Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 Part 9

When morning broke, they a.s.sembled all the workmen they could muster, and manning a cutter with the crew of the launch, they went off to the Sheerness, which had been driven on sh.o.r.e to the west of York Island.

There a most distressing sight presented itself; two vessels had been driven on sh.o.r.e, one of which was totally lost. The Sheerness had parted her cables during the night, and for a time her situation was exceedingly perilous, it was impossible to stand upon deck till the main and mizen masts had been cut away. The water rose above the orlop deck till it became level with the surface of the sea.

Not a barrack-house or tree escaped the ravages of the storm; many were levelled with the ground, others extensively damaged, and the hospital was completely unroofed, which rendered the situation of the sick most deplorable. One of the patients was killed by the falling beams. Several Europeans fell a sacrifice to the storm, many of them being exposed to the torrents of rain without any place of shelter within reach.

Lord George Stuart, the officers and crew of the Sheerness were acquitted of all blame respecting the loss of that vessel, it being the opinion of the court, that 'Every exertion was made for the preservation of the ship by the captain, officers, and crew upon that trying occasion; and that, owing to the violence of the hurricane, the loss of the ship was inevitable; and every subsequent attempt to get her afloat proved ineffectual, in consequence of the damage she had sustained in grounding when driven on sh.o.r.e, from the impossibility of keeping her free by means of the pumps.'

Lord George Stuart entered the navy in the year 1793 as a midshipman on board the Providence, in which ship he had the misfortune to be wrecked in the year 1797.

He received his post rank in 1804, and was almost constantly employed from that time until 1809, when he a.s.sumed the command of a light squadron at the mouth of the Elbe.

Here he performed an important service in taking the town of Gessendorf, situated on the banks of the Weser, and in driving from the fortress a body of French troops who had made frequent predatory and piratical excursions in the neighbourhood of Cuxhaven.

A few days after the defeat of the French, the gallant Duke of Brunswick also arrived on the opposite banks of the Weser, after having almost succeeded in effecting his retreat through the heart of Germany. By the previous dispersion of the enemy and the destruction of the fortress, he succeeded in crossing the river and escaping his pursuers, who would otherwise, in all probability, have captured or destroyed the whole of his detachment.

His Lordship was next appointed to the Horatio, a 38-gun frigate.

Whilst cruizing on the morning of the 7th December, 1813, off the Island of Zealand, he received a letter from a gentleman who had been in the British service, requesting his aid to drive the French from Zierick-Zee, the capital of Schowen. He at once complied with this request, and directed a detachment of seamen and marines to storm the batteries as soon as the tide would answer for the boats to leave the ship, which could not be done until nine P.M. In the meantime, a deputation arrived on board from the princ.i.p.al citizens, bearing a flag of truce from the French general, and requesting, that in order to save the effusion of blood, and to prevent the disorders which would in all probability arise, as the city was then in a state of insurrection, terms of capitulation should be granted, by which the French should be allowed to withdraw with their baggage to Bergen-op-Zoom. To this, Lord George Stuart gave a peremptory refusal, and summoned the French to surrender unconditionally. After a short delay, the signal of surrender was made, and thus, by the prompt.i.tude and decision displayed by the British officer, the French were compelled to evacuate the Island of Schowen without bloodshed, and the ancient magistrates of Zierick-Zee resumed their former functions.

Lord George Stuart subsequently commanded the Newcastle, and was employed in the last American war. In 1815, he received the Order of the Companion of the Bath, and died as rear-admiral in 1841.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] Captain Hunter died in 1807.

ATHENIENNE.

The Athenienne, of 64 guns, commanded by Captain Robert Raynsford, with a crew of 470 men, sailed from Gibraltar on the 16th of October, 1806, and at noon on the 20th, the Island of Sardinia was seen in the distance. The ship continued under a press of sail with a fair wind, and sped on her course towards Malta. At eight o'clock of the evening of the 20th, the first watch had been stationed, and the officer on duty had reported the ship's progress at nine knots an hour. The labours of the day were over, and all, save the few whom duty or inclination kept on deck, had gone below. Another hour pa.s.sed away; the majority of the crew had retired to their berths to seek repose after the toils of the day, and to gain fresh strength for the morrow--that morrow which many of them were destined never to behold.

One there was on board the Athenienne, to whose care the safety of the vessel and the lives of her crew had been entrusted, who appeared to have misgivings as to the course she was steering. The captain was seated in his cabin, looking over the chart with one of his officers, when he exclaimed, 'If the Esquerques do exist, we are now on them,'

Scarcely were the words out of his mouth when the ship struck.

