of the bow plates of the Sigismund outside
Sandy Hook.
'It is astonishing,' said the man from Saigon, 'how many true stories are
put down as sea yarns. It makes a man almost shrink from telling an
anecdote.'
'Oh, please don't shrink on our account,' said the smoking-room with
one voice.
'It's not my own story,' said the man from Saigon. 'A fellow on a
Massageries boat told it me. He had been third officer of a sort on a
Geordie tramp--one of those lumbering, dish-bottomed coal-barges
where the machinery is tied up with a string and the plates are rivetted
with putty. The way he told his tale was this. The tramp had been
creeping along some sea or other with a chart ten years old and the
haziest sort of chronometers when she got into a fog--just such a fog as
we have now.'
Here the smoking-room turned round as one man, and looked through
the windows.
'In the man's own words, "just when the fog was thickest, the engines
broke down. They had been doing this for some weeks, and we were
too weary to care. I went forward of the bridge, and leaned over the
side, wondering where I should ever get something that I could call a
ship, and whether the old hulk would fall to pieces as she lay. The fog
was as thick as any London one, but as white as steam. While they
were tinkering at the engines below, I heard a voice in the fog about
twenty yards from the ship's side, calling out, 'Can you climb on board
if we throw you a rope?' That startled me, because I fancied we were
going to be run down the next minute by a ship engaged in rescuing a
man overboard. I shouted for the engine-room whistle; and it whistled
about five minutes, but never the sound of a ship could we hear. The
ship's boy came forward with some biscuit for me. As he put it into my
hand, I heard the voice in the fog, crying out about throwing us a rope.
This time it was the boy that yelled, 'Ship on us!' and off went the
whistle again, while the men in the engine-room--it generally took the
ship's crew to repair the Hespa's engines--tumbled upon deck to know
what we were doing. I told them about the hail, and we listened in the
smother of the fog for the sound of a screw. We listened for ten minutes,
then we blew the whistle for another ten. Then the crew began to call
the ship's boy a fool, meaning that the third mate was no better. When
they were going down below, I heard the hail the third time, so did the
ship's boy. 'There you are,' I said, 'it is not twenty yards from us.' The
engineer sings out, 'I heard it too! Are you all asleep?' Then the crew
began to swear at the engineer; and what with discussion, argument,
and a little swearing,--for there is not much discipline on board a
tramp,--we raised such a row that our skipper came aft to enquire. I, the
engineer, and the ship's boy stuck to our tale. 'Voices or no voices,' said
the captain, 'you'd better patch the old engines up, and see if you've got
enough steam to whistle with. I've a notion that we've got into rather
too crowded ways.'
'"The engineer stayed on deck while the men went down below. The
skipper hadn't got back to the chart-room before I saw thirty feet of
bowsprit hanging over the break of the fo'c'sle. Thirty feet of bowsprit,
sir, doesn't belong to anything that sails the seas except a sailing-ship or
a man-of-war. I speculated quite a long time, with my hands on the
bulwarks, as to whether our friend was soft wood or steel plated. It
would not have made much difference to us, anyway; but I felt there
was more honour in being rammed, you know. Then I knew all about it.
It was a ram. We opened out. I am not exaggerating--we opened out, sir,
like a cardboard box. The other ship cut us two-thirds through, a little
behind the break of the fo'c'sle. Our decks split up lengthways. The
mizzen-mast bounded out of its place, and we heeled over. Then the
other ship blew a fog-horn. I remember thinking, as I took water from
the port bulwark, that this was rather ostentatious after she had done all
the mischief. After that, I was a mile and a half under sea, trying to go
to sleep as hard as I could. Some one caught hold of my hair, and
waked me up. I was hanging to what was left of one of our boats under
the lee of
Continue reading on your phone by scaning this QR Code
Tip: The current page has been bookmarked automatically. If you wish to continue reading later, just open the
Dertz Homepage, and click on the 'continue reading' link at the bottom of the page.