Читать книгу The Scarlet Stripe--being the adventures of a naval surgeon - Henry Taprell Dorling - Страница 8

Table of Contents

IT is difficult to know how to begin to write of the eight awful days that followed.

Even if I had had the inclination, I had no means of keeping a record, for though some of us had old letters or odd scraps of sodden paper about our persons, there wasn’t such a thing as a pencil among us. Nor was there a going watch in the boat, which meant we could only tell the time roughly by the sun. To keep count of the days, I amused myself by carving a nick in the gunwale of the boat each evening at sundown.

What with our thirst and hunger, our gradually increasing exhaustion, our cold and stiffness during the bitter nights, the blazing heat of some of the days, the soreness caused by the incessant movement of the boat and the sea water drying on our bodies, our swollen joints which soon made it an agony to move, and the lack of proper sleep, we seemed to lose count of time. I know my thoughts wandered strangely. When I dozed off for a few minutes I sometimes dreamt of food and drink, though more often I woke myself up in a sort of horrible nightmare. The men, too, talked and raved in their sleep. I was often light-headed. It needed the greatest concentration of will-power to retain a grip of oneself, or to take any interest in what went on around us.

I suppose I had better try to start at the beginning. Our first preoccupation when we found ourselves alone was to make some sort of mast and sail. As we had only three oars, and needed one of them for steering instead of the missing rudder, and the other two for pulling in case it fell flat calm, we used the ash boathook for a mast, and managed to split up some of the bottom-boards for a yard. Luckily there was a certain amount of cordage in the boat in the shape of her painter, and a heaving line that we found in one of the lockers. In another locker we found the usual boat’s bag which, among other things, contained a small ball of spunyarn, a whole reel of sailmaker’s twine, and some sailmaker’s needles.

The chief difficulty was the material for our sail. Having surrendered my own shirt, which was in pretty good condition, I asked the men who had most clothing to volunteer theirs also. We got more than enough, so selecting those that looked strongest, I carefully ripped up one of the side seams of each, cut off the arms, and put one of the men on to sewing them together with twine.

It took most of the forenoon to finish that sail, and the result was pathetic. It looked like a patchwork quilt, or Joseph’s coat of many colours. It bulged where it shouldn’t, and had various odd bits of material hanging loose. All the same, when we had stayed the mast, fitted sheets and halliards, and hoisted the sail, it bellied out bravely in the breeze. We rigged out an oar over the stern for steering, and, if our mouths hadn’t been so parched, could have shouted for joy when the heavy old boat actually gathered way and started to move ahead.

I doubt if we travelled at more than a knot or a knot and a half with a stiffish breeze behind us. Moreover, we could only run before the wind. All the same, we had started to travel in the right direction, for the wind, so far as I could tell from the bearing of the sun, was about south-west.

I soon realised, however, that if it came on to blow really hard we should have to furl our home-made sail altogether to save it from being blown into ribbons. Shirt material is flimsy at the best of times, and our stitches were not calculated to stand much pressure without tearing away from the material. My chief dread, however, was lest the breeze should fly round to the eastward, in fact, to any direction between north and south passing through east. If it did, I could see no hope of ever making the land. We should be blown out to sea willy-nilly, where, unless we were sighted and picked up by some passing ship, a not altogether likely occurrence, we should either be swamped and drowned in a gale of wind, or perish miserably by thirst and starvation.

The prospect wasn’t at all rosy; but I was glad to remember that the prevailing winds in the area were westerly. I naturally didn’t say anything of my fears to the men. I didn’t want to make them more despondent than they already were.

The breeze increased slightly during the day, and there was a moderate breaking sea rolling up from astern which helped us along on our course but made steering difficult. But there was no real vice in either wind or sea, and we hardly shipped a drop of water.

The sun was abominably hot in the middle of the day, and we were all parched with thirst. Some of the men asked about the water, so once more I went into the question of food and drink and explained to them what I intended to do. We would serve out the merest suspicion of a drink twice a day, roughly a tablespoonful at about noon, and another at sundown. At noon, too, each man would receive a small shred of corned beef out of our 6-lb. tin. The thick ships’ biscuits, I calculated, could be served out at the rate of one and a half per man per day. At first they were fairly popular; but as our thirst increased we found them too hard and too dry to masticate and to swallow with the almost complete absence of saliva in our swollen mouths. We tried soaking them in sea-water until they were soft and pulpy. This made them slightly more palatable, while, rather to my surprise, the slightly salty flavour did not seem to increase our thirst.

