The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, and Other Stories
matter of three columns of solid nonpareil at a hundred dollars a
column. The cashier didn't faint, but he came rather near it. He sent
for the proprietors, and they came and never uttered a protest. They
only laughed in their jolly fashion, and said it was robbery, but no
matter; it was a grand 'scoop' (the bill or my 'Hornet' report, I didn't
know which): 'Pay it. It's all right.' The best men that ever owned a
newspaper.
The 'Hornet' survivors reached the Sandwich Islands the 15th of June.
They were mere skinny skeletons; their clothes hung limp about them and
fitted them no better than a flag fits the flag-staff in a calm. But
they were well nursed in the hospital; the people of Honolulu kept them
supplied with all the dainties they could need; they gathered strength
fast, and were presently nearly as good as new. Within a fortnight the
most of them took ship for San Francisco; that is, if my dates have not
gone astray in my memory. I went in the same ship, a sailing-vessel.
Captain Mitchell of the 'Hornet' was along; also the only passengers
the 'Hornet' had carried. These were two young men from Stamford,
Connecticut--brothers: Samuel and Henry Ferguson. The 'Hornet' was a
clipper of the first class and a fast sailer; the young men's quarters
were roomy and comfortable, and were well stocked with books, and also
with canned meats and fruits to help out the ship-fare with; and when
the ship cleared from New York harbour in the first week of January
there was promise that she would make quick and pleasant work of the
fourteen or fifteen thousand miles in front of her. As soon as the cold
latitudes were left behind and the vessel entered summer weather, the
voyage became a holiday picnic. The ship flew southward under a cloud of
sail which needed no attention, no modifying or change of any kind, for
days together. The young men read, strolled the ample deck, rested and
drowsed in the shade of the canvas, took their meals with the captain;
and when the day was done they played dummy whist with him till
bed-time. After the snow and ice and tempests of the Horn, the ship
bowled northward into summer weather again, and the trip was a picnic
once more.
Until the early morning of the 3rd of May. Computed position of the ship
112 degrees 10 minutes longitude, latitude 2 degrees above the equator;
no wind, no sea--dead calm; temperature of the atmosphere, tropical,
blistering, unimaginable by one who has not been roasted in it. There
was a cry of fire. An unfaithful sailor had disobeyed the rules and
gone into the booby-hatch with an open light to draw some varnish from a
cask. The proper result followed, and the vessel's hours were numbered.
There was not much time to spare, but the captain made the most of it.
The three boats were launched--long-boat and two quarter-boats. That
the time was very short and the hurry and excitement considerable is
indicated by the fact that in launching the boats a hole was stove in
the side of one of them by some sort of collision, and an oar driven
through the side of another. The captain's first care was to have four
sick sailors brought up and placed on deck out of harm's way--among them
a 'Portyghee.' This man had not done a day's work on the voyage, but had
lain in his hammock four months nursing an abscess. When we were taking
notes in the Honolulu hospital and a sailor told this to Mr. Burlingame,
the third mate, who was lying near, raised his head with an effort, and
in a weak voice made this correction--with solemnity and feeling:
'Raising abscesses! He had a family of them. He done it to keep from
standing his watch.'
Any provisions that lay handy were gathered up by the men and two
passengers and brought and dumped on the deck where the 'Portyghee'
lay; then they ran for more. The sailor who was telling this to Mr.
Burlingame added:
'We pulled together thirty-two days' rations for the thirty-one men that
way.'
The third mate lifted his head again and made another correction--with
bitterness:
'The “Portyghee” et twenty-two of them while he was soldiering there and
nobody noticing. A damned hound.'
The fire spread with great rapidity. The smoke and flame drove the men
back, and they had to stop their incomplete work of fetching provisions,
and take to the boats with only ten days' rations secured.
Each boat had a compass, a quadrant, a copy of Bowditch's 'Navigator,'
and a Nautical Almanac, and the captain's and chief mate's boats had
chronometers. There were thirty-one men all told. The captain took an
account of stock, with the following result: four hams, nearly thirty
pounds of salt pork, half-box of raisins, one hundred pounds of bread,
twelve two-pound cans of oysters, clams, and assorted meats, a
keg containing four pounds of butter, twelve gallons of water in a
forty-gallon 'scuttle-butt', four one-gallon demijohns full of water,
three bottles of brandy (the property of passengers), some pipes,
matches, and a hundred pounds of tobacco. No medicines. Of course the
whole party had to go on short rations at once.
The captain and the two passengers kept diaries. On our voyage to San
Francisco we ran into a calm in the middle of the Pacific, and did
not move a rod during fourteen days; this gave me a chance to copy the
diaries. Samuel Ferguson's is the fullest; I will draw upon it now.
When the following paragraph was written the doomed ship was about one
hundred and twenty days out from port, and all hands were putting in the
lazy time about as usual, as no one was forecasting disaster.