For the information of our readers, we must state that the Esquerques, or Shirki, are a reef of sunken rocks lying about eighty miles west from Sicily, and about forty-eight from Cape Bon, on the coast of Africa. In 1806, the charts were not as accurate as they are in the present day, and the reef was not laid down in all of them; the very existence, indeed, of these rocks was positively denied by some navigators, though it was as positively a.s.serted by others.

It would be vain to attempt to describe the scene that followed the first shock, on the vessel's striking the rock. Upon the captain's hastening on deck, he found the crew rushing up from their berths, many of them in a state of nudity, and so stupified as to be utterly incapable of making the least effort for their own preservation. Some went below, and for the moment resigned themselves to despair, while others rushed to the p.o.o.p for safety.

In a few minutes, the officers had gathered round their captain. It needed no words to point out to them the imminence of their danger, and the necessity of their setting an example of steadiness and intrepidity to the men. They suffered no signs of dismay to appear in their demeanour, but immediately proceeded to consider what were the best steps to be taken to meet the impending danger. The calmness and courage thus displayed by the captain and his officers could not fail of having the desired effect upon the ship's company, who recovered from their panic, and seeing the necessity for instant exertion, held themselves in readiness to execute each order as it was issued.

In order to prevent the ship falling on her broadside, the masts were cut away; but she continued to beat so violently upon the rocks, that in less than half-an-hour she filled with water up to the lower deck ports, and then fell over to larboard on her beam ends. Captain Raynsford, foreseeing the inevitable loss of his vessel, had ordered the boats to be hoisted out, with the idea that they would be useful in towing a raft, which he had caused to be constructed to leeward.

This raft would probably have been the means of preserving a great many lives, had not the men in charge of the two jolly-boats pushed off, and left their unhappy comrades to their fate. Unfortunately, both the cutter and the barge, in hoisting out, were stove, and immediately swamped, no less than thirty men perishing with them.

Several of the crew had been killed by the falling of the masts, and others were severely injured. Two midshipmen were crushed to death between the spanker boom and the bulwarks.

Brenton has thus described the horrible scene on board:--'Nothing was to be heard but the shrieks of the drowning and the wailings of despair. The man who would courageously meet death at the cannon's mouth, or at the point of the bayonet, is frequently unnerved in such a scene as this, where there is no other enemy to contend with than the inexorable waves, and no hope of safety or relief but what may be afforded by a floating plank or mast. The tremendous shocks as the ship rose with the sea, and fell again on the rocks, deprived the people of the power of exertion; while at every crash portions of the shattered hull, loosened and disjointed, were scattered in dreadful havoc among the breakers. Imagination can scarcely picture to itself anything more appalling than the frantic screams of the women and children, the darkness of the night, the irresistible fury of the waves, which, at every moment, s.n.a.t.c.hed away a victim, while the tolling of the bell, occasioned by the violent motion of the wreck, added a funereal solemnity to the horrors of the scene.'

The fate of the hapless crew seemed fast approaching to a termination.

When the vessel first struck, signal guns had been fired, in the hope that some aid might be within reach, but none appeared; the guns were soon rendered useless, and when the ship fell on her beam ends, the wreck, with the exception of the p.o.o.p, was entirely under water. Here were collected all that remained of the ship's company, whose haggard countenances and shivering forms were revealed to each other, from time to time, by the glare of the blue lights, and by the fitful moonbeams which streamed from beneath the dark clouds, and threw their pale light upon the despairing group.

The sea-breached vessel can no longer bear The floods that o'er her burst in dread career; The labouring hull already seems half filled With water, through an hundred leeks distilled; Thus drenched by every wave, her even deck, Stripped and defenceless, floats a naked wreck.

FALCONER.

Two boats only remained, one of which was useless, her side having been knocked in by the falling of the masts; and the other, the launch, was therefore the sole means of preservation left. She was already filled with men, but it was found impossible to remove her from her position on the booms; and even if she had floated, she could not have contained above one-fourth of the crew. For about half an hour she continued in the same position, (the men who were in her expecting every moment that her bottom would be knocked out by the waves dashing against the spars on which she rested,) when suddenly a heavy sea lifted her off the bows clear of the ship. Three loud cheers greeted her release, and the oars being ready, the men immediately pulled from the wreck, with difficulty escaping the many dangers they had to encounter from the floating spars and broken masts.