Bingo, the dog, shared and shared alike with the rest of us throughout the trip, though it must have been on the fifth or sixth day that one of the men suggested eating him after collecting and drinking the poor beast’s blood. I had heard of shipwrecked people cast away in boats drawing lots as to who should be killed and eaten to keep the others alive. There was the case of the men of the yacht Mignonette in 1884, who, after eighteen days in an open boat, and having been without food for a week and water for five days, killed and ate the boy, who would have died in any case.

But somehow I couldn’t imagine myself eating our poor old hound, and I could see the proposal wasn’t very popular with most of the men, famished and nearly mad with thirst though they were. Indeed, there were the makings of a row when the subject was broached. So I solved the difficulty by putting it to the vote. Two men only were in favour of Bingo’s execution, and all the rest of us were against it.

And I’ll swear that Bingo knew what was happening. If ever a dog grinned with gratitude when the verdict was given he did. He lived to reach the shore with the rest of us, and I hope survived to a good old age to dream over his adventures in the Irish farm where we left him. Incidentally, when our water failed entirely during our fifth day in the boat, it was Bingo who gave us the idea of licking up what little dew fell in the night. I don’t honestly know that it did much to help matters.

From the very first, realising that the lack of water would be our worst privation, I advised the men to adopt the time-honoured dodge of dipping their clothes in the sea and putting them on wet. We all did this during the heat of the day and I think it helped. So did sucking buttons, which seemed to encourage the flow of saliva.

While on the subject of thirst, I may say I was very glad we had no means of smoking. Most of us had pipes and tobacco or cigarettes, which could easily have been dried; but there was no method of lighting them. Our matches were completely sodden and useless, and though we dried them in the sun, their heads came off as soon as we tried to strike them. We had no burning glass either, and though I tried to use my watch glass, it wouldn’t function. I know I felt an intense craving for tobacco all the time, thirst or no thirst. If I could have smoked, assuredly I should have. Some of the men tried chewing tobacco, but soon gave it up. It merely made them sick.

The second night came down after a glaring sunset of bright copper-colour and sickly yellow which overtopped the masses of purplish cloud piled up on the horizon. I didn’t like its appearance. The colour was too harsh and glaring and the clouds looked ominous and hard-edged, almost as if they had been cut out of cardboard with scissors.

But we drove on during the night with our sail set, steering as best we could with the oar over the stern, and keeping an approximately steady course by keeping the Pole Star, whenever we could see it, somewhere on the port beam.

Mawson, a petty officer, kept the first watch, during which I lay stretched out in the stern and managed to doze off occasionally with the sound of the wind and rushing water in my ears. He roused me when he thought it was midnight, and, after massaging my legs and trying to flap some warmth into my numbed carcass, I relieved him at the steer-oar.

“What d’you think of the weather?” I asked.

“I don’t like it, sir,” he whispered. “Sea’s getting up, so’s the wind.”

“Ought we to get the sail down?”

After all, he was a professional seaman. I was not.

“No, sir,” he answered. “I should hang on a bit. Give me a shout if it comes on worse.”

He coiled himself up at my feet and in five minutes was fast asleep. I envied him. I could never sleep as Mawson did. And what a good fellow he was, a veritable tower of strength, full of ideas and common-sense. I should have been like a child without him to back me up.

I had my work cut out to keep the boat more or less before the wind, and by the time the first grey light of dawn appeared over the horizon ahead things looked very nasty. The wind had increased and the paling stars overhead were all but obscured in streamers of flying scud driving in from the westward. The sea, too, was steeper and more threatening, each great rolling hummock topped with yeasty white. At one moment, poised on a foaming crest, the boat shot forward like an arrow with the makeshift sail full. Then, as the sea passed on under us, we seemed to be slipping backwards down an interminable slope until we subsided into a great valley between two walls of water with the sail flapping and useless.

The motion was horrible, a sort of everlasting see-saw and switchback combined. Spray was already starting to break on board, and every time the stern started to lift I gazed anxiously aft at the breaking wave behind us, expecting to be overwhelmed. But, thank heaven, it was a fairly long sea, with a hundred feet or more between successive crests, and the boat responded nobly. I should explain, perhaps, that she was an ordinary merchant ship’s lifeboat, something over twenty feet long with a sharp bow and stern. Very broad in the beam, she was fitted with air-tanks forward and aft and along the sides under the thwarts. Though heavy, she was remarkably buoyant.

I made up my mind to hold on for a bit, for we were certainly travelling fast in the right direction.

The sky was rapidly becoming overcast. Most of the men still slept in queer contorted attitudes in the bottom of the boat with their heads on each other’s bodies. One or two of them groaned and talked incessantly in their sleep. Their pinched, unshaven faces looked ghastly in the growing daylight. They reminded me of corpses.

