Harper's Round Table, August 27, 1895 Part 4

"Of course I know that," said Mr. Powers, rather impatiently, "but they all manage to get across in defiance of the winds."

"Perhaps I'd better tell you of an instance I have in mind," said the Captain.

"Do so by all means," answered Mr. Powers; and Harry leaned forward attentively, because he perceived that a yarn of the sea was forth-coming. Captain Ferris settled himself comfortably in his chair, cast a look around the horizon, and then launched into his story.

"Three years ago," he said, "I was in Hamburg in command of the steamship _Bristow_. She is a vessel of about 1200 tons, and is in the carrying trade, though she occasionally takes half a dozen pa.s.sengers at low rates. I was ready to get under way for New York when a man, accompanied by a boy about the age of your grandson there, came aboard and applied for pa.s.sage. He said that he had come to Europe on business, and had received word that his wife was very sick in New York. He was anxious to get home and my ship was the first that was going. I advised him to wait three days and take the Hamburg-American liner, which would arrive fully five days before us; but he said he had not money enough to go that way except in the steerage, and he could not think of doing that because his boy's health was none too good. So, of course, I agreed to take the two. The boy looked up at me and said,

"'Thank you, sir; and please make the ship hurry, because mamma is waiting for us.'

"I promised him I'd do my best, and, indeed, I did make up my mind to push the ship as she'd never been pushed before. We sailed at three o'clock on June 28th--I remember that date well enough. It was a lowering damp afternoon, with a brisk southwesterly wind, and as soon as we got fairly out into the North Sea the ship began to b.u.t.t into a nasty chop that sent the spray flying over her bows. But I was able to escape the worst of it by hugging the Holland coast, and so got down into the English Channel in some comfort. But now it was no longer possible to hug the coast, for that would have carried me too far out of my course.

However, the _Bristow_ made good progress till we pa.s.sed Fastnet Rock and got well out into the Atlantic. And there our troubles began. The morning of our third day out dawned with a hard low sky, a dead calm, and a deep, long, oily swell underrunning the ship. She rolled pitiably indeed. The barometer began to fall, and the wind rose and became very unsettled. I think that before noon it blew from every point of the compa.s.s, and some of the gusts were regular white squalls. The swell was running from the south, but the wind was chiefly from the west, southwest, and northwest. Toward evening the wind settled down, and by dark it was dead calm. But the terrific swells that swept up from the south, the gradual fall of the barometer, and the lurid state of the sky told me that there was a lot of trouble ahead of us yet. We were about 400 miles west of Fastnet at ten o'clock, and I lay down, giving my first officer instructions to call me in case the wind rose. Just before midnight I was aroused, and went on deck to find the wind coming in short angry blasts from the nor'west. At midnight it came out with the full force of a hurricane right in our teeth. In a short time a terrible confused sea was running. It was a frightful night. At three o'clock in the morning a thunder-storm swept over with the gale. Fierce lightning and a deluge of rain combined to make an appalling scene. Daylight found the ship reeling and staggering over huge jagged walls of water that loomed up ahead of her as if they would swallow her. Just after four o'clock a fearful sea fell bodily over the starboard quarter and stove in one side of the cabin, filling it with water. I saw that it was madness to try to drive the ship against such weather, and I hove her to. When I went to my breakfast, Mr. Howard, my pa.s.senger, and his son were there, very quiet and with white faces.

"'Will the ship sink, Captain?' asked the boy.

"'Oh no,' I answered; 'she's all right.'

"'But we sha'n't get home to mamma so soon,' murmured the boy, mournfully."

[Ill.u.s.tration: FOR TWO WEEKS, INCH BY INCH, THE "BRISTOW" FOUGHT AGAINST A SERIES OF WESTERLY GALES.]

"I had hove the ship to so as to bring the damaged side of the deck-house to leeward, and I set the carpenter at work repairing it. We were hove to for twenty-eight hours, and then, the weather moderating somewhat, I started the _Bristow_ ahead at half speed. We had drifted back fully seventy-five miles, and as we did not make more than three knots an hour ahead, it took us fully a day to recover the lost ground.

