Life Saving Medals from the Collection of John Wilson
sir, I take no credit for resolving to lie-to all night. But I am bound to say a word for the two crews, who made up their minds without a murmur, without a second's hesitation, to face the bitter cold and fierce seas of that long winter darkness, that they might be on the spot to help their fellow-creatures when the dawn broke and showed them where they were. I know there are scores of sailors round our coasts who would have done likewise. Only read, sir, what was done in the north, Newcastle way, during the gales last October. But surely, sir, no matter who may be the men who do what they think their duty, whether they belong to the North or the South, they deserve the encouragement of praise. A man likes to feel, when he has done his best, that his fellow-men think well of his work. If I had not been one of that crew I should wish to say more; but no false pride shall make me say less, sir, and I thank God for the resolution He put into us, and for the strength He gave us to keep that resolution.
All that we had to do now was to make ourselves as comfortable as we could. Our tow rope veered us out a long way, too far astern of the tug for her to help us as breakwater, and the manner in which we were flung towards the sky with half our keel out of water and then dropped into a hollow - like falling from the top of a house, sir - while the heads of the seas blew into and tumbled over us all the time, made us all reckon that, so far from getting rest, most of our time would be spent in preventing ourselves from being washed overboard. We turned to and got the foresail aft, and made a kind of roof of it. This was no easy job, for the wind was so furious that wrestling even with that bit of a sail was like fighting with a steam-engine. When it was up ten of us snugged ourselves away under it, and two men stood on the after-grating thwart keeping a look-out, with life-lines around them. As you know, sir, we carry a binnacle, and the lamp in it was alight and gave out just enough haze for us to see each other in. We all lay in a lump together for warmth, and a fine show we made, I dare say; for a cork jacket, even when a man stands upright isn't calculated to improve his figure, and as we all of us had cork jackets on and oil-skins, and many of us sea boots, you may guess what a raffle of legs and arms we showed, and what a rum heap of odds and ends we looked, as we sprawled in the bottom of the boat upon one another. Sometimes it would be 21 Johnny Goldsmith - for we had three Goldsmiths - Steve , and Dick and Johnny - growling underneath that someone was lying on his leg; and then maybe Harry Meader would/bawl out that there was a man sitting on his head; and once Tom Friend swore his arm was broke; but my opinion is, sir, that it was too cold to feel inconveniences of this kind, and I believe that some among us would not have known if their arms and legs really had been broke, until they tried to use 'em, for the cold seemed to take away all feeling out of the blood. As the seas flew over the boat the water filled the sail that was stretched overhead and bellied it down upon us, and that gave us less room so that some had to lie flat on their faces; but when this bellying got too bad we'd all get up and make one heave with our backs under the sail, and chuck the water out of it in that way. 'Charlie Fish,' says Tom Cooper to me, in a grave voice, 'what would some of them young gen'lmen as comes to Ramsgate in the summer, and says they'd like to go out in the Life-boat, think of this?' This made me laugh, and then young Tom Cooper votes for another nipper of rum all round; and as it was drawing on for one o'clock in the morning, and some of the men were groaning with cold, and pressing themselves against the thwarts with the pain of it, I made no objection, and the liquor went round. I always take a cake of Fry's chocolate with me when I go out in the Life-boat, as I find it very supporting, and I had a mind to have a mouthful now; but when I opened the locker I found it full of water, my chocolate nothing but paste and the biscuits a mass of pulp. This was rather hard, as there was nothing else to eat, and there was no getting near the tug in that sea unless we wanted to be smashed into staves. However, we hadn't come out to enjoy ourselves; nothing was said, and so we lay in a heap, hugging one another for warmth, until the morning broke.
The first man to look to leeward was old Tom's son - young Tom Cooper - and in a moment he bawled out, 'There she is!' pointing like a madman. The morning had only just broke, and the light was grey and dim, and down in the west it still seemed to be night; the air was full of spray, and scarcely were we a-top of a sea than we were rushing like an arrow into the hollow again, so that young Tom must have had eyes like a hawk to have seen her. Yet the moment he sung out and pointed, all hands cried out, 'There she is!' But what was it, sir? Only a mast about three miles off -just one single mast sticking up out of the white water, as thin and faint as a spider's line. Yet that was the ship we had waited all night to see. There she was, and my heart thumped in my ears the moment my eye fell on that mast. But Lord, sir, the fearful sea that was raging between her and us! For where we were was deepish water, and the waves regular; but all about the wreck was the Sand, and the water on it was running in fury all sorts of ways, rushing up in tall columns of foam as high as a ship's mainyard, and thundering so loudly that, though we were to windward, we could hear it above the gale and the boiling of the seas around us. It might have shook even a man who wanted to die to look at it, if he didn't know what the Bradford can go through. I ran my eye over the men's faces. 'Let slip the tow-rope,' bawled Dick Goldsmith. 