TRAGEDIES OF THE SEA.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXVI, Issue 14169, 18 September 1906, Page 3

TRAGEDIES OF THE SEA.

[All Rights Reserved.] Unfortunately, there is little difficulty in writing upon so fruitful a topic as the above, so fruitful indeed, that in the brief space at my disposal I. do not propose to particularise more than by passing allusion any of the great sea tragedies that have passed through our later maritime history. It will, I think bo far more fitting in an article like this to deal with the causes of the sea tragedy and to show, as may easily bo done, how by the advance of seamanship, the improvement in naval architecture, and the steady upward trend of character among those responsible for the navigation of ships, great sea tragedies have lessened amazingly in number, while the fleets of the world have increased in an even greater, proportion. ■

"When I first went to eea, only thirtyeight years ago, seafaring was just emerging from that state in which its normal condition, might have been described as one of tragedy. Steam, that great ameliorator of life at sea-, whether for the passenger or the seaman (leaving for the present the firemen and engineers out of the question) had evidently come to stay, and although splendid fleets of clipper ships still traded regularly between the United Kingdom and all the great ports of the world, it was obvious that their tenure of regular trade was menaced most seriously by the new agent. But even in those magnificent sailing ships there wore cases of actual experience which froze the blood to listen to. Cases of ■disaster occurring through drunkenness, through ignorance and carelessness super-added to the ordinary perils of the sea, were neither few nor far between, although it must be gladly admitted that certain great lines such as Green’s, 'Wigram’s, Devitt and Moore, George Thompson and Brocklebanks enjoyed special immunity because. of the great care with which they selected their officers, the lavish ulike op of the ships, and last, but by no means least, the good food which they provided for the largd crews carried. BAD FOOD AND THE COFFIN SHIP. Just a step lower in the seal© a very different condition of things obtained. Owing to the truly infernal condition of feeding, I have seen practically a whole ship’s company before the mast suffering from scurvy, that most horrible and loathsome disease whereby much of the putridity of the corpse may be witnessed in the still living and suffering body. And it was entirely due to the vile quality of the food put on board, and practically an entire absence of fresh provisions—for it is a farce to present men, who have been compelled to eat the offal, which, although acrid with salt, was really putrid, with on© plateful of preserved

soup four times in seven months! 1 was but a boy, but can 1 ever forget my task of leading those scurvy-stricken men about the decks at night (for they were then quite blind) putting the ropes in their hands and hearing their moans as the pulling racked their tortured bones? This is Sea Tragedy. Then there was the coffin ship, meant to sink somewhere out of reach of paying eyes, heavily insured and in command cf some reckless brute, who valued not his own life at a row of pins, and the lives of his crow at much less. The risks of saiEng in a vessel like this, apart altogether from the secret intention of sinking her at the first favourable opportunity, _ were very great, for tho usual concomitants of such a. Voyage were rotten gear, had food, filthy, almost unmentionably bad accommodation, and plenty of drink. In addition to all these it was usually the case that' there was no chronometer, or a useless one, which was worse, while reliable charts and other usual aids to navigation were absent or in such a condition as to he unuseable. Life on hoard such a vessel as this was a long tragedy, no gleam of light illumined the sordid gloom, and when the end cawo it is perhaps not too much to say i hat those few terrible moments in which tho weary soul parted from the worn body were welcome, because they led straight to rest. A HERITAGE OF BRUTALITY. But wo are still far from the bottom of the scale. Lower even than these occasional vessels sent to sea. to sink, were those whose owners were poor and generally allied to the master or skipper, and sometimes the first officer, by financial ties. It is hardly necessary to say that these vessels were sailed cheaply, because that condition is obvious, but this raging desire for economy led to some truly awful deeds. The Crews of these vessels were chiefly boys and young men who were taken as apprentices to avoid paying them -wages, and their condition can only be described by one often misused word, slavery. Their lives were quite at the mercy of the skipper aud mate, men -who, while undoubtedly honest and'brave, as well as good seamen (there is a difference between a good seaman and a good navigator, though it is difficult to explain to lands folk), were as undoubtedly drunken, merciless brutes, to whom cruelty towards those in their power was the only method of exercising that power with which they were acquainted. Their favourite remark was that they were law and God in blue water, and, unhappily, they behaved as if that were true. Sadly enough, as the beaten, starved, overworked apprentice grew up, in spite of his treatment, to be a man and took Jus place as an able seaman in the fo’c’ele until he, too, could rise to the quarter-deck, he practised the same brutality upon his fellows, only a step beneath him. as lie had been subjected to. The result was that the wretched lads were between two fires, being savagely beaten cn deck and no lees savagely ill-treated below, so that to their normal condition of ; body might be fitly applied tho dici turn of Isaiah, “Full of wounds and ! bruises and putrifying sores—they have | not been neither bound up, nor I mollified with ointment.” Of course I many of them died, and were flung ! overboard without the slightest inquiry . into the manner of their death. No I man cared for these luckless sons of the sea. ROMANCE AND TRAGEDY AKIN. . The peculiar feature of the sea tragedy on the grand scale which constantly recurs in the stories of shipwrecks in the early past nineteenth century is the mad rush to the spirit-room, I the broaching of rum-casks and the 1 subsequent conversion of the mariners into howling Sends, who went down quick into the pit in a state of mad- | ness. This horrible side of sea tra- ; gedy is hardly ever absent from our i early sea fiction, and undoubtedly it added immensely to the romantic inter- ! cst of such stories. It is, a good thing for us to realise that within the last half-century this feature of debauchery has been entirely eliminated from the other terrors of the sea. Few, indeed, are the ships in which liquor forms any part of the agreed rations, outside of vessels of the Royal Navy, of course, and nowhere'has the spread of temperance been more mark- | ed than at sea. Some of the later tragedies of the sea ■ have taken hold of the popular imagination, and will always hold their place ; in sea-stories. Not because of the magnitude of the disasters, but because ' human suffering being non-cumulative, there is just as much tragedy in the loss of a steamer with a couple of , hands on board as in a wreck of a liner whore the deaths run into hundreds. Still, certain of these shipwrecks have undoubtedly the spectacular element about them which will always appeal to the human mind, and of these during the last century perhaps none can compare with the wreck of the Birkenhead with her lines of soldiers drawn up and calmly awaiting the end, while the mariners were labouring to save the ! women and children as the doomed ship ! was being steadily ground to fragments I upon tho Ragged rocks. Next I should I place the Atlantic, stranded in a I snowstorm upon the awful, iron-bound coast near Cape Race, Newfoundland; with her hundreds of helpless passengers in thin night-gear clinging to the rigging and there frozen to death, while those who essayed to reach the shore were dashed to pieces upon tho rooks by the tremendous violence of the waves. But the loss of the City of Boston, of tho old Inman line, fills one with the horror that always accompanies the unknown. A grand ship, staunch, well-found and ably commanded, she disappeared while on her voyage between Liverpool and New York, and no trace of her has ever been discovered. The simplest theory of her loss is that she collided with an iceberg in a thick fog and sank with all hands, the whole agony lasting but a tew minutes. True, a fearful storm did rage over the North Atlantic at about that time, but that is not sufficient to account for the loss of so fine a ship. HOPELESS HEROES. The loss of the London in the Bay of Biscay possessed all the elements of modern sea tragedy, glorified by the splendid behaviour of aU concerned, officers, passengers and crew. Amidst the howling of the hurricane and the gradual disintegration of tho ship, ■everybody kept their heads, nor disgraced their humanity. There are few finer spectacles in our ocean history than that of the doomed captain of the London hanging on the lee of the wrecked bridge and shouting to the steersman of the one boat that got clear with a full freight of rescued ones, tho course and distance to Brest “and a safe passage to you.” Think if you can of the might of this selfsacrifice, and behold it, too, in those passengers left behind without hope, raising out of tho depths of their chilEng hearts a good-bye cheer. Of a very different character appears tho terrible tragedy of the Northfleet sailing ship at anchor in the Downs, with six or seven hundred navvies and their wives on board, outward bound to the colonies. At dead of night she was run into by a large Spanish steamer, the Murillo, winch, in dastardly fashion, backed out of the wreck she had mad© and steamed away. An awful scene ensued, in which the few brave ones who endeavoured to stem tho flood of panic lest their lives, indeed, only the merest handful of them were saved. And the agonising part of it all was ftliat when daylight ■ came there were the three tall masts

