THE WRECK OF THE INDIAN CHIEF.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XVIII, Issue 6063, 23 April 1881, Page 6

THE WRECK OF THE INDIAN CHIEF.

■ THE COXSWAIN'S YARN. ; [BrASEAFAnER.] , ! ■..-;' Two days had elapsed since, the rescue of the survivors of the crew of the Indian Chief - —the. particulars of which were related in this journal last Saturday—and I was gazing with much interest at the victorious lifeboat as she lay motionless upon the water of '■■' the harbour. It was a very calm day, the sea' stretching from tho pier-sides as smoothes piece of green silk, and growing vague in the! wintry haze of tho horizon, while the white ■ cliffs were brilliant with the silver suushir.e. ' It filled the mind with strange and moving" thoughts to look at that sleeping, lifeboat, with her image as sharp as a. coloured photo--graph shining in the clear water under,her," and then reflect upon the furious conflict she had been concerned in only two nights ', before, the freight of half-drowned men that, had loaded her, the dead body on her' thwart, the bitter cold of the howling gale, the deadly peril that, had attended-every' , heave of the huge black seas. Within a few hundred yards of her lay the tug, tho sturdy 1 steamer that had towed her to the Long Sand, that had held her astern all liight, and brought her back safe on the following afternoon. The tug had suffered much from the frightful tossing she had received, and her injuries had not yet been dealt with ; she had lost her sponsons, her starboard side-house was gone, the port.aide of her bridge had been started and the iron railing warped, her decks still seemed dank from the remorseless washing, her funnel was brown with rust, and the tough craft looked a hundred years old. Remembering what these vessels had gone through, how they had but two days since topped a long series of merciful and dangerous errands by as brilliant an act of heroism and humanity as '~ any on record,- it was difficult to behold them without a quickened pulse. I recalled the coming ashore of their crews, the lifeboatmen with their great cork-jackets around them, the steamer's men in streaming oilskins, the facee of many, of them livid with, the cold, their e3'es dim. witli .'the bitter vigil they had kept and the furious blowing of the spray ; and I remembered the bright smile that here and there lighted up the weary faces, as first one and - then another, causht sight of a wife or a sister in the crowd waiting to greet and accompany, the brave hearts to the warmth of their humble homesI felt that while these crews' sufferings and the courage and resolution they had shown remained unwritten only half of a very stirring and manful story had been recorded. The narrative, as related to me. by the coxswain of the lifeboat, is a necessary pendent to the tale told last week by-the mate of the wrecked sliip; and as he and his colleagues both of the lifeboat and the steamtug want no better introduction than their own deeds to the sympathy and attention of. the public,, let Charles Edward Fish begin his yarn -without further preface. "News had been brought to Ramsgate, as yon know, sir, that a large ship was ashore on the Long Sand, and Captain Br-iine, the harbour master, immediately ordered the tug and lifeboat to proceed to her assistance. It was blowing a heavy gale of wind, though it came much harder some hours afterwards; and the moment we were clear of the pierp we felt the sea. Our boat' is a very fine one. I know there is no better on the coasts, and there are only two in Great Britain bigger. She waa presented to the town by the people of Bradford, and is called after that place. But it is ridiculous to talk of bigness when it means only fortytwo feet long, and when a sea is raging round you lieavy enough to swamp a line-of-battle ship. I had my eye on'the tug— named the Vulcan, sir—when'she met the fir3t of the seas, and she was thrown np like a ball, and you could see her starboard paddle revolving in the air high enough out for a coach to pass under; and when' she struck the hollow she dished a sea over Her bows that left only the stern'showing. ' "We were towing head to wind, and' the water was flying over the boat in clouds. Every man of us was soaked to the skin, in spite of our overalls, by the time we had brought the Ramsgate Sands abeam; but there were a good many miles to be gone over befrire we should fetch the Knock Lightship, and so you see, sir, it was much too early for us to take notice that things were not over arid above comfortable. We got out the sailcover—a piece of tarpaulin—to make a shelter of, and rigged it up against the mast, seizing it to the burtons ; but it hadn't been up two minutes when a heavy sea hit and washed it right aft