Down to a Soundless Sea (9 page)

Depending on the location and stability of heavy cargo, coal might be reshipped from one bunker to another to trim the vessel by the bow or stern, whichever applied to the prevailing requirements. This was arduously accomplished one shovelful at a time, hour after hour, day after day, and night after night. Chapel judged ship’s boiler decks and coal bunkers to be any Christian’s vision of hell. He was therefore fascinated by the ease with which the Filipino stokers, a very orthodox clan, cheerfully managed to disregard their surroundings altogether. They simply immersed themselves in reinforced memories of home and family. The significance of their sacrifice held the stokers in a common bond of mutual support. Every man’s children would have a better life than their fathers, even if it meant they spent years slowly expiring in the belching black guts of a stinking Yankee freighter.

Chapel thought it interesting that most of the black gangs he had ever come across were always akin in some fashion. There were exceptions to the rule to be sure, but he had noticed how many stokers on any given ship were all Portuguese or Cubans, Irish or Chinese or, in this case, Filipino.

He surmised that the burdens of the black gang being what they were, it would represent greater safety and fellowship if the stokers were all of the same tribe. He had known of ships whose owners had taken on the strangest mix of crews. There was the
Prince William
out of Sydney, for instance. That vessel registered Peruvian owners, but her captain was Dutch–South African, her deck officers Italian, her able seamen all Danes, her engineers German, and her black gang, appropriately enough, Welsh coal miners. Chapel often wondered how many translations an order would require to make it from the bridge to the bunkers on the old
Prince Willy
.

While Chapel and the black gang shoveled coal, the
Los Angeles
began experiencing a particularly bad turn. The wind, tide, and waves caused the ship to pitch and shudder with ever-increasing ferocity. It made work in the dim bunkers hazardous at best.

Tino Bracas and Chapel were moving coal toward a bunker chute that fed the open scuttles in the boiler room, but the coarse motion of the ship obliged them to halt their work and brace themselves upon their shovels on every downward pitch of the bows.

Chapel heard the distant clangs of the engine-room telegraph over the pounding of the great steam pistons. It was obvious from the repeated code that the ship was changing course and speed, possibly to address the prevailing seas from another quarter. It was curious how well one could know
everything about a vessel’s movements from the blind depths of her bunkers or engine room. Chapel was reflecting in this manner when suddenly the whole ship trembled and shuddered with such violent force that both he and Tino were thrown off their feet.

In that same instant a great granite claw came gouging through the chine of the hull, ripping the iron plates like paper as it traveled toward them from bow to stern. The seas immediately flooded in behind the advancing claw, and in seconds Chapel and Tino were up to their waists in freezing black water. Both men scrambled up and out of the bunker just in time to warn the rest of the black gang to close the firebox doors and get the hell out of there. Chapel herded his charges out of the boiler room like a barking terrier, and as the last man out he closed and secured the boiler-room hatch. Even as he did so Chapel could see broad channels of black water cascading over the top of the bunker they had just occupied.

Chapel immediately looked about for Mr. Gladis, but could not spot him in all the confusion of frightened seamen desperately clambering to the relative safety of the upper decks. Then the slumped figure of Mr. Gladis slowly crawled from between the rotator blocks where he had been thrown when the ship struck. Chapel rushed to help him to his feet. The chief engineer didn’t seem badly hurt, though he was somewhat dazed from a sharp blow to the head. Mr. Gladis had been confirming a signal from the bridge when the ship struck, and he still clutched the handle of the telegraph, which had come away in his strong grasp when he was catapulted off his feet and across the grating.

Chapel was stunned to hear Mr. Gladis scream in pain when grasped about the chest. Chapel knew at once that Mr. Gladis’
injuries probably included several cracked or broken ribs or worse.

Once ensconced in a place of relative safety, Mr. Gladis gasped instructions for Chapel to go on deck at once and seek orders from the first officer, or “whoever looks like he knows what the hell he’s doing.” Chapel hesitated and suggested that now was the best time for both men to make their way up, but Mr. Gladis was insistent that his injuries made it impossible to return to his station in time to effect the orders. He tried to push Chapel toward the ladder, but the pain prevented the gesture, so he pointed and ordered Chapel to go at once.

