Part 2

In the year 1816 two stately vessels were sailing on the ocean, in all the pride of perfect equipment and of glorious enterprise. The one was an English frigate, the Alceste, having on board our ambassador to China; the other was a French frigate, the Medusa, taking out the suite of a governor for one of the colonies of France on the coast of Africa. The importance of the mission on which each ship was despatched, and the value of the freight, would seem to assure us that the Alceste and the Medusa were officered and manned by the best crews that could be selected. Two nations, rivals in science and civilization, who had lately been contending for the empire of the world, and in the course of that contest had exhibited the most heroic examples of promptitude and courage, were nautically represented, we may suppose, by the elite who walked the decks of the Alceste and the Medusa. If any calamity should happen to either, it could not be attributed to a failure of that brilliant gallantry, which the English and French had equally displayed on the most trying occasions.

But a calamity of the most fearful nature did befal both, out of which the Alceste's crew were delivered with life and honour untouched, when that of the Medusa sank under a catastrophe, which has become a proverb and a bye-word to mariners. Both ships were wrecked. For an account of the good conduct, of the calm and resolute endurance, and of the admirable discipline to which, under Providence, the preservation of the crew of the Alceste is to be attributed, see pages 204-226 of this volume. A total relaxation of discipline, an absence of all order, precaution, and presence of mind, and a contemptible disregard of everything and of everybody but self, in the hour of common danger, filled up the full measure of horrors poured out upon the guilty crew of the Medusa. She struck on a sand-bank under circumstances which admitted of the hope of saving all on board. The shore was at no great distance, and the weather was not so boisterous as to threaten the speedy destruction of the ship when the accident first happened.

There were six boats of different dimensions available to take off a portion of the passengers and crew: there was time and there was opportunity for the construction of a raft to receive the remainder. But the scene of confusion began among officers and men at the crisis, when an ordinary exercise of forethought and composure would have been the preservation of all. Every man was left to shift for himself, and every man did shift for himself, in that selfish or bewildered manner which increased the general disaster. The captain was not among the last, but among the first to scramble into a boat; and the boats pushed off from the sides of the frigate, before they had taken in as many as each was capable of holding. Reproaches, recrimination, and scuffling took the place of order and of the word of command, both in the ship and in the boats, when tranquillity and order were indispensable for the common safety.

When the raft had received the miserable remnant, one hundred and fifty in number, for whom the boats had no room, or would make no room, it was found, when it was too late to correct the evil, that this last refuge of a despairing and disorderly multitude had been put together with so little care and skill, and was so ill provided with necessaries, that the planking was insecure; there was not space enough for protection from the waves, and charts, instruments, spars, sails, and stores were all deficient. A few casks of wine and some biscuits, enough for a single meal only, were all the provision made for their sustenance. The rush and scramble from the wreck had been accomplished with so little attention to discipline, that the raft had not a single naval officer to take charge of her. At first, the boats took the raft in tow, but in a short time, though the sea was calm and the coast was known to be within fifteen leagues, the boats cast off the tow-lines: and in not one of the six was there a sufficient sense of duty, or of humanity left, to induce the crew to remain by the floating planks--the forlorn hope of one hundred and fifty of their comrades and fellow-countrymen! Nay, it is related by the narrators of the wreck of the Medusa, that the atrocious cry resounded from one boat to another, 'Nous les abandonnons!'--'we leave them to their fate,'--until one by one all the tow-lines were cast off. During the long interval of seventeen days, the raft struggled with the waves. A small pocket compass was the only guide of the unhappy men, who lost even this in one of the reckless quarrels, which ensued every hour for a better place on the raft or a morsel of biscuit. On the first night twelve men were jammed between the timbers, and died under the agonies of crushed and mangled limbs. On the second night more were drowned, and some were smothered by the pressure towards the centre of the raft. Common suffering, instead of softening, hardened the hearts of the survivors against each other. Some of them drank wine till they were in a frenzy of intoxication, and attempted to cut the ropes which kept the raft together. A general fight ensued, many were killed, and many were cast into the sea during the struggle; and thus perished from sixty to sixty-five. On the third day portions of the bodies of the dead were devoured by some of the survivors. On the fourth night another quarrel and another fight, with more bloodshed, broke out. On the fifth morning, thirty only out of the one hundred and fifty were alive. Two of these were flung to the waves for stealing wine: a boy died, and twenty-seven remained, not to comfort and to assist each other, but to hold a council of destruction, and to determine who should be victims for the preservation of the rest. At this hideous council twelve were pronounced too weak to outlive much more suffering, and that they might not needlessly consume any part of the remaining stock of provisions, such as it was, (flying fish mixed with human flesh.) these twelve helpless wretches were deliberately thrown into the sea. The fifteen, who thus provided for their own safety by the sacrifice of their weaker comrades, were rescued on the seventeenth day after the wreck by a brig, sent out in quest of the wreck of the Medusa by the six boats, which reached the shore in safety, and which might have been the means of saving all on the raft, had not the crews been totally lost to every sentiment of generosity and humanity, when they cast off the tow-lines.