in rags; so there was nothing to do but to hold on to the thwarts and shake ourselves when the water came over. I never remember a colder wind. I don't say this because I happened to be out in it. Old Tom Cooper, one of the best boatmen in all England, sir, who made one of our crew, agreed with me that it was move like a flaying machine than a natural gale of wind. The feel of it in the face was like being gnawed by a dog. I only wonder it didn't freeze the tears it fetched out of our eyes. Wo were heading N.E., and the wind was blowing from N.E. The North Foreland had been a bit of shelter, like; but when we had gone clear of that, and the ocean lay ahead of us, the seas were furious —they seemed miles long, sir, like an Atlantic sea, and it was enough to make a man hold his breath to watch how the tug wallowed and tumbled into them. I sung out to Dick Goldsmith, 'Dick.'lsays, 'she's slowed, do you see, she'll never be able to meet it,' for she had slackened her engines down into a mere crawl, and I really did think.they meant to give up. I could see Alf Page—the master of her, sir—on : the bridge, coming and going like' the moon when the clouds sweep over, it, as the seas smothered him up one moment'and left him shining in the sun the next. But there was to be no giving up with the tug's crew any more than with the lifeboat's; she held on, and we followed. "Somewhere abreast of the Elbow Buoy a smack that was running ported her helm to speak us. Her skipper 2iad just time to jell out, 'A vessel on the Long Sand !' and we to wave our hands, when she was astern and out of sight in a. haze of spray. Presently a collier named the Fanny, with her forctopgallant yard gone, passed us. She was cracking on to bring the news of the wreck to Ramsgate, and was making a heavy sputter under her tbpsaik and fore* sail. They raised a cheer, for they knew our errand, and then, like the smack, in a minute she was astern and gone. By this time the cold and the wet and the fearfu plunging were beginning to telL and one of the men called for a nip of rum. The quantity we generally take is half a gallon, and it is always my rule to be sparing with that drink for the sake of the shipwrecked men we may have to bring home, and who are pretty sure to be in greater need of the stuff than us. I never drink myself, sir, and that's one reason, I think, why I manage to meet the cold and wet middling well, and rather better than some men who look stronger than me. However, I told Charlie Verrion to measure the rum out and serve it round, and it would have made you laugh, I do believe, sir, to have seen the.care the men took of the big bottle—Charlie cooking his finger into the cork-hole and Davy Berry clapping his hand over the pewter measure whenever a ,sea came to prevent the sal

rficht was, the tug's crew were no better SffT their wheel is forrard, and so yon may suc'pose the fellow that steered had his • Hw of the seas ; the others stood by to relieve him ; and, for the matter of water, she was just like a rock, the waves striking | ner.bows, and flying pretty nigh as h.gh as the top ct her funnel, and blowing tne whole length of her aft with a fall like the tumble nf half-n-dozen cartloads of bricks. I like to sneak of what they went through, lor the tray they were knocked about was something fearfal. to be sure. •'By half-past four o'clock in the afternoon it was drawing on dusk, and about that hour we sighted the revolving light of the Kentish Knock Lightship, and a little after five we were pretty close to her. She is a big red-hulled boat, with the words 'Kentish Knock' written in long white letters on her sides and, dark as it was, we could see her flung up, and rushing down fit to roll her over*nd over; and the way she pitched and went out of sight, and then ran up on the black heights of water, gave me a better notion of the fearfulness of that sea than I had got by watching the tug or noticing our own lively dancing. The tug hailed her first, and two men looking over her side answered ; bnt what they said didn't reach us in the lifeboat. Then the steamer towed us abreast, but the tide caught our warp and <»ave us 3 sheer that brought us much too close alongside of her. When the sea took her she seemed to hang right over us, and the sight of that great dark hull, looking as if when it fell, it must come right atop of us, made us want to sheer off, I can tell you. I sun? out, ' Have yon seen the ship ?' And one of the mea bawled back, 'Yes.' 'How does she bear?' "Xor-west by north.' 