No one could have been prepared for the scene that presented itself on deck. The storm-launched waves and howling winds combined with the increasing list of the crippled ship had caused pandemonium and panic, but Chapel was truly distressed to see the crew in no better command of their wits than the terror-stricken passengers.

Mr. Ryfkogel was standing on the starboard wing of the bridge screaming coarse obscenities through a megaphone at a commandeered lifeboat that had left the ship without permission. Captain Leland suddenly emerged from the bridge house and took the megaphone from his enraged third officer.

As he struggled to climb to the bridge, Chapel tried to hear what the captain was yelling at Mr. Ryfkogel, but the death screams of emergency whistles and the despairing clang of bells owned the night. He looked over the side toward the object of Mr. Ryfkogel’s thunderous denunciation in time to see Captain Leland’s prize black gang slowly disappear toward the rotating Cyclops of the Point Sur Light in a half-filled lifeboat.

Chapel watched as his mates rowed off with “the devil in
the stern sheets.” He spat out a short curse of his own and continued up to the bridge.

Captain Leland was emphatic and brusque. The engine room was to be abandoned at once. The seas would quench all fear of fire, though explosions were still very possible. He said there was no duty left but to save as many lives as Providence would permit. With that, Captain Leland put the megaphone to his mouth and began to sort out the plight of the frantic passengers and crew still left on deck. In moments the captain’s thundering voice and force of will restored the frenzied passengers and crew to a fair degree of self-possession and good order.

Chapel prepared to charge down to the engine room to report to Mr. Gladis. He physically induced the gaunt and terrified bosun’s mate, Mr. Roody, to follow below directly and bare a hand hoisting the injured chief engineer up on deck. The captain’s express orders and Chapel’s clenched fist proved ample persuasion for the fainthearted Mr. Roody.

Mr. Page, having just emerged from the rope locker with a coil of stout line, offered to return below and assist with the rescue. He warned that the ship was torn through the bowels from stem to stern. There was eight feet of water in the holds and no working pumps to speak of. The necessity for dash was explicit if they were to return to the deck alive.

Chapel led the way down the companionway ladder to find Mr. Gladis resting uncomfortably where he had left him. The man was certainly conscious, but suffered in the darkest manner from spurs of unbearable pain. The extent of his distress registered in the livid color of his complexion and the contortion of his features when subjected to the slightest movement.

While Mr. Page fabricated a bosun’s harness, Chapel and
Mr. Roody fished the engine room’s block-and-chain hoist to an overhead beam. It was in this way that they hoped to elevate Mr. Gladis to the upper catwalk and then onto the deck. Their efforts were so concentrated that no one seemed to notice that the frigid seawater had rapidly risen to the height of their hips. All the reeking filth and scum that had rested for years in the rusting bilges now floated on that rising water like lumpy crude oil.

Just as Mr. Roody secured the hoist, the ship, still impaled on its granite claw, gave a violent shudder and heeled ten degrees to starboard. The block and chain, which was not yet secured, slid off the catwalk before Mr. Roody could grab for it. The twenty-pound block plummeted down in a riotous tangle of chain that swung directly toward Chapel’s head. The bosun’s mate shouted a warning, but Chapel was still trying to regain his footing from the lurch of the ship. With the timely alarm, however, he did manage to avoid a direct blow as the lethal mass crashed into the steam return valve. The valve joint ruptured on impact, releasing a blast of scalding steam that caught Chapel square in the face six feet away. Ke Hop, the ship’s second cook, said later that he could hear Chapel’s scream all the way up on the galley deck. He said it froze the blood in his veins because it sounded so much like the dying ship’s whistle.

Chapel was now blind and in excruciating pain. The how and when of his escape from the flooding engine room seemed more a matter of raw torture than deliverance. Every movement brought gasps of unbearable suffering from Mr. Gladis, while Chapel’s agony peaked higher with every moment. His only balm was the chilled fetid water swirling about his stomach. With this he bathed his scalded face as the pain increased.
Mr. Page and the bosun’s mate deposited their charges near the bridge, where they could be seen to by others and eventually helped into the boats if their luck held out. But luck, by its definition, is usually in very short supply upon the warping decks of a fast-sinking ship.