These gallant fellows, however, would not desert their companions in misfortune, and although their boat already contained more than a hundred, they pulled towards the stern of the frigate; but so great was the anxiety of the poor creatures upon the p.o.o.p to jump into the boat, that in self-defence they were obliged to keep at a certain distance from the wreck, or the launch would have been instantly swamped. They were therefore reduced to the terrible alternative, either of leaving their comrades to perish, or of throwing away their own lives. Nine of the men who had jumped overboard were picked up, but to have attempted to save any more would have been to sacrifice all. One of the officers left on board the wreck endeavoured by every argument to persuade Captain Raynsford to save himself by swimming to the launch, but all in vain. This intrepid man declared that he was perfectly resigned to his fate, and was determined not to quit his ship whilst a man remained on board. Finding that all entreaties were useless, the officer himself jumped overboard from the stern gallery into the sea, and swimming through the surf, gained the launch and was taken on board.

The general cry in the boat was, 'Pull off!' and at twelve o'clock, as the moon sunk below the horizon, her crew took their last look of the Athenienne. The situation of the launch was of itself imminently perilous: she had neither sail, bread, nor water on board. Fortunately there was a compa.s.s, and for a sail the officers made use of their shirts and the frocks of the seamen. On the following morning they fell in with a Danish brig, which relieved, in some degree, their urgent necessities. Lieutenant John Little, a pa.s.senger in the Athenienne, with a party of seamen, went on board the brig, for the purpose of prevailing on her master to return with them to the wreck, in hopes of rescuing any of the crew who might be still alive; but this generous purpose was frustrated by violent and adverse winds.

On the 21st, at four o'clock in the afternoon, the party reached Maritimo, having been sixteen hours in the open boat, and the next day they proceeded to Trepani, in Sicily. On the 24th, they arrived at Palermo; the news of the sad event had already been conveyed thither to Sir Sidney Smith, by a letter which had been written from Maritimo.

The Eagle, of 74 guns, was instantly ordered to the Esquerques, but returned with the intelligence, that all who were left upon the wreck had perished, with the exception of two men, who had been picked up on a raft by some fishermen. They related that the p.o.o.p had separated about eleven o'clock on the morning after the launch left them, and that they, together with ten others, clung to it, but all had either been washed off or died except themselves. There were also two other rafts, on one of which were three warrant officers, and on the other Captain Raynsford and Lieutenants Swinburne and Salter; but it was found impossible to disengage the rafts from the rigging to which they were attached, and the unfortunate men all perished.

The existence of the Esquerques, as we have already stated, had been doubted, but from Captain Raynsford's exclamation, previous to the ship striking, we may infer that he himself was not sceptical on the subject. From whatever cause this fine frigate may have been lost, the gallantry, at least, and self-devotion of her commander, from the time the vessel first struck, will rescue his memory from reproach.

There's a prayer and a tear o'er the lowliest grave; But thousands lament o'er the fall of the brave; And thou, whose rare valour and fate we bemoan,-- In the sufferings of others forgetting thy own,-- O'er thy dust, though no trophies nor columns we rear, Though the storm was thy requiem, the wild wave thy bier; Yet thy spirit still speaks from its home on the flood, Still speaks to the gen'rous, the brave, and the good; Still points to our children the path which you trod, Who lived for your country, and died in your G.o.d.

J.H.J.

Three hundred and fifty of the crew perished, while one hundred and forty-one men, with two women, were all who were saved.

THE NAUTILUS.

ONLY a few weeks after the loss of the Athenienne, and of so many of her crew, a shipwreck occurred in another part of the Mediterranean, attended by circ.u.mstances of most painful interest.

His Majesty's sloop, Nautilus, commanded by Captain Palmer, left the squadron of Sir Thomas Louis in the h.e.l.lespont, on the morning of the: 3rd of January, 1807, bearing dispatches of the utmost importance for England.

The wind blowing fresh from the north-east, the sloop continued her course through the Archipelago without danger or mischance, until the evening of the 4th, when she was off Anti Milo; the pilot then gave up his charge, professing himself ignorant of the coast they were now approaching. As the dispatches confided to Captain Palmer were of great moment, he determined to run every hazard rather than r.e.t.a.r.d their delivery. He therefore sailed from Anti Milo at sunset, and shaped his course to Cerigotto. At midnight, the wind had risen to a gale; the night was dark and gloomy; torrents of rain were falling, accompanied by loud and incessant peals of thunder, whilst vivid flashes of lightning ever and anon illuminated for an instant the murky sky, and left all in obscurity more dismal than before.

At two o'clock A.M., the tempest and the darkness having increased, the captain gave orders to close-reef topsails, and prepare for bringing-to until daybreak. A little after three o'clock, a bright flash of lightning discovered to them, the Island of Cerigotto right ahead, and about a mile distant. The captain considered his course to be now clear, and therefore directed all possible sail to be kept on the vessel without endangering the masts, at the same time he congratulated Lieutenant Nesbitt upon their escape from the threatened dangers of the Archipelago.