'Up foresail,' I shouted, and two minutes after we had sighted that mast we were dead before the wind, our storm foresail taut as a drum-skin, our boat's stem heading full for the broken seas and the lonely stranded vessel in the midst of them. It was well that there was something in front of us to keep our eyes that way, and that none of us thought of looking astern, or the sight of the high and frightful seas which raged after us might have played old Harry with weak nerves. Some of them came with such force that they leapt right over the boat, and the air was dark with water flying a dozen yards high over us in broad solid sheets, which fell with a roar like the explosion of a gun ten and a dozen fathoms ahead. But we took no notice of these seas even when we were in the thick of the broken waters, and all the hands holding on to the thwarts for dear life. Every thought was upon the mast that was growing bigger and clearer, and sometimes when a sea hove us high we could just see the hull, with the water as white as milk flying over it. The mast was what they call 'bright,' that is, scraped and varnished, and we knew that if there was anything living aboard that doomed ship we would find it on that mast; and we strained our eyes with all our might, but could see nothing that looked like a man. But on a sudden I caught sight of a length of canvas streaming out of the top, and all of us seeing it we raised a shout, and a few minutes after we saw the men. They were all dressed in yellow oilskins, and the mast being of that colour was the reason why we did not see them sooner. They looked a whole mob of people, and one of us roared out, 'All hands are there, men!' and I answered, 'Aye, the whole ship's company, and we'll have them all!' for though, as we afterwards knew, there were only eleven of them, yet, as I have said, they looked a great number huddled together in that top, and I made sure the whole ship's company were there. By this time we were pretty close to the ship, and a fearful wreck she looked, with her mainmast and mizzenmast gone, and her bulwarks washed away, and great lumps of timber and planking ripping out of her and going overboard with every pour of the seas. We let go our anchor fifteen fathoms to windward of her, and as we did so we saw the poor fellows unlashing themselves and dropping one by one over the top into the lee rigging. As we veered out the cable and drove down under her stem, I shouted to the men on the wreck to bend a piece of wood on to a line and throw it overboard for us to lay hold of. They did this, but they had to get aft first, and I feared for the poor half-perished creatures again and again as I saw them scrambling along the lee rail, stopping and holding on as the mountainous seas swept over the hull, and then creeping a bit further aft in the pause. There was a horrible muddle of spars and tom canvas and rigging under her lee, but we could not guess what a fearful sight was there until our hawser having been made fast to the wreck, we hauled the Life-boat close under her quarter. There looked to be a whole score of dead bodies knocking about among the spars. It stunned me for a moment, for I had thought all hands were in the foretop, and never dreamt of so many lives having been lost Seventeen were drowned, and there they were, most of them, and the body of the captain lashed to the head of the mizenmast, so as to look as if he were leaning over it, his head stiff upright and his eyes watching us, and the stir of the seas made him appear to be struggling o get to us. I thought he was alive, and cried to the men to hand him in, but someone said he was killed when the mizenmast fell, and had been dead four or five hours. This was dreadful shock; I never remember the like of it. I can't hardly get those fixed eyes out of my sight, sir, and I lie awake for hours of a night, and so does Tom Cooper, and others of us, seeing those bodies tom by the spars and bleeding, floating in the water alongside the miserable ship.
Well, sir, the rest of this lamentable story has been told by the mate of the vessel, and I don't know that I could add anything to it. We saved the eleven men, and I have since heard that all of them are doing well. If I may speak, as coxswain of the Life-boat, I would like to say that all hands concerned in this rescue, them in the tug as well as the crew of the boat, did what might be expected of English sailors - for such they are, whether you call some of them boatmen or not; and I know in my heart, and say it without fear, that from the hour of leaving Ramsgate Harbour to the moment when we sighted the wreck's mast. there was only one thought in all of us, and that
www.dnw.co.uk
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164 |
Page 165 |
Page 166 |
Page 167 |
Page 168 |
Page 169 |
Page 170 |
Page 171 |
Page 172 |
Page 173 |
Page 174 |
Page 175 |
Page 176 |
Page 177 |
Page 178 |
Page 179 |
Page 180 |
Page 181 |
Page 182 |
Page 183 |
Page 184 |
Page 185 |
Page 186 |
Page 187 |
Page 188 |
Page 189 |
Page 190 |
Page 191 |
Page 192 |
Page 193 |
Page 194 |
Page 195 |
Page 196 |
Page 197 |
Page 198 |
Page 199 |
Page 200 |
Page 201 |
Page 202 |
Page 203 |
Page 204 |
Page 205 |
Page 206 |
Page 207 |
Page 208 |
Page 209 |
Page 210 |
Page 211 |
Page 212 |
Page 213 |
Page 214 |
Page 215 |
Page 216 |
Page 217 |
Page 218 |
Page 219 |
Page 220 |
Page 221 |
Page 222 |
Page 223 |
Page 224 |
Page 225 |
Page 226 |
Page 227 |
Page 228 |
Page 229 |
Page 230 |
Page 231 |
Page 232 |
Page 233 |
Page 234 |
Page 235 |
Page 236 |
Page 237 |
Page 238 |
Page 239 |
Page 240 |
Page 241 |
Page 242 |
Page 243 |
Page 244 |
Page 245 |
Page 246 |
Page 247 |
Page 248 |
Page 249 |
Page 250 |
Page 251 |
Page 252 |
Page 253 |
Page 254 |
Page 255 |
Page 256 |
Page 257 |
Page 258 |
Page 259 |
Page 260 |
Page 261 |
Page 262 |
Page 263 |
Page 264 |
Page 265 |
Page 266 |
Page 267 |
Page 268 |
Page 269 |
Page 270 |
Page 271 |
Page 272 |
Page 273 |
Page 274 |
Page 275 |
Page 276 |
Page 277 |
Page 278 |
Page 279 |
Page 280 |
Page 281 |
Page 282 |
Page 283 |
Page 284 |
Page 285 |
Page 286 |
Page 287 |
Page 288 |
Page 289 |
Page 290 |
Page 291 |
Page 292 |
Page 293 |
Page 294 |
Page 295 |
Page 296 |
Page 297 |
Page 298 |
Page 299 |
Page 300 |
Page 301 |
Page 302