I was feeling damnably hungry and thirsty myself, and so far we had been only about thirty-six hours or so without a proper meal—from tea-time the day before yesterday.

What should we look like at the end of five days or a week? It might take us all that to reach the land if we weren’t picked up beforehand. Moreover, I had the chart in my mind’s eye. With the wind in the south-west we were travelling about north-east, or diagonally towards the land, not by the shortest route. This meant that from 100 miles the distance might be lengthened to as much as 150, or half as much again. It was a doleful prospect.

I don’t know what time it was that the wind started to blow in fierce squalls and the fag-end of a breaking sea crashed over the stern. But it woke Mawson, and after a brief consultation we decided to take the sail off the boat and to make some sort of a sea-anchor with what timber we possessed. We should probably have broached to and swamped if we had carried on.

Mawson went forward and lashed all our spare wood and bottom-boards together like a rough raft. We didn’t use the oars for this purpose, as we couldn’t risk losing them. After nearly three-quarters of an hour’s work, however, he had finished making his bundle and secured it to the long painter in the bows. The difficulty now was to get the boat head on to the wind without being capsized or swamped in the process.

We lowered the sail and got an oar out each side to turn her, while I stood up in the stern to heave away on the steer-oar when the time came. Then we waited until the boat started to sink into a hollow between the great seas.

“Stand by, sir!” Mawson shouted. “Now, sir!” Helped by a couple of men he dropped the sea-anchor over the side.

It drifted slowly astern, while we laboured at the three oars to turn the boat end for end as quickly as we could. By the time she was about half-way round we started to climb the next watery slope, and, as I laboured, I remember looking over to starboard to where, perhaps thirty feet away over our heads, our moving hillock terminated in a crest of frothing white. It seemed to hiss and to roar as it bore remorselessly down upon us. Terrified at the sight, for I made certain we were about to be swamped, I tugged at the steer-oar with all my strength, while the men amidships did the same—one oar pulling and the other backing.

It was touch and go. The wave-top came closer and closer as we rose, and the boat seemed sluggish and heavy, reluctant to move through the last forty-five degrees. But I had forgotten the sea-anchor. The painter suddenly tautened out with a jerk that sent me sprawling, and the stern spun round—just in time. She seemed to toboggan through the broken water on the crest and into the next grey valley without really shipping much water, though the men forward were drenched.

We brought every one as far aft as they could be crowded to keep the bows of the boat as high as possible out of the water. Throughout the whole of that miserable day and until nearly midnight, when the wind went down and we were able to sail on, we lay at our sea-anchor slowly drifting to leeward. We were wet through and chilled to the bone, and at least half-a-dozen times, when an unusually heavy sea broke over the bows and flooded us nearly to the thwarts, we had to bale for our lives with anything we could lay our hands upon. We were weakening fast, and the only bright spots in that interminable day came at noon and again at sundown, when we served out those precious drops of water. The clouds scurried overhead, and once or twice I thought we were going to have rain. But no rain came, nothing but driving spray.

It was blowing, I should think, a moderately strong gale, and only those who have experienced an Atlantic blow can have any possible conception what it meant to us in that open boat. Sitting in the stern sheets as the boat rose and fell in a perpetual switchback motion, gazing alternately at the grey sky and the deep grey-green hollows, with the thunder of breaking water and the patter of falling spray constantly in our ears, was a sort of waking nightmare. The seas seemed as high as houses. Time and time again, watching their smoking crests driving towards us, I made certain we were about to be overwhelmed. But as often the boat rode through it with nothing worse than a burst of heavy spray.

Had we possessed more strong rope in the boat we should have veered the sea-anchor further ahead. But this wasn’t possible. Even so, I was in terror that the painter would chafe through where it passed over the bows, and at least a dozen times Mawson made his way forward to serve it over with rags of clothing and spunyarn. If it had carried away we should have been hurled broadside on to the sea and nothing could have saved us.

During that dismal day we had occasional bursts of sunlight, when it was rather wonderful to see the blue-green translucence of the seas with the sun behind them, and the lace-like pattern of foam on their sloping sides. To tell the truth, however, we weren’t in the mood to admire anything. Our bodies were sore with the constant chafe and movement. We had difficulty in moving our joints. Our throats were parched, and our tongues swollen. It was an effort even to talk.

On the third day, when we were again travelling to the north-eastward under our rag of a sail, now sadly frayed, we sighted smoke broad on the port quarter. It rose straight into the air like a pillar before drifting to leeward in a long layer, which showed that the steamer making it was moving in much the same direction as ourselves, that is, before the wind.