'Have you seen anything go tc her?' The answer I caught was, 'A boat.' Some of onrmen said the answer was, ' A. lifeboat, , but most of U3 only heard, 'Aloat. , The tug was now towing ahead, and we went ■past the lightship, but ten minutes after Tom Friend sings out, 'They're burning a li"ht aboard of her!' and looking astern I saw they had fired a red signal light that ■was blazing over the bulwark in a long shower of sparks. The tug put her helm down to return, and we were brought broadside to the sea. Then we felt tUe power of those waves, sir. It looked a wonder that we were not roiled over and drowned, "every man of us. We held on -with our teeth clenched, and twice the boat was filled, and the water up to our throats. ' Look out for it men!' was always the cry. But every .upwartlsend emptied the noble little craft, like pnlliug out a plug in a washbasin, and in a. few minutes we were again alongside the lightvessel. This time there were six or seven men looking over the side. ' What do you want ?' we shouted. ' Did you see the Sunk lightship's rocket ?'. they all yelled out together. . 'Yes. Did you say you saw a boat?' 'No,' they answered, showing we had mistaken their iirst reply. • On which I shouted to the tug, ' Pull us round to the • Long Sand Head Buoy 1' and then we were nnder weigh again, -meeting tho tremendous ,seas. There v?as only, a little bit of'moon, westering fast, and what there -was of it showed bnt now and.again, as the heavy clouds opened and let" the light of it down. Indeed; it'was very dark', though there; was some kind of glimmer in the foam which enabled us to mark the tug ahead. 'Bitter cold -work, Charlie,' says Old Tom Cooper to me; 'but,' says he, 'it's colder for the -poor -wretches aboard the. wreck, if they're alive to feel it-.' The thought of?them made our own sufferings small; ' and we kept look.ing and looking into the darkness around, but there was nothing to be spied, only now and and long whiles apart the flash of a rocket in the sky from the Sunk Lightship. Meanwhile, from, time .to time, -we burnt a hand-signal—a light," sir, .that's fired -something after the manner of a gnn. Ton fit it into a wooden tube, and give .a sort of .himmer/at the end a smart-blow, and the Same rashes out, and a bright light it makes, ; sir;- Ours were green lights, and whenever Tset one flaring I couldn't help taking notice ■ of the appearance of the men. It was a queer sight, I assure you, to see them nil as ' green as leaves, with their cork jackets swelling ont their bodies so as scarcely to : seem like hnraan beings, and the black water as high as our masthead, or howling a long way below us, on either side. They burned hand-signals on she tug, too, but nothing : came of them. There wa3 no sign of the wreck, and staring over the edge of the boat, with the spray, and the darkness, was like trying to see through the bottom of a well. So we began to talk the matter over, and Tom Cooper says, ; ' We had better stop here and wait for daylight. , 'I'm, for stopping,' ' says Steve Goldsmith; and Bob Penny sajrs, 'We're here to fetch the wreck, and fetch it we will, if we wait a week. 'Eight,' says I; and all hands being agreed without any fuss, sir, though, I dare say, most of our hearts were at home and our wishes alongside our hearths and the warm fires in them—we all of us pnt our hands to our months and made one great cry of 'Vulcan ahoy!' The tug dropped astern. , ' What do you want ?' sings out ..the skipper, ' when •. he gets within "speaking distauce. 'There's nothing to be seen of the vessel, and so we had better lie-to for the night, I answered. 'Very good, , he says, and fien the steamer, without another word from her ; crew, and the water tumbling over her bows like cliffs, resumed her station ahead, her paddles revolving just fast.enough to keep her from dropping astern. As coxswain of tho lifeboat, sir, I take no credit for resolving to lie-to all night. But I am bound to say a few words for the two crews, who made up their minds, without a-murmur, without a second's hesitation, to face the ,; bitter cold and fierce seas of that long ' winter darkness, that'they might be on the spot to help their fellow-creatures when the dawn broke and showed them where-they 'were. I know there are scores of: sailors round our coasts who would have done likewise. Only, jead, sir, what was done in the North, Ne'wcastle way, during the gales last October. But surely, sir, no matter - ■ who may be the men , who do what .they : think-their duty, whether they belong to Cthe North or the South, they deserve the •■ encouragement of praise. A man likes to feel when he has. done his be3t ;that his feUow-men think well = of: his work, i If I haa not been one of that "crew I should wish to say more; but no false.pride shall make ■me say less,sir, and Ithank'God for the resolutionHe put into us,' and for the strength He gave us to keep that, resolntion.. " All that we. had to do now was to make ourselves as comfortable