of wood, one of metal. The night before, one of the wooden boats had been smashed against the wheelhouse. The remaining boats each normally held four oarsmen, a helmsman, and forty to fifty passengers, but with the strain on the oarsmen in seas such as this, Herndon could load no more than fifteen or twenty. As soon as the
Marine
rounded to, he ordered the first officer to clear away two of the lifeboats, one on the port, one on the starboard, and to get the port boat to the lee side of the ship. Then he ordered all women and children below to don life preservers.

Although the sea nearly swamped the first lifeboat under the guards of the steamer, the crew launched it and the second boat safely. Then they lowered a third lifeboat, and as soon as it hit the water, a heavy sea
quickly sucked it away, then rose up and smashed it against the hull of the ship, the planks shattering and the remains of the boat hanging from its block.

Two boats were now in the water, the oarsmen trying to keep them away from the sides of the steamer. Two boats remained on the upper deck, one wood, one metal. The crew lowered the wooden lifeboat safely into the water. Chief Engineer Ashby helped launch the metal boat, riding it down into the waves, but a heavy sea caught the boat, drove it hard under the lee guard, stove it in, swamped it, and sank it immediately. Ashby disappeared with the boat, and the crew had to pull him from the water.

Below in the main cabin, the women and children gathered to prepare for the trip to the
Marine
. To give them as much freedom as possible and as little weight, the women were instructed to strip off their undergarments and layers of skirts, everything but the outside dress, then put on a life preserver. They also wrapped the older children in life preservers and the babies in blankets to be held in their arms.

Many of the women traveled with a great deal of money they had not registered with the purser. All of them were now advised not to carry more than two twenty-dollar gold pieces with them. Two women retrieved a satchel from their stateroom and upon returning to the cabin, opened the satchel, and weeping, shook eleven thousand dollars in gold onto the floor. Through tears, they said that anyone who wanted the money could take what they pleased. “That money is all we made in California,” they added. “We were returning home to enjoy it.”

As the women discarded their extra clothes and put on life preservers, the captain’s boy appeared at the entrance to the cabin and shouted, “The captain says all the ladies must go on deck!”

The few who had managed to ready themselves and their families for the trip made their way across the room and started climbing the steps to the hatchway, their dresses long and sagging from lack of hoops and petticoats, their upper bodies covered in cork and tin life preservers, their hands holding or pushing forward small children, until they reached the deck. There the water crashed around them and the wind blew the spray over them, and they were wet through in an instant. By the time Ashby was hauled from the sea, women and children were
struggling their way to the lee side of the ship, where the five-man crews fought to keep the lifeboats from being smashed against the ship or swamped under her guards. Herndon ordered Ashby and his first officer not to let a single man into the boats until all of the women and children were off.

“While they were getting into the boats,” observed one man from the bailing lines, “there was the utmost coolness and self-control among the passengers; not a man attempted to get into the boats. Captain Herndon gave orders that none but the ladies and children should get into the boats, and he was obeyed to the letter.”

In line to be transferred to a lifeboat, Annie McNeill glanced at Captain Herndon as he stood on the rain-soaked deck. She thought he seemed saddened. She talked with him briefly, and he said he would not try to save himself, that he would go down with his ship.

“Nevertheless,” she remembered, “he did all that lay in his power to save others. He was a very kind, generous, gentlemanly man, and if he had any fault it was that he was not severe enough to his own hands.”

T
HE ONLY WAY
Captain Herndon could get the women and children into the boats was to lower each by rope one at a time from the upper deck, while the oarsmen tried to fend off, and the lifeboats crested close to the ship’s hull. He and his men had fashioned a rope chair. “A noose was passed around our feet and dress,” recalled one of the women. “There was nothing to support our backs, but we held a rope, which came down in front, with our hands. The boat could only approach the steamer between the waves, so we had to remain suspended sometimes while the wave passed. These waves would also drive us under the side of the steamer.”

The water sucked away from the steamer’s hull, then rose up and slammed against it, sending salt spray high into the air and hissing back into the sea. The oarsmen fended off, trying to keep the boat steady, close enough to catch the women and children dropped from the deck, yet far enough away to avoid the waves smashing the boat to splinters. Already the storm had claimed half of the lifeboats.