Although the force of the wind had abated, it was still blowing a gale, and the sea was sufficiently heavy to impede our progress very much. In all my experience at sea I have never met with such heart-breaking weather. If the wind had only shifted to our beam I would have been profoundly grateful, while a hurricane on our quarter, disturbing at any other time, would have filled me with joy. That boy's pale anxious face and the thought of the sick mother at home haunted me as I walked the reeling bridge or clung to its rail, and held my breath when some green wall crashed down upon our forecastle deck. But the westward sky seemed to be made of chilled steel, and out of its pitiless lips blew one gale after another, and all full of a biting cold that made the name of summer a foolish jest. For two weeks, inch by inch, the _Bristow_, running her engine at its full power, fought her way against a series of westerly gales. The decks were white with crusted salt, and the iron-work became browned with rust, until the ship began to look old and haggard from her struggle with the elements. But the worst had not come yet. On the seventeenth day out, while I was at my dinner, the pale-faced boy and his father sitting opposite to me and gazing at me in mournful silence, the chief engineer came to me with a grave countenance, and asked me to step aside that he might speak with me.

"'Captain,' said he, 'I am sorry to tell you that the coal in our bunkers is getting very low, and that unless we make better headway it will run out before we make port.'

"'Cut up all the spare wood in the hold,' I said, 'and feed that to the furnaces.'

"The engineer went away shaking his head, and then the boy came up to me and said,

"'Captain, are we ever going to get home?'

"'Oh yes,' I said, with an effort to appear cheerful; 'of course we are.

We're doing very well now.'

"The boy looked at me reproachfully and walked away. His father hadn't said a word to me for two days. But I declare it wasn't my fault. Well, you may think we had had our share of trouble, but we were not through yet. On the afternoon of July 20th several large ice-floes were sighted, and that night the ship ran into a dense field of ice. By this time most of our spare wood had been burned, and we were depending largely on our sails to carry us along, while the wind, which was still blowing half a gale, was almost dead ahead. And here we were in an ice-field that hemmed us in as far as the eye could see. The temperature of the air was bitterly cold, and it seemed as if we had been plunged into the midst of arctic regions. The ice-floes crashed and groaned, gulls whirled phantomlike and screaming above our stained spars, and all the time the wind blew against us as if some supernatural force were bent on driving us back. On the evening of the 21st the ship's carpenter came to me and said,

"'Captain, there are six inches of water in the hold.'

"For a minute, I think, I could not speak, for this new misfortune quite stunned me.

"'Have you found the leak?' I asked at length.

"'Not yet, sir,' he answered. 'It is somewhere forward, though.'

"'Make a close search for it, and let me know at once,' I said.

"He went below, and in about half an hour reported that one of the plates in our starboard bow had been cracked by the ice. The break was below the water-line, but I succeeded in stopping it up by melting some tar, which I fortunately had aboard, and pouring it into the crack. Our engine was stopped altogether now, because the ice was so thick that it was dangerous to push the vessel ahead. There was a good deal of sea underrunning the ice, and it required the greatest skill and watchfulness to prevent disaster. To avoid injury altogether was quite impossible. At four bells in the morning watch on July 23d, while we were still in the ice-field, there was a jar and a crash. I sprang from my bunk, in which I had been lying dressed, and jumped on deck.

"'What in the world has happened now?' I cried.

"'Carried away our rudder, sir,' called the second mate, who was leaning over the taffrail.

"The pale-faced boy came up to me, and looking into my face with his great solemn eyes, said,

"'What shall we do now?'

"'Rig another,' I answered as bravely as I could.

"I'm not going to describe to you the rigging of a jury-rudder, because it's one of the commonest feats of sea-engineering; but I will tell you that it cost us a day's hard work, and required the use of some spare stuff which I would have been very glad to put into the furnaces, for the coal supply was becoming smaller and smaller, and we were seven hundred miles from the nearest port. Well, we were twelve long, heart-breaking days in the ice. Fortunately it rained heavily during two of those days, and by using everything we had on board, including the boats, to catch the rain, I succeeded in fairly replenishing the supply of water in our tanks. We were fortunate in having an unusually large supply of food, and this alone saved us from falling into the straits of hunger. We had plenty of everything except beef and pork. These articles were exhausted, and we had to depend upon canned food, bread, crackers, tea, and coffee. But we had enough of those to last us three months, so that I did not deem it necessary to shorten the allowances. On August 2d we got clear of the ice, and began to make progress at the rate of four knots an hour under sail and a little steam, but three points off our course. In all this time we had sighted nothing save one distant sail; but on August 3d, to our intense joy, a steamer rose over the horizon ahead of us. I set signals of distress, and they were seen. The steamer proved to be the _Argonaut_, from Halifax for Liverpool, and her Captain agreed to tow us into Halifax. It was a long, long way, and we knew it would be a slow task, but the thought of it lightened every heart. My men jumped eagerly to the task of pa.s.sing the great hawser, and at four o'clock in the afternoon it was stretched, and the _Argonaut_ began to drag us westward at six knots an hour. Our ship's company gathered in the bow and gave a cheer, and the boy smiled and said,

"'At last we shall get home to mamma.'