as we could, j Our 'tow-ropeveered us out a long:-way, too far S3tera cf the tug for her to help us as a breakwater, "and the manner in which we ■were flung towards,the sky.yith'half our keel out of water and then dropped into and hollow—like falling fromthe-top of arouse, sir—while the heads of the seas blew; into ■ tumbled over us all tho time, made us all reckon that, so far from getting any; rest, -inost ofi our "time would be preventing ourselves from being wasnod overboard, i We. turned to and got r the foresail aft, and made_ a kind of roof of it. : This ■ ■■■ ■ was no easy job, for the wind'was so furious V;.:that wrestling even with that bit of a sail j.i[was" like fighting with 'a steam-engine. ■- When it was up ten of us snugged ourselves. : away; under- it, and two men stood oh the aftaSgrating thwart keeping a look-out, with the life-lines around them. As you/know, •'■sir, "We carry-a binnacle, and the lamp:in it ■was ! alight and gave out just enough haze for . ".'va to see each "other -in. fWe all lay in a lump together for warmth, and is fine'ehow we made, I dare say; for a cork-jacket, even when, sman stands upright, isn't calculated to improve his figure, and as we all of us hailcork-jackets on and oil-skins, and many of us sea .boots, ■ you-may guess what a raffleof legs' and arms we showed, and : what a. riim heap of odds and ends we looked, as we sprawled in thebottom of the . boat upon one another. Sometimes it would ;. ;be Johnny Goldsmith—for we had three and Dick and Johnny— growling underneath that somebody was lying on his leg; and then may be Harry Header would bawl out that there was a man sitting.on his head; and once Tom . Friend;swore his arm was broke.; but my opinion is, sir, that it wa3 too cold to feel inconveniences of this kind/ and F-believe that some among us would not have known | U their: arms and legs really had been broke, until they tried to use 'em, for the cold : seemed fc, take away all feeling out of the ,: mood,:. As the seas flew over the .boat the s water filled the sail that was stretched over- . aead and bellied it down upon ; us, and that gaye us less room, so that some had to lie .; .-y.,.™t on their faces; but when this bellying ■•■■;;■ sot. too.had we'd all get up and make one neavo with our backs under the sail, and ! «nuclr the; water: out-thatt way. 'Charlie : '"n.'rsays .Tom Cooper" tbmo, in ! ai grave "- Volc f... what would some- of them iyoung ------m^! mCn M comes to ' Eamsgate in the ' -S2 r «^ JSfej,,l ' likl! ' to 'SO out in tho * ' : lSrf^'i^-- of * -Ihi?, made me •■ '■"-' ■ah ? 6t^^- hc^?OJln g To m Cooper votes for : W.'^ Ag morn-

always take a cake o! Fry's chocolate with me when I go out in the lifeboat, as I find it very supporting, and I had a mind to have a mouthful now ; hut when I opened the locker I found it full of water, my chocolate nothing but paste, and the biscuit a mass of pulp. Tins was rather hard, as there was nothing else to eat, and there was no getting near the tug in that sea unless we wanted to be smashed into staves. However, we hadn't come oat to enjoy ourselves ; nothing was said, and so we lay in a heap, hugging one another for warmth, until the morning broke. " The first man to look to leeward was old Tom's son—young Tom Cooper—and in a moment he bawled out, ' There she is'.' pointing like a madman. The morning had only just broke, and the light was grey and dim, and down in the west it still seemed to be night; the air wa3 full of spray, and scarcely were we a-top of a sea than we were rushing like an arrow into the hollow again, so that young Tom must have had eyes like a hawk to have seen her. Yet the moment he sung out and pointed, all hands cried out, ' There she is!' But what was it, sir f Only a mast about three miles off—just one single mast sticking up out of the white water, as thin and faint a3 a spider's line. Yet that was the ship we had been waiting all night to see. There she was, and my heart thumped in my ears the moment my eye fell on that mast. But Lord, sir, the fearful sea that -was raging between her and us ! for where we were was deepish water, and the waves regular; but all about the wreck was the Sand, and the water on it was running in fury all sorts of wajs, rushing up in tall columns of foam as high as a ship's mainyard, and thundering so loudly that, though we were to windward, we could hear it above the gale and the boiling seas around us. It might have shook even a man who wanted to die to look at it, if he didn't know what the 'Bradford' can go through. I ran my eye over the men's faces. 'Let slip the tow rope,' bawled Dick Goldsmith. 