The women and children had to jump from the deck as far out over the water as they could, dangling on the rope, and then drop suddenly
when the waves pushed the boat higher and toward the ship. In that instant, the men holding the ropes often just let go. Some women fell into the boat, others hit the water, and then either the hands on deck raised them hanging from the rope to try again, or the oarsmen grabbed ahold and hauled them in over the gunwale. The sea moved suddenly and with great force, seemingly in all directions at once, and a body slammed against the hull of the ship or dropped suddenly into the boat found them both hard and unforgiving. Many of the women were bruised and cut; some sprained shoulders or twisted ankles. Most of them fell into the sea at least once, several of them twice, and one disappeared beneath the surface three times. As soon as a woman or child had dropped to the boat and an oarsman could free the rope, the men on deck snapped it up and quickly began rigging the next passenger.

Some women being herded toward the rope looked around wildly for their children and called to their friends, but their voices were drowned in the confusion. Some got shuffled forward so quickly and found themselves in the sling and over the side so suddenly that they ended up in a boat without their children. Some watched after the children of other women. Captain Herndon supervised the evacuation, constantly moving from one part of the ship to another, ensuring that only women and children got into the first boats.

Jane Harris started up the gangway from the saloon to the upper deck holding her baby in her arms, but she could barely move because the steps under her feet slid sideways then suddenly dropped away or rocketed upward as the ship pounded in the trough of the waves. Herndon saw her trying to negotiate the stairs and sent one of the passengers to help her. Moments later, as she stood on deck prepared to descend to the first boat, Herndon assisted in loading her into the rope swing.

“The captain tied a rope around me,” she remembered, “and I think he was one of the men that had hold of it when I was lowered down. He was a noble man, and I shall never forget him as long as I live. When I began to slide down, a great wave dashed up between me and the little boat, which threw the boat off from the ship and left me hanging in the air with the rope around my waist. I was swung hither and thither over the waves by the tossing of the ship, then I was dropped suddenly into the boat when it happened to come directly under me. As soon as I got
into the boat, I looked up and saw the captain was fixing a cape around my child, and a few moments afterward he lowered her down to me.”

The minstrel Billy Birch had left the bailing lines, found his wife, Virginia, and helped her with her life preserver. Then the two of them went to their cabin to find a cloak for Virginia. Amid the water and debris, Virginia saw something she could not leave behind: the canary she had carried aboard in a cage. “It was singing as merrily as it ever did,” she remembered, and she hated to think of the small bird being drowned or crushed as the steamship broke apart.

“On the spur of the moment I took the little thing from its prison and placed it in the bosom of my dress. My husband remonstrated with me, hurrying me to leave the vessel, and telling me not to waste time on so trifling an object.”

Together they hurried through the crowds of people belowdecks and up through the hatchway, trying to keep their footing as they made their way against the wind. They prepared Virginia quickly, and she bid her husband of three weeks good-bye. “I expected that it was the intention to transfer all the passengers to the brig, otherwise I would not have left while my husband remained behind. But he told me to go and he would soon follow, and so I went.” The canary stuffed into her dress, Virginia swung over the side of the steamer and disappeared beneath the waves before she could be hauled, soaked and gasping, into the first of the small boats.

Many of the women expected their husbands to accompany them in the lifeboats, or assumed that their husbands would follow soon in another boat. But every man refused to leave with his wife until all of the women and children had been safely ferried to the
Marine
.

Mary Swan was a young wife traveling with a baby not yet two. When the order came for the women and children to prepare for lowering to the lifeboats, her husband left his place at the pumps and came to her. “About an hour before I left, he took me aside and bade me, ‘Good-bye.’ He said, ‘I don’t know that I shall ever see you again.’ He was very glad to think that I could be taken off. He wanted me to go, and said that he did not care about himself, if it were possible that I could be saved, and the little child. He told me that he would try to save himself if an honorable opportunity should present itself after all the women
were taken off. He had been sick for three or four days before the disaster, but notwithstanding this, he persisted in keeping his place at the pumps.”