Buoyed up by the hope of being rescued, we tied coats to the two oars and hoisted them aloft. The smoke became more distinct, and the look on the haggard faces of the men as they watched it baffles description.

Then, as we lifted on the swells, we saw first a smoking funnel and two masts, and then the hull of a ship. She was an ordinary tramp steamer, at a distance, I should think, of about six miles.

She was steaming a slightly divergent course to the northward, and we headed in the same direction to try to cut her off. For an hour we waved our home-made flags, did all we could to attract her attention. But she passed us unseeing at a distance of about five miles, and within an hour was getting further and further away on the port bow. In another half-hour she was completely out of sight. Nothing remained but her tantalising smoke trail on the horizon.

Words cannot describe our feelings when we realised she hadn’t seen us. On first sighting her our hopes had been lifted sky-high as we realised help was at hand and our agony might be over. Then came an interminable period of suspense, when, every moment, we expected to see her turn in response to our frantic signals. Then, as she drew further away and we realised she was going, we felt numb with despair and disappointment. Our weakness, our helplessness, seemed a hundred times worse than before as we watched her fade gradually out of sight. Some of us prayed, some wept, others blasphemed.

And on that third day, when doling out the evening ration, I discovered that the water was not holding out as it should. I had to tell the men that in future the daily allowance would be the equivalent of about one tablespoonful served out at noon. They accepted the situation without a murmur, poor fellows. There was nothing else for it. But we were all weakening fast, and I had my eye on two of them who seemed worse than the others, and were hardly able to stir. Another poor chap, an able seaman, kept talking to himself in a way I didn’t quite like. There was a peculiar wild look in his eyes as though he were going mad. Mawson noticed it too.

“I don’t like the looks o’ Strangeways, sir,” he croaked under his breath. “Looks to me he’s goin’ potty. D’you think, sir, we’d better lash him up an’ search his pockets? Maybe he’s got a knife.”

But somehow I didn’t like the idea of violence, and vetoed the suggestion.

“Let’s hang on a bit,” I said. “He can’t do much harm as he is.”

Two days later I wished that I had taken Mawson’s advice.

On the fourth day it was practically flat calm. The breeze had dropped and we were barely making headway under our sail. The sun blazed overhead in a cloudless sky, and the sea shone like burnished metal. We took off our shirts and vests, dipped them in sea-water, and put them on again. All the same, the baking heat made our thirst excruciating. There was a vile taste in our mouths. Our tongues were furred and horrible, and the mere driblet of water served out at noon did little to alleviate the agony.

On that day the strongest of us took spells at the oars to help the boat in the right direction. But we had no strength for pulling, and how many miles we travelled I shouldn’t like to say. I made up my mind that if the calm continued, another forty-eight hours would see the end of us. We seemed to have reached the limit of human endurance. The men’s faces, though burnt brick-red by the sun, were gaunt and hollow-cheeked. With the dark rings under their eyes, their bloodless lips and heavy growth of stubble, they looked ghastly. Their eyes followed me pathetically, as though I, being the only officer present, had the power of life or death over them. But what could I do to make things better? I was as helpless and as impotent as they were.

Strangeways sat crouched up in the bottom of the boat with his head in his hands, mumbling and muttering to himself. The other two men I had noticed as being worse than the others lay stretched out in the bottom of the boat like corpses.

Just before sunset, when the breeze sprang up from the south-west again and we hoisted the sail, Mawson came aft and whispered in my ear.

“Will you come forward and have a look at Butler, sir,” he said in an awed voice.

Sick at heart I crawled forward, felt Able Seaman Butler’s pulse, and put my hand over his heart.

He was dead!

I noticed one or two of the others eyeing the corpse in a furtive horrible kind of way when I made my pronouncement. I realised what was in their minds; but starvation was better than that. I called Mawson forward. We removed the identity disc, leather belt, boots, and a few things from the trousers pockets. Then, while I repeated what I could remember of the Funeral Service at Sea, we lifted the body and slid it over the side. We had no weights; but sinking slowly in a little trail of bubbles it disappeared astern. I wondered which of us would be the next.

All through the night we sailed on under a starry sky and a freshening breeze; but next morning the sea again started to rise. At about noon, when it was blowing half a gale, we were forced once more to heave our sea-anchor overboard. It was more difficult this time, for we were all very weak. The wind seemed stronger than before and the seas steeper and more menacing, and during the ten hours that we lay thus we were often baling like grim death with the boat nearly full of water.

It was at noon on this fifth day, after serving out the water, that I made the horrible discovery that we had no more than an inch of lukewarm, dirty-looking liquid left at the bottom of the rum jar. It was just sufficient to wet our lips the next day, no more.