'Up foresail,' I shouted, and two minutes after we had sighted that mast we were dead before the wind, our storm foresail ta,ut, our boat's stem heading full for the broken seas and the lonely stranded vessel in the midst of them. It was well that there was something in front of us to keep our eyes that way, and that none of us thought of looking astern, or the sight of the high and frightful seas which raged after us might have played old Harry with weak nerves. Some of them came with such ferce that they leapt right over the "boat, r.nd the air was dark with water flying a dozen yards high over iis in. broad solid sheets, which fell with a roar like the.'explosion of a gun ten and a dozen fathoms ahead. But we took no notice of these seas even when we were in the thick of the broken watera, and all the hands holding on to the thwarts for dear life. Every thought was upon the mast that -was growing bigger and ; clearer, and sometimes when a°sea hove us high we could just' see the hull, with the water' as white as milk flying over her. The mast was what they call ' bright, , that is, scraped and varnished, and we knew that if there was anything living aboard that doomed ship we should find it on that,.mast; and we strained! our eyes with all our might, but could; see nothing that looked like a man. But on a sudden I caught sight of a length of canvas streaming out of the top, and all of us seeing it, we raised a shout, and a few minutes after we saw the men. They! were all dressed in yellow oilskins, and the mast being of that colour was the reason why we did not see them sooner.; They-looked a whole mob of people, and one of us roared out, ' All hands are there, men !' and I answered, ' Aye; the whole ship's company, and we'll have them all!' for. though, as we afterwards knew, there were only eleven of them, yet, as I have said, they looked a great number huddled together in that top, and I made sure the wholo ship's company were there. By this time we were pretty close to the ship, and a fearful wreck she looked, with her mainmast and mizenmast gone, and her bulwarks washed away, and great lumps of timber and plankins ripping out of her and going overboard.with every pour of the seas. We let go our anchor fifteen fathoms to windward of-her, and as we did so we saw the poor fellows uulashing themselves and dropping one by one over the top into the lee rigging. : As we veered out cable and drove down under her stern, I shouted to the men oh the wreck to bend a piece of wood oa to a line and throw it overboard for us to lay hold of. They did this, but they had to get aft first, and 1 feared for the poor half-perished creatures again and again as I saw them scrambling along the lee rail, stopping and holding on as the mountainous seas swept over the hull, and then creeping a bit further aft in the pause. There was a horrible muddle of spars and torn canvas and ri"«ino- under her lee, but we could not guess what "a fearful sight was there until our hawser having been made fast to the wreck, we had hauled the lifeboat close under her quarter. There looked to be a whole score of dead bodies knocking about among the spars. It stunned me for a moment, for I had thought all hands were in the foretop, and never dreamt of so many lives having been lost. :, Seventeen were drowned, , and there they were,- most of them, and the body'of the captain; lashed to the head of the mizenmast, - so as to look as if he were I leaning over it, his head stiff upright, and ■"his eyes watching us, and the stir of the seas made him appear to be struggling to get to us. I thought he was alive, and cried to the men to hand him in, but some one said he was killed when the mizenmast fell, and had been dead four or five hours. This was a dreadful shock ; I never remember the like of it. I can't hardly get those fixed 'eyes out of" my sight, sir, and I lie awake for hours of a night, and so does Tom Cooper and others of'us, sseing those bodies torn by the spars and bleeding, floating in the water alongside the miserable ship. " Well, sir, the rest of this lamentable story has been told by the mate of the vessel, and I don't know that I could add anything to it. We saved the eleven men, and I have since heard that all of them are doing we! 1. If I may speak, as coxswain of the lifeboat, I-would like to say that all hands concerned in this rescue, them in the tug as well as the crew of the boat, did what might be expected of English sailors—for such they are, whether you call some of them boatmen or not- and I know in my heart, and say it without fear, that from the hour of leaving Ramagate'Harbour to the moment when we sighted the wreck's mast, there TWis! only one thought in all of us, and that was that the Almighty would give us; the strength and direct ua how to save the lives of the poor fellows to whose assistance we had been sent."—Dally Telegraph.