In fact, from the very first of the calamity which befel the Medusa, discipline, presence of mind, and every generous feeling, were at an end: and the abandonment of the ship and of the raft, the terrible loss of Life, the cannibalism, the cruelty, the sufferings, and all the disgraceful and inhuman proceedings, which have branded the modern Medusa with a name of infamy worse than that of the Gorgon,--the monster after which she was called,--originated in the want of that order and prompt obedience, which the pages of this volume are intended to record, to the honour of British seamen.

In the history of no less than forty shipwrecks narrated in this memorial of naval heroism,--of passive heroism, the most difficult to be exercised of all sorts of heroism,--there are very few instances of misconduct, and none resembling that on board the Medusa.

This contrast is marked and stated, not in an invidious spirit towards the French, but because there is no example on record, which furnishes such a comparison between the safety which depends on cool and orderly behaviour in the season of peril, and the terrible catastrophe which is hastened and aggravated by want of firmness, and confusion.

'It is impossible,' said a writer in the Quarterly Review, of October, 1817, 'not to be struck with the extraordinary difference of conduct in the officers and crew of the Medusa and the Alceste, wrecked nearly about the same time. In the one case, all the people were kept together in a perfect state of discipline and subordination, and brought safely home from the opposite side of the globe; in the other, every one seems to have been left to shift for himself, and the greater part perished in the horrible way we have seen.'

I have brought the comparison between the two wrecks again under notice to show, that as certainly as discipline and good order tend to insure safety on perilous occasions, so, inevitably, do confusion and want of discipline lead to destruction. In the one case, intrepidity and obedience prompted expedients and resources: in the other case, consternation was followed by despair, and despair aggravated the catastrophe with tenfold horrors.

It is not to be concealed, that occasional instances of insubordination and pusillanimity have occurred in the British navy. Some such appear in this narrative, and they invariably have produced their own punishment, by leading always to disaster, and often to death; and they serve as beacons to point out the fatal consequences of misconduct, under circumstances either of drunkenness, disobedience, panic, selfishness, or confusion.

The selfish cowardice, noticed in page 94, on the part of the men in charge of the jolly-boat of the Athenienne, and of some of the crew of the launch of the Boreas, (see p. 136,) and the tumult, intoxication, and desertion of the majority of the crew of the Penelope, which were followed by the prolonged sufferings and painful deaths of the culprits, (see pp. 200-204,) are but a few dark spots in the shipwrecks of the Royal Navy, to set off by contrast the many bright pages, which describe innumerable traits of character that do honour to human nature.

As a direction to some of these noble traits, every one of which will make the reader warm to the name of a British sailor: and, if he be one himself, will bring the blood from his heart to his face in a glow of emulation and honest pride,--I ask him to turn for examples of perfect discipline to pages 13, 23, 63, 70, 71, 75, 110, 173, 188, 194, 216, 223, 229, 231, 268, 269, 278, 279, 280. Here he will behold the portraits of men on the brink of destruction, steady, 'as if they were moving from one ship to another in any of the Queen's ports,' and unmoved by images of death under the most appalling forms; and he will say, 'Lo! these are triumphs of order and subordination, and examples of such resolute defiance of the terrors of the last enemy, when covered with the shadow of death, that no exploits in battle can exhibit fortitude that will compare with them.'