Chapel’s panic subsided with the knowledge that he would not at least be trapped below when the
Los Angeles
settled to the bottom. His world was now closed to all vision, so he began to piece together the frenetic activity on deck with the evidence of sound alone. He could hear Captain Leland close by thundering orders to the lifeboat crews.

When the black gang had absconded with the first lifeboat, it left the ship with only two remaining cutters and the motor launch. Captain Leland had ordered that the launch tow the cutters back and forth to shore until most of his eighty-five charges had made it to the safety of the beach below Point Sur. Chapel, Mr. Gladis, Mr. Page, Captain Leland, and three slightly injured passengers waited for the motor launch to take them aboard. They would be the last survivors to go ashore.

The night winds had grown in force, and the sea formed into hammerlike breakers that crashed against the port beam with deafening regularity. The surf to starboard, facing the beach, had taken on a hazardous chop. The shore breakers could be heard but not seen. They waited, but the launch did not return. Mr. Page came to Chapel with life jackets and bid him to put one on immediately. These were cumbersome, vestlike affairs that contained large blocks of cork front and back.

It was difficult enough getting a blind man into one of these contraptions, but poor Mr. Gladis was another and certainly more painful challenge.

Chapel helped as best he could, but without sight he
was less than useful. Sadly he was obliged to sit and voice hollow assurances while Mr. Gladis moaned in pain. At last the two men were fitted up, and as added insurance, Mr. Page lashed the two men together with a length of line. Mr. Page apologized for the “crippled leading the blind” arrangement, but he thought it safer to handle one rope rather than two in the dark.

Mr. Gladis gasped out the observation that the rigid life vest, tightly lashed about his torso as it was, actually provided considerable relief to his tortured ribs. He felt a little more confident about the situation and told Captain Leland that he would look after Mr. Lodge should the need arise.

That very necessity arose thirty seconds later as the
Los Angeles
began to settle to the bottom of the ocean, seven hundred yards from shore off Point Sur.

Within moments the sea had taken possession of the decks and Captain Leland was forced to herd his charges toward the rigging of the ship’s vestigial mast. As the broken ship was sucked from beneath them, the hapless survivors climbed and clung to the ratlines and stays. Captain Leland shouted that the bottom off Point Sur was relatively shallow, and this fact was immediately confirmed when the mast ceased to sink and temporary refuge was afforded just below the flag yard. The company standard still flew from the top of the mast.

It wasn’t much of a hedge against immediate death, but Mr. Gladis observed that it was a damn sight better than nothing at all. In fact, Mr. Gladis was feeling somewhat better about everything. Since floating, even in the angry chop, took the pressure of gravity off his injured ribs, Mr. Gladis was allowed the privilege of breathing without incessant pain.

Chapel, on the other hand, could do little to influence his
destiny except hold on tight and avoid drowning as best he could. Their biggest worry at present, besides the obvious absence of boats to carry them ashore, was the frigid temperature of the water. Captain Leland worried that cold hands would lose their grip, and he encouraged everyone to cling to each other as well as to the rigging.

In all, Chapel, like Mr. Gladis, was feeling his injuries less. The cold salt water bathed his scalded face to a point of tolerance, and though deeply worried about his eyes, Chapel felt that he had at least a fighting chance of survival. Now that he was embraced in the arms of the sea, he felt safe. He could swim, blind or not, and that was more than could be said for the poor
Los Angeles
now resting on the rocks beneath them.

If all else failed, Chapel felt he could always swim to the sound of the surf in the hope that God loved fools enough to bring him to the shore safely.

From out of the storm a large ocean swell transformed itself into a rogue breaker that crashed over the ship’s mast, engulfing the survivors clinging desperately to the rigging. When the wave passed, Captain Leland’s worst fears were realized. The two injured passengers, who had timidly held on with the others when the ship went down, were gone.