"I turned in after that and slept the sleep of exhaustion. The _Argonaut_ towed us gallantly for 250 miles; and then, on the night of August 5th, we ran into another gale from the nor'west. It was not as bad as those we had previously encountered, but it checked our advance, and before morning had raised a heavy sea. At eight o'clock the tow-line parted with a report like that of a gun. To think of stretching it again in such a sea was hopeless, but the _Argonaut_ lay by us all day.

Several times in the course of the following night we saw her lights, but before morning the wind shifted to the southeast, a fog came up, and we never saw the _Argonaut_ again. Sadly we set sail on the _Bristow_, and began to move slowly through the still troubled waters. But at nine o'clock the fog cleared off, the wind hauled to the eastward, and the sea became moderate. I was now able to set every st.i.tch of canvas on the vessel with a fair wind, and I laid my course for St. John's, Newfoundland. We forged ahead at four knots an hour, and hope revived in every breast. But before night the wind fell light, and our progress became nothing better than a drift of two knots hourly. Still we were going ahead, and we did not despair. Calm weather and light winds continued till August 10th, and then the wind came in ahead. We were now about two hundred miles from Cape Race. Two schooners pa.s.sed us in the course of the day, and I signalled to them our condition, asking them to report us, and they promised to do so. I now determined to use the last fuel I could find aboard the ship. Our coal had been exhausted, and I did not dare to strip the spars from the masts lest I should still need them to make sail. All the bulkheads in the ship were iron, but I had every available bit of wood-work cut away, including the doors, and so made enough steam to start the engine again. We went ahead very slowly all that day, but the following morning, when 38 miles southeast of Cape Race, we came to a stand-still. Our fuel was all gone, and the boilers were cold.

"'What shall we do now?' asked the pale-faced boy.

"'Send a boat to Cape Race for help,' said I.

"My first officer, Hiram Baker, and four seamen volunteered to make the voyage, and at nine o'clock, with a well-provisioned and unsinkable life-boat, they pushed off from the ship. We watched them out-of sight with aching hearts and throbbing eyes. There was a light breeze from the westward, and the life-boat was able to work to windward, so she could come pretty near laying her course. The weather seemed settled, and I felt that unless some unforeseen accident occurred she would reach her destination before the next day. And so, indeed, she did. Two powerful sea-going tugs were despatched from St. John's, and on the afternoon of August 12th they hove in sight. Two hours later they had us in tow, and that night we arrived in St. John's, six weeks and three days out. The boy and his father hurried off to the telegraph office and sent a message to New York. In the morning a messenger came aboard with an answer. I can never forget with what eager hands Mr. Howard tore open the envelope. Then he threw his arms around his boy and said,

"'She is much better!'

"'Then we shall be at home in time, after all.'

"And he came up to me and gave me a kiss, which rewarded me for all my struggles."

In the thirteenth century the Chinese government issued some paper currency. To-day there are probably but two notes of that issue extant.

One is in the British Museum, and the other in the possession of the Oriental Society of St. Petersburg. These notes were issued in the reign of Hung Woo, the founder of the Ning Dynasty, who died in 1398. The face value of the notes is about a dollar, and that issue of paper currency was the only one ever guaranteed by the Chinese government. To-day these notes are probably the rarest and most valuable of currency issues.

Nearly all note collectors and Chinese bankers are fully aware of their existence and their value.

STEWED QUAKER.

BY MARGARET E. SANGSTER.

I don't like to be very ill--just ill enough to make her, (My grandmamma) say softly, "Child, I'll fix you some stewed Quaker."

It's sweet and thick and very nice, and has mola.s.ses in it, And lots of vinegar and spice; you want it every minute.

And being medicine, of course you sip and say it's dandy.

Just only think! it's _medicine_, and tastes like taffy candy!

Now castor-oil and squills, and stuff that wrinkles up your forehead, And puckers up your mouth, and gags and burns, are simply horrid.