the vessel was subjected, rendered it not a little hazardous for a landsman to remain on deck; but those who reclined in the lassitude of sickness, as well as those who had thus sought shelter and safety below, were now called upon to make an effort for life. It was no longer matter of opinion, left to the mockery of such an arbiter as Captain Atkinson; "The lab'ring vessel, through unnumber'd chinks, Above, below, th' invading water drinks; and the pumps were necessarily set going, the passengers relieving each other at short intervals. This, at such an hour, and in such a scene, was dreary work-and the more so from its utter hopelessness; for the leaks gained upon them, and many who had hitherto clung to the cheering conviction that "The Lord maketh a way in the sea, and a path in the mighty waters," for those whom his wisdom selects for preservation, now shrunk aghast at the prospect of the doom which opened to them, and gave themselves up for lost. But their situation was at this critical period more desperate than was generally known; for so much water had found its way into the engine-room, the floor of which, at the commencement of the voyage, was overflowed,* that the coal was rendered useless, and the fires could not be fed without water rushing in with the wet fuel; so that the steam could not be kept up, and consequently the vessel made for the most part less way than ever. The captain, however, even under these distressing circumstances, made no effort to surmount the difficulties opposed to him. He might, in all human probability, by making sail, have reached anchorage-ground off Penmon (see the chart), under the shelter afforded by the Anglesea * This fact, which is highly important in estimating the " state of the vessel," I give on the respectable authority of Mr. Henry Wilson, of Manchester. coast within the Menai Strait, where the water would have been smooth, and where the pilot-establishment provided by the late Lord Bulkeley, expressly for such exigencies, would have promptly supplied every facility to ensure the safety of the passengers and crew. He had passed the Great Ormshead, having previously made the wind fair, by running close to a lee shore, and then having almost miraculously escaped by making the wind directly foul, for which there would otherwise have been no occasion; he had weathered the Great Ormshead, however, and from that point he should have taken a fresh departure, and regulated his conduct accordingly. The chart will show that the direct course of the vessel from the Great Ormshead' (considering that, under such circumstances, she passed so dangerously close to that stupendous rock) was about due west; though Mr. Broadhurst says, in the excellent narrative with which he has favoured me, that her head was for some time as close to the wind as W. N. W., notwithstanding which she "continued to drift; "* but such necessity would not have existed if she had acquired a greater degree of speed. Taking her course, therefore, to *To drift, in this sense, is to make lee way· i. e., the movement of a vessel to leeward when driven by the wind. But a vessel may drift by the influence of currents when the wind is fair, in which case the term lee way does not apply. Allowance is made in navigation for these disadvantages, which deduct largely from the nominal progress of the vessel, when a current sets unfavourably, or the wind directly or obliquely crosses her So Falconer, in his well-known "Shipwreck ;". course. "The different traverses, since twilight made, As swept across the graduated chord. Her place discovered by the rules of art, Unusual terrors shook the master's heart, When Falconera's rugged isle he found Within her drift, with shelves and breakers bound." have been due west, she would have the wind, which was still blowing from the N. N. W., only two points before the beam, which would have enabled her, with the use of sails, in addition to the little steam-power which remained, to make tolerable way through the water, especially as the tide then exercised a favourable influence. And all this, too, might have been accomplished long before the final declension of the moon, whose friendly light, obscure and partial though it was, from the black masses which rolled in stormy succession before it, would have proved a most welcome auxiliary. No expedient of the kind, however, was resorted to; and this, and similar instances of serious neglect become the more astonishing when the fact is mentioned that a Liverpool Branch Pilot,—of course, a practised seaman and well acquainted with the coast,- -was amongst the passengers! That this man should, if he were in his senses, look tamely on, without making one observation calculated to apprize those who surrounded him of such fatal error, seems perfectly incredible. But so it was; and the passengers did not know, until after the vessel had struck, that such a person was on board. It will also be seen by the chart, that, after passing the Great Ormshead, the approach to Conway River opens on the left, directly to leeward of the vessel's course; and the growing imminence of the danger induced several of the passengers to intreat the captain, as all possibility of returning to Liverpool was then cut off by distance and the ebb tide, to put into Conway; but his answer was, "God keep me from attempting it; it would be certain destruction." And, for once, he was right, as the plan of the coast will demonstrate. With the tide running out, a lee shore, and so difficult a navigation, nothing, indeed, but “destruction" could have been expected. Eleven o'clock came: the pumps were still going-the leaks increasing-and the apprehension of the passengers augmented to dreadful intensity. The females, generally speaking, were with difficulty soothed into anything like composure, those who attempted the task but too plainly betraying an anxiety which was at variance with the comfort they administered. Mr. Robert Whittaker, about this this time, asked the captain to hoist a lighted lantern, or fire a gun as a signal of distress; but he simply replied, that he had neither the one nor the other! He had, indeed, no customary means of making a night-signal; but any other person, in the same situation, would very quickly have devised a substitute. If the end of a tarred rope had been set on fire, and the blaze exposed from the poop, twenty boats would have come to their assistance in less than twenty minutes! At about a quarter to twelve o'clock, land duskily appeared on the starboard bow, the sinking moon just sufficing to show that it was Puffin Island, at the entrance of the Menai Strait; and, to adopt the words of Mr. Scoresby, 66 a cry of joy from the anxious passengers on deck proclaimed throughout the vessel the cheering tidings!" But, alas! the revival of gladdened feelings for a few short minutes only served to render the horrors which succeeded more terrible. CHAPTER II. THE WRECK. "Fathers beheld the hastening doom, with stern, delirious eye; Howling above the shrieks of death, the struggling groans for life!"* SWAIN. I Now come to a portion of my narrative in which, as it defies all power of description, I must necessarily leave much for the reader to supply. I shall endeavour to relate the incidents with scrupulous fidelity; but who could hope to pourtray the husband and the wife, the parent and the child, plunged in anguish which must ever remain "unut *The above lines were chosen, not only for their singular applicability to the melancholy incidents which they are intended to illustrate, but.also on account of a circumstance which properly associates them with this work. They are extracted from a little poem entitled “ The Village of Scheveningen,” by Charles Swain, a young author whose productions have deservedly obtained considerable popularity; and a manuscript copy of that poem—which eloquently describes the horrors of a scene when "Storm was upon the lonely sea, storm on the midnight sky!" was found in the pocket-book of one of the Misses Broadhurst, in a trunk belonging to those young ladies, which was recovered from the wreck. See the affecting Narrative of the bereaved father. |