towering above the water to a height of a hundred feet, for tho ship had been at anchor in less than sixty feet of water, and had settled straight down, standing erect upon the bottom. So that nearly, if not quite all of tho drowned might have been saved, had they possessed this little bit of .elementary knowledge, and climbed up . out of death. There is a trifling amount of satisfaction in the knowledge that tho coward steamer was afterwards caught and confiscated. IN THE “ROARING FORTIES.” , That terrific enemy fire is never more terrible than when it gets the upper hand at sea, and the last century afforded some harrowing examples of its destructive power. Chief among these was the case of the Gospatrick, a 1 fine emigrant ship, saiEng along that gigantic void of the Southern Ocean on her way to the AustraEan colonies. If is a place of tremendous stress even for the best equipped saiEng ships,, the “ roaring forties,” requiring high seamanship and courage to take advantage of the great gales which blow almost continually, in order to make a passage. But when suddenly from the bowels of the flying ship, already straining every item of her construction to moot the demands made upon her by the elements, there bursts the long, greedy spirals of flame, no amount of descriptive power can exaggerate that tragic potentialities of the situation. The gigantic seas rolling up preclude the idea of being saved ■ by the boats, the awful loneliness of that vast ocean 1 renders the possibility of being succoured by a passing ship almost entirely out of the question, while the state of the weather forbids that manoeuvring which in fighting firs in a sailing vessel is so essential. All 1 these _ hindrances combined to render the disaster to the Gospatrick complete, and yet by some miracle five or six persons did escape from that awful calamity and were picked up alive by a passing ship. But. of the details of that terrible conflict we are ignorant except that we know what sort of a fiendish combination fire and gale and sea and night and perfect isolation oould produce. It would, however, be too cruel to dwell upon it. THE UNSINK ABLE SHIP IN SIGHT. Far more grateful is it to record how, in spite of what those who should know better lament as the decay of the romantic side of seafaring, the tale of sea tragedies grows ever smaller and smaller. Many causes contribute to this most desirable end. The most highly educated officer has put into his capable hands scientific aids to safe navigation which makes his arduous task not perhaps easier, but far less liable .to disaster. He is far less dependent, also, upon the seafaring abiEty of Ida crew, in the great majority of cases ■> only needing what he almost invariably receives, the loyal support of men who handle ocal and engines far below. And the,ships of to-day, of whatever class, are built with such mechanical skill and such amazing fidelity on the part of the workmen that it really appears aa if w© were within reach, of the unsilikable ship. As to fire getting the upper hand, that, owing to improved chemical appliances, has almost been relegated to the ignoble position of an almost impossible idea. Of course, until all the sailing ships are gone, tragedies of the" sea wEI still occasionally furnish forth harrowing reading owing to their many disabiEties in the strife with the ocean. But a glance at Lloyd’s register of wrecks during the last twenty-five years will Show at a glance that by leaps and bounds we are approaching the time when seafaring shall have become as safe ae any other cal Eng, although, of course, that does not mean that we shall ever be without tragedy at sea.