For instances of generous thought for others, of self-devotion and of disregard of personal safety, I refer the reader to pages 58, 59, 67, 68, 69, 96, 128, 129, 169, 186, 190, 194, 231, 234, 269, 270.

In the long list of heroes, which these references to examples of indomitable courage and unhesitating self-devotion will unfold, it is almost wrong to mark out one more than another for observation, and yet the following stand so prominently forward in the front rank of heroism, that it is impossible to refrain from noticing them. Captain Lydiard sacrificed his life in his desperate endeavour to rescue a boy from the wreck of the Anson, (pp. 128, 129.) Captain Temple, of the Crescent, and more than two hundred of his crew, displayed a noble disregard of themselves, when they permitted the jolly-boat, their own last hope of escape, to take off as many as it would hold, and leave them to perish. There was no rushing, no struggling, to get away from the sinking ship, but with orderly care they helped the boat to push off, bade her God speed, and calmly waited their fate, (p. 153.) The resolution of Captain Bertram, of the Persian, to brave the danger of taking some men off a raft into his over-crowded gig, was generously followed by the crews of the other boats, who threw their clothing and provisions overboard to make room for the additional weight, (p. 191.)

I may refer also to the magnanimous contest between Captain Baker, of the Drake, and his officers and men, each insisting on being the last to make his way from the ship to a rock (p. 231), and which ended in Captain Baker refusing to stir until he had seen every man clear of the wreck. A second struggle for precedency in glorious self-devotion took place, when the same commander declared, that all his crew should pass from the rock to the mainland, by help of a line, before he himself would consult his own safety, (p. 234.) The rope broke, and the last means of communication between the rock and the shore was severed, while the captain of the Drake and three of his companions were waiting their turn to escape. They met their fate with intrepid composure, (p. 235.) Lieutenant Smith, of the Magpie, offered another memorable example, when his schooner was upset in a squall, and he took to his boat with seven men. The boat capsized, and while the struggling crew were endeavouring to right her, they were attacked by sharks. The lieutenant himself had both his legs bitten off; but when his body was convulsed with agony, his mind retained and exercised all its energies, and his last words were expressive of dying consideration for others. 'Tell the admiral, if you survive,' said he, to a lad named Wilson, 'that my men have done their duty, and that no blame is attached to them. I have but one favour to ask, and that is, that he will promote Meldrum to be a gunner,' (p. 270.) And richly did Meldrum deserve the distinction. When all in the boat had perished but himself and another, a brig hove in sight, but did not seem to notice the speck on the ocean. Meldrum sprang overboard, and swam towards the ship, and was thus the means of saving his companion's life as well as his own.

In a volume like this, 'the dangers of the seas' come before the reader in such rapid succession, that he has scarcely time to think of the many other awful perils and sufferings, besides those of wind and storm, which put the mariner's fortitude to the test. The narratives in pages 2, 3, 9, 36, 69, 70, 113, 115, present to view the horrors of a ship on fire.

In pages 12, 169, 171, 196, 226, 242, we learn something of the terrible consequences of being exposed to fogs and mist, ice and snow. In page 27, we have a vivid picture of a combination of these terrors; and in pages 217, 268, the most appalling of all the dangers a sailor has to encounter is brought in view.

We will hope that the rigours and perils of the blockade system, which occasioned so fearful a loss of life at different periods of the late war, but especially in the disastrous year 1811, are at end for ever. From page 154 to 159, and from 168 to 186, the accounts of the loss of life in the Baltic and North Seas alone occur in fearful succession; and the magnanimity with which hundreds, nay, thousands of our bravest officers and men met death on that most perilous of all services, has rendered the names of British blockading ships memorable in the annals of hardship, hardihood, and suffering. Many invaluable lives perished from the inclemency of the weather; men were frozen to death at their posts. It is recorded of one devoted officer, Lieutenant Topping, that rushing on deck in anxiety for his ship, without giving himself time to put on his clothes, 'in fifteen minutes he fell upon the deck a corpse, stricken by the piercing blast and driving snow,' (p. 169.)