He then went below, and was engaged with the pilot in examining the chart, when a cry was heard of 'Breakers ahead!' Lieutenant Nesbitt, who was on deck, ordered the helm a-lee; it was scarcely done, when the vessel struck. The shock was so violent, that the men below were thrown out of their hammocks, and they had difficulty in getting upon deck, for every sea lifted up the ship and then again dashed her upon the rocks with such force that they could not keep their feet. All was confusion and alarm. Every one felt his own utter helplessness.

'Oh! my Lord,' writes Lieutenant Nesbitt to Lord Collingwood, 'it draws tears from my eyes when I reflect on the complicated miseries of the scene! Heaven, now our only resource, was piteously invoked; and happy am I to say, our gallant crew left nothing untried which we imagined could save us--all cheerfully obeying the orders of the officers. An instant had hardly elapsed ere our main-deck was burst in, and a few minutes after the lee bulwark was entirely overwhelmed.

A heavy sea broke entirely over us, and none could see the smallest aperture through which hope might enter, and enliven the chill and dreary prospect before us.'

The only chance of escape for the crew was by the boats, and one only, a small whale-boat, got clear of the ship in safety, the others were all either stove or washed off the booms and dashed to pieces on the rocks by the raging surf. The boat that escaped was manned by the c.o.xswain, George Smith, and nine others. When they got clear of the wreck, they lay on their oars, and those who had clothing shared it with others who were nearly naked. They then pulled towards the Island of Pauri, seeing that it was impossible for them to render any a.s.sistance to their wretched comrades, as the boat already carried as many as she could possibly stow.

After the departure of the whale-boat, the ship continued to strike every two or three minutes, but as she was thrown higher on the rock, the men perceived that a part of it was above water; and as they expected the vessel to go to pieces at every shock, that lonely rock offered a safer refuge from the waves than the frail timbers to which they were clinging. The mercy of Providence soon provided them with the means of exchanging their perilous situation for one of less certain and instant danger. The mainmast fell over the side about twenty minutes after the vessel struck, and the mizen and foremasts followed. These all served as gangways by which the people pa.s.sed through the surf from the wreck to the platform of the coral reef, and thus for the time were rescued from the certain death that awaited them if they remained on board.

The rock, which they reached with difficulty, was scarcely above water; it was between three and four hundred yards long, and two hundred wide; and upon this spot, in the midst of the deep, nearly a hundred men were thrown together, without food, almost without clothing, and with very little hope that they should ever escape from the perils that surrounded them. They had only left the wreck in time to hear her dashed to pieces against the rocks; her timbers quivering, rending, and groaning, as they were riven asunder by the remorseless waves. When day dawned upon the cheerless group, its light only revealed new horrors: the sea on all sides was strewed with fragments of the wreck; not a sail was visible on the waters, and many of their comrades were seen clinging to spars and planks, tossed hither and thither by the waves. The situation of the survivors was truly distressing; they were at least twelve miles from the nearest island, and their only chance of relief was in the possibility of a ship pa.s.sing near enough to see the signal which they hoisted on a long pole fixed to the rocks.

The day was bitterly cold, and with much difficulty the unfortunate men contrived to kindle a fire, by means of a knife and flint that were happily in the pocket of one of the sailors, and a small barrel of damp powder that had been washed on to the rock. They next constructed a tent with pieces of canvas, boards, and parts of the wreck, and so they were enabled to dry the few clothes they had upon them. And now they had to pa.s.s a long and dreary night, exposed to hunger, cold, and wet; but they kept the fire burning, hoping that it might be visible in the darkness, and be taken for a signal of distress. And so it proved; for the c.o.xswain and crew of the whale boat, who were on the Island of Pauri, observed the fire in the middle of the night, and the next morning the c.o.xswain and pilot, with four of the men, pulled to the rocks, in hopes that some of their comrades might be still living.

They were beyond measure astonished to find so many survivors from the wreck, when they had scarcely dared to hope that any could have been saved except themselves. They had no food or water in their boat; for they had found nothing on the Island of Pauri (which was only a mile in circ.u.mference) but a few sheep and goats, kept there by the inhabitants of Cerigo, and a little rain-water that was preserved in a hole of the rock. The c.o.xswain attempted to persuade Captain Palmer to come into the boat, but the intrepid officer refused. 'Never mind me,' was his n.o.ble reply; 'save your unfortunate shipmates.'