May 2. Latitude 1 degree 28 minutes N., longitude 111
degrees 38 minutes W. Another hot and sluggish day; at one time,
however, the clouds promised wind, and there came a slight breeze
--just enough to keep us going. The only thing to chronicle to-day
is the quantities of fish about; nine bonitos were caught this
forenoon, and some large albacores seen. After dinner the first
mate hooked a fellow which he could not hold, so he let the line go
to the captain, who was on the bow. He, holding on, brought the
fish to with a jerk, and snap went the line, hook and all. We also
saw astern, swimming lazily after us, an enormous shark, which must
have been nine or ten feet long. We tried him with all sorts of
lines and a piece of pork, but he declined to take hold. I suppose
he had appeased his appetite on the heads and other remains of the
bonitos we had thrown overboard.
Next day's entry records the disaster. The three boats got away, retired
to a short distance, and stopped. The two injured ones were leaking
badly; some of the men were kept busy baling, others patched the holes
as well as they could. The captain, the two passengers, and eleven men
were in the long-boat, with a share of the provisions and water, and
with no room to spare, for the boat was only twenty-one feet long, six
wide, and three deep. The chief mate and eight men were in one of the
small boats, the second mate and seven men in the other. The passengers
had saved no clothing but what they had on, excepting their overcoats.
The ship, clothed in flame and sending up a vast column of black smoke
into the sky, made a grand picture in the solitudes of the sea, and
hour after hour the outcasts sat and watched it. Meantime the captain
ciphered on the immensity of the distance that stretched between him and
the nearest available land, and then scaled the rations down to meet the
emergency; half a biscuit for dinner; one biscuit and some canned meat
for dinner; half a biscuit for tea; a few swallows of water for each
meal. And so hunger began to gnaw while the ship was still burning.
May 4. The ship burned all night very brightly, and hopes are
that some ship has seen the light and is bearing down upon us.
None seen, however, this forenoon, so we have determined to go
together north and a little west to some islands in 18 degrees or
19 degrees north latitude and 114 degrees to 115 degrees west
longitude, hoping in the meantime to be picked up by some ship.
The ship sank suddenly at about 5 A.M. We find the sun very hot
and scorching, but all try to keep out of it as much as we can.
They did a quite natural thing now: waited several hours for that
possible ship that might have seen the light to work her slow way to
them through the nearly dead calm. Then they gave it up and set about
their plans. If you will look at the map you will say that their
course could be easily decided. Albemarle Island (Galapagos group) lies
straight eastward nearly a thousand miles; the islands referred to in
the diary as 'some islands' (Revillagigedo Islands) lie, as they think,
in some widely uncertain region northward about one thousand miles and
westward one hundred or one hundred and fifty miles. Acapulco, on the
Mexican coast, lies about north-east something short of one thousand
miles. You will say random rocks in the ocean are not what is wanted;
let them strike for Acapulco and the solid continent. That does look
like the rational course, but one presently guesses from the diaries
that the thing would have been wholly irrational--indeed, suicidal. If
the boats struck for Albemarle they would be in the doldrums all the
way; and that means a watery perdition, with winds which are wholly
crazy, and blow from all points of the compass at once and also
perpendicularly. If the boats tried for Acapulco they would get out of
the doldrums when half-way there--in case they ever got half-way--and
then they would be in lamentable case, for there they would meet the
north-east trades coming down in their teeth, and these boats were so
rigged that they could not sail within eight points of the wind. So they
wisely started northward, with a slight slant to the west. They had but
ten days' short allowance of food; the long-boat was towing the others;
they could not depend on making any sort of definite progress in the
doldrums, and they had four or five hundred miles of doldrums in front
of them yet. They are the real equator, a tossing, roaring, rainy belt,
ten or twelve hundred miles broad, which girdles the globe.
It rained hard the first night and all got drenched, but they filled up
their water-butt. The brothers were in the stern with the captain, who
steered. The quarters were cramped; no one got much sleep. 'Kept on our
course till squalls headed us off.'
Stormy and squally the next morning, with drenching rains. A heavy and
dangerous 'cobbling' sea. One marvels how such boats could live in it.
Is it called a feat of desperate daring when one man and a dog cross the
Atlantic in a boat the size of a long-boat, and indeed it is; but this
long-boat was overloaded with men and other plunder, and was only three
feet deep. 'We naturally thought often of all at home, and were glad to
remember that it was Sacrament Sunday, and that prayers would go up from
our friends for us, although they know not our peril.'
The captain got not even a cat-nap during the first three days and
nights, but he got a few winks of sleep the fourth night. 'The worst
sea yet.' About ten at night the captain changed his course and headed
east-north-east, hoping to make Clipperton Rock. If he failed, no
matter; he would be in a better position to make those other islands. I
will mention here that he did not find that rock.
On May 8 no wind all day; sun blistering hot; they take to the oars.
Plenty of dolphins, but they couldn't catch any. 'I think we are all
beginning to realise more and more the awful situation we are in.' 'It
often takes a ship a week to get through the doldrums; how much longer,
then, such a craft as ours?' 'We are so crowded that we cannot stretch