In page 174, we read of the bodies of the dead, victims to the cold and tempest, piled up by the survivors in rows one above another, on the deck of the St. George, to serve as a shelter against the violence of the waves and weather. 'In the fourth row lay the bodies of the Admiral and his friend Captain Guion;' and out of a crew of 750, seven only were saved.

The Defence, the consort of the St. George, was cast away in the same storm: out of her complement of 600, six was the small remnant of survivors. This ship might probably have escaped, but her gallant captain (Atkins) said, 'I will never desert my admiral in the hour of danger and distress,' (p. 175.)

An instance of obedience and discipline, worthy of particular mention, occurred before the St. George went down. A few men asked leave to attempt to reach the shore in the yawl. Permission was at first granted, but afterwards withdrawn, and the men returned to their posts without a murmur. 'As if Providence had rewarded their implicit obedience and reliance upon their officers,' says the narrative (p. 173), 'two of these men were of the few (seven) that were saved.'

The question now arises, to what are we to attribute the extraordinary display of cool determination manifested by British seamen, in such trials of nerve as are described in the following pages? The series of shipwrecks extends from 1793 to 1847, a period of fifty-four years; and tragic scenes are described, many of them far exceeding the imaginary terrors of fiction, and all of them equal in horror to anything that the Drama, Romance, or Poetry has attempted to delineate.

We rise from the perusal with scarcely any other impression upon our minds than that of wonder and admiration, at the extraordinary self-command exercised when death was staring every man in the face. Doubtless there are some instances of misbehaviour, and of lack of firmness: it could not be otherwise. 'When the stormy wind ariseth, and they are carried up to the heaven and down again to the deep, their soul melteth because of their trouble. They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wit's end.' But such examples are so few in the British navy, that we have little on this score wherewith to reproach our seamen.

To what, then, are we to attribute the manly bearing of British seamen, when the planks of their ship tremble under their feet, and the waves are yawning to swallow them up!

First.--To the early training which almost all our youth receive, in one way or other. It begins at school. The first principles of generosity, as of obedience and order, are taught in our schools: whether in the national and parochial schools, or at Westminster, Eton, and Harrow, and other schools of a higher order, where in his very games the boy learns to exercise presence of mind, daring, and self-command. In our streets and play-grounds, where the humblest or the proudest are at their sports, the germ of the manly spirit is discernible in emulous contention as to who shall bear and forbear, remain at his post, give and take, with most patience and good-humour.

Foreigners have allowed that there is nothing like an English school to discipline a lad for the high places, or rough places, of after-life; and that our mixed schools of every grade are the seminaries, where one learns to lead, and another to follow, in the path of honour and duty.

Secondly.--To the habit which prevails so universally in this country, of giving place to those to whom deference is due, and of looking up to those, who are above us in station, with ungrudging respect and confidence. This goes with the man into all the walks of life. Some attribute it to the aristocratic feeling, which is said to be stronger in England than elsewhere: but it maybe more justly traced to that good sense, which is at work in all orders of our people, and which understands when to obey and to hearken. In the seaman it displays itself in a predisposition to regard his officer as one worthy of his confidence, and whom it is his safety as well as duty to obey in the hour of danger. And this confidence is justified by the almost unfailing manner, in which the officer shows himself deserving of the trust reposed in him, and takes the lead in the very front of danger, and exhibits in moments of doubt and difficulty all the resources of a cool and collected mind, at the very juncture when life and death depend upon his composure.

The leadership to which a British tar is accustomed, and which ever responds to his own confiding spirit, is one of the primary causes of his endurance and daring. His officer is the first to advance, the foremost to encounter, the last to hesitate, and the most willing to take more than his share of danger and of suffering; and this inspires the men with an emulation to do likewise.