On the sixth day, Strangeways, in a fit of delirium, tried to open the veins in his wrist with a razor. He raved and shouted and threatened to kill us all when we tried to disarm him, and undoubtedly would have done himself or some one else a mischief if one of the stokers, getting him round the neck from behind while he wasn’t looking, hadn’t borne him backwards. The others managed to take away his razor and to throw it overboard, whereupon Strangeways, shouting incoherencies, tried to follow it. He fought with the strength of three ordinary men when prevented, and it was a job to overpower him. I still had my pocket medicine case, and the drugs in the little glass bottles were undamaged by water. So I slipped a morphia tablet under his tongue. It soon quietened him.

During the seventh day, on which the heat was overpowering and we had no water at all, we suffered the torments of the damned. Our bones and our bodies ached. Our joints, our limbs, were swollen and painful to touch, so were our throats and tongues. We could scarcely articulate. But the sea remained moderately calm and the fair breeze held, so that we made tolerably good progress. Watching the red sun disappearing over the edge of the sea, however, I found myself wondering if I should ever see another sunset. To tell the truth, I didn’t much care.

The wind fell during the night and at dawn on the eighth day the sun rose in an almost cloudless sky. Looking over the bows I thought I saw a thin purple smear on the eastern horizon. I rubbed my eyes and looked out again, and sure enough, when the sun had risen a few degrees, I realised that I was looking at the tops of mountains peeking up over the edge of the sea. They were fifteen or twenty miles away; but having given up all hope, nobody except myself can ever realise what I felt at that moment.

“Land, Mawson! Land!” I managed to say, stirring him with my foot.

He woke up with a groan, pulled himself wearily to his feet and peered ahead.

You should have seen the faces of the men as he told them the joyful news. They sat up, one after the other, with their poor anxious faces gazing wistfully to the eastward. But one man, poor Williams, one of the stewards, still lay in the bottom of the boat. He had died during the night. We committed his remains to the sea.

It was flat calm without a breath of wind; but getting out the oars we took turns at pulling to the eastward. The men, forgetting their privations, seemed endowed with new strength, and the heavy boat foamed along as I had never seen her travel before. Some of them even tried to sing in their poor croaking voices. Even old Bingo sat on his haunches and sniffed the morning air. I saw his poor nose, cracked like a bit of old black indiarubber, quivering with excitement.

Very soon we saw a ruffle on the water out to sea. The breeze was coming, and eventually it reached us—a fine spanking breeze in the right direction. We laid in the two oars, made more sails out of our clothes, hoisted them aloft on the oars, and spread them to the wind. Our speed increased. As I sat at the steer-oar with my heart full of thankfulness I could hear the little bow-wave rippling round the forefoot.

The coast became more and more distinct as the day wore on, and our hunger and thirst was forgotten in the excitement. Some time during the afternoon we saw the slender white pillar of a lighthouse between us and the shore. It was perhaps six miles away.

We reached it just before sundown, and saw the swell creaming round the edge of the buttress of rock upon which it stood. Then we heard the voices of the three lighthouse keepers as they came down the steps towards us. They looked fat and cheerful and well-favoured to the emaciated scarecrows about me.

How we worked that boat alongside I don’t pretend to know, neither do I remember disembarking. But I do recollect climbing painfully on all fours up some steps covered in green weed behind a line of men in similar attitudes. We were weak with fatigue and exposure. Our faces, hands, and feet were blistered and swollen, our chins and noses raw and bleeding from licking up the dew in a vain endeavour to assuage our raging thirst. Every movement, every bending of the joints, brought sharp, stabbing twinges of agony.

Not one of the twenty-one men who crawled up those steps and passed in through the heavy bronze doorway of that lighthouse will ever forget his first drink of cool, clear water at the hands of the keepers. It was difficult to make them sip it slowly to start with; but common-sense and persuasion eventually prevailed. Even old Bingo sometimes stopped drinking to breathe.

And the next afternoon, by which time we were in a fair way to recovery, we were landed on the mainland by an armed trawler that had been summoned by wireless. The lighthouse at which we had left our boat was Black Rock, about seven miles north-west of Achill Head, and ten miles out from the entrance to Blacksod Bay, on the coast of County Mayo. From the spot in which the Parham had been torpedoed, it was every inch of 150 sea miles.

Four days later, after being kitted up with seaman’s clothes at the nearest naval base and parting from the men, I was back in London with my people. I found it difficult to sleep in a bed, and strange to think that I could eat and drink as I liked. It was stranger still to read of myself as ‘Missing. Feared Killed’ in The Times, and to see the official cancellation two days afterwards.