Battles with the Sea | Page 6

caught

them and cast their gallant ship upon the dangerous Sands off the
mouth of the Thames. This happened on the night of the 3rd, which
was intensely dark, as well as bitterly cold.
Who can describe or conceive the scene that ensued! the horror, the
shrieking of women and children, and the yelling of the blast through
the rigging,--for it was an absolute hurricane,--while tons of water fell
over the decks continually, sweeping them from stem to stern.
The Fusilier had struck on that part of the sands named the Girdler. In
the midst of the turmoil there was but one course open to the crew--
namely, to send forth signals of distress. Guns were fired, rockets sent
up, and tar-barrels set a-blaze. Then, during many hours of agony, they
had to wait and pray.
On that same night another good ship struck upon the same sands at a
different point--the Demerara of Greenock--not an emigrant ship, but
freighted with a crew of nineteen souls, including a Trinity pilot.
Tossed like a plaything on the Sands--at that part named the Shingles--
off Margate, the Demerara soon began to break up, and the helpless
crew did as those of the Fusilier had done and were still doing--they
signalled for aid. But it seemed a forlorn resource. Through the thick,
driving, murky atmosphere nothing but utter blackness could be seen,
though the blazing of their own tar-barrels revealed, with awful power,
the seething breakers around, which, as if maddened by the obstruction
of the sands, leaped and hissed wildly over them, and finally crushed
their vessel over on its beam-ends. Swept from the deck, which was no
longer a platform, but, as it were, a sloping wall, the crew took refuge
in the rigging of one of the masts which still held fast. The mast
overhung the caldron of foam, which seemed to boil and leap at the
crew as if in disappointed fury.
By degrees the hull of the Demerara began to break up. Her timbers
writhed and snapped under the force of the ever-thundering waves as if
tormented. The deck was blown out by the confined and compressed air.
The copper began to peel off, the planks to loosen, and soon it became
evident that the mast to which the crew were lashed could not long hold
up. Thus, for ten apparently endless hours the perishing seamen hung

suspended over what seemed to be their grave. They hung thus in the
midst of pitchy darkness after their blazing tar-barrels had been
extinguished.
And what of the lifeboat-men during all this time? Were they asleep?
Nay, verily! Everywhere they stood at pierheads, almost torn from their
holdfasts by the furious gale, or they cowered under the lee of boats
and boat-houses on the beach, trying to gaze seaward through the
blinding storm, but nothing whatever could they see of the disasters on
these outlying sands.
There are, however, several sentinels which mount guard night and day
close to the Goodwin and other Sands. These are the Floating Lights
which mark the position of our extensive and dangerous shoals. Two of
these sentinels, the Tongue lightship and the Prince's lightship, in the
vicinity of the Girdler Sands, saw the signals of distress. Instantly their
guns and rockets gleamed and thundered intelligence to the shore. Such
signals had been watched for keenly that night by the brave men of the
Margate lifeboat, who instantly went off to the rescue. But there are
conditions against which human courage and power and will are
equally unavailing. In the teeth of such a gale from the west-nor'-west,
with the sea driving in thunder straight on the beach, it was impossible
for the Margate boat to put out. A telegram was therefore despatched to
Ramsgate. Here, too, as at Broadstairs, and everywhere else, the heroes
of the coast were on the lookout, knowing well the duties that might be
required of them at any moment.
The stout little Aid was lying at the pier with her steam "up." The
Ramsgate lifeboat was floating quietly in the harbour, and her sturdy
lion-like coxswain, Isaac Jarman, was at the pier-head with some of his
men, watching. The Ramsgate men had already been out on service at
the sands that day, and their appetite for saving life had been whetted.
They were ready for more work. At a quarter past eight p.m. the
telegram was received by the harbour-master. The signal was given.
The lifeboat-men rushed to their boats.
"First come, first served," is the rule there. She was over-manned, and
some of the brave fellows had to leave her. The tight little tug took the

boat in tow, and in less than half an hour rushed out with her into the
intense darkness, right in the teeth of tempest and billows.