LIFE SAVING AWARDS


By half-past four o'clock in the afternoon it was drawing on dusk, and about that hour we sighted the revolving light of the Kentish Knock Lightship, and a little after five we were pretty close to her. She is a big, red-hulled boat, with the words 'Kentish Knock' written in long white letters on her sides, and dark as it was, we could see her flung up, and rushing down fit to roll her over and over; and the way she pitched and went out of sight, and then ran up on the black heights of water, gave me a better notion of the fearfulness of that sea than I had got by watching the tug or noticing our own lively dancing. The tug hailed her first, and two men looking over her side answered; but what they said didn't reach us in the Life-boat. Then the steamer towed us abreast, but the tide caught our warp and gave us a sheer that brought us much too close alongside of her. When the sea took her she seemed to hang right over us, and the sight of that great dark hull, looking as if, when it fell, it must come right atop of us, made us want to sheer off, I can tell you. I sung out, 'Have you seen the ship?' and one of the men bawled back, 'Yes.' 'How does she bear?' 'Nor' -west by north.' 'Have you seen anything go to her?' The answer I caught was, 'A boat.' Some of our men said the answer was a life-boat,' but most of us only heard 'A boat.' The tug was now towing ahead, and went past the lightship, but ten minutes after Tom Friend sings out, 'They're burning a light aboard her!' and looking astern I saw they had fired a red signal light that was blazing over the bulwark in a long shower of sparks. The tug put her helm down to return, and we felt the power of those waves, sir. It looked a wonder that we were not rolled over and drowned, every man of us. We held on with our teeth clenched, and twice the boat was filled, and the water up to our throats. 'Look out for it, men!' was always the cry. But every upward send emptied the noble little craft, like pulling out a plug in a wash-basin, and in a few minutes we were again alongside the light-vessel. This time there were six or seven men looking over side. 'What do you want?' we shouted. 'Did you see the Sunk Lightship's rocket?' they all yelled together. 'Yes. Did you say you saw a boat?' 'No,' they answered, showing we had mistaken their first reply. On which I shouted to the tug, 'Pull us round to the Long Sand Head Buoy!' and then we were under weigh again, meeting the tremendous seas. There was only a little bit of moon, westering fast, and what there was of it showed but now and again, as the heavy clouds opened and let the light of it down. Indeed, it was very dark, though there was some kind of glimmer in the foam which enabled us to mark the tug ahead. 'Bitter cold work, Charlie,' says old Tom Cooper to me: 'but,' says he, 'it's colder for the poor wretches aboard the wreck, if they're alive to feel it.' The thought of them made our own sufferings small, and we kept looking and looking into the darkness around, but there was nothing to be spied, only now and again, and long whiles apart the flash of a rocket in the sky from the Sunk lightship. Meanwhile, from time to time, we burnt a hand-signal -a light, sir, that's fired something after the manner of a gun. You fit it into a wooden tube, and give a sort of hammer at the end a smart blow, and the flame rushes out, and a bright light it makes, sir. Ours were green lights, and whenever I set one flaring I couldn't help taking notice of the appearance of the men. It was a queer sight, I assure, to see them as green as leaves, with their cork jackets swelling out their bodies so as scarcely to seem like human beings, and the black water as high as our masthead, or howling a long way below us, on either side. They burned hand-signals on the tug, too, but nothing came of them. There was no sign of the wreck, and staring over the edge of the boat, with the spray and the darkness was like trying to see through the bottom of a well. So we began to talk the matter over, and Tom Cooper says, 'We had better stop here and wait for daylight.' 'I'm for stopping,' says Steve Goldsmith; and Bob Penny says, 'We're here to fetch the wreck, and fetch it we will, if we wait a week.' 'Right,' says I; and all hands being agreed -without any fuss, sir, though I dare say most of our hearts were at home, and our wishes alongside our hearths, and the warm fires in them -we all of us put our hands to our mouths and made one great cry of 'Vulcan ahoy!' The tug dropped astern. 'What do you want?' sings out the skipper, when he gets within speaking distance. 'There's nothing to be seen of the vessel, and so we had better lie-to for the night,' I answered. 'Very good,' he says, and then the steamer, without another word from her crew, and the water tumbling over her bows like cliffs, resumed her station ahead, her paddles revolving just fast enough to keep her from dropping astern. As coxswain of the Life-boat, 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


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