Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (20 page)

As if to dramatize the hysteria of such a dilemma, one man ripped open a bag containing twenty thousand dollars in gold dust and sprayed it about the main cabin as though he were a pixie and the gold were nothing more than tiny grains of sand. Others unhitched treasure belts, upended purses, and snapped open carpetbags, flinging the shiny coins and dust across the floor. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars were thus thrown away,” said a passenger.

Badger himself had a satchel filled with 825 twenty-dollar, double-eagle gold pieces fresh from the San Francisco Mint; he retrieved these from his stateroom and, according to a witness, “flung them onto the floor” of the captain’s cabin, telling the men to help themselves. But no one did. Purses filled with gold lay untouched. Amid the shouting and confusion, some men stood topside in a resigned daze and tossed gold coins at the wind.

Three or four hundred men waited on deck, while others remained in the cabins and corridors below. Darkness had closed in, and the
Central America
had settled so low in the water that now almost every wave broke over her. Bubbles, millions of them racing across the ship, formed and popped so fast as to make a hissing sound, and rising from below came the sound of timbers cracking and splintering.

“The scene among the passengers on deck and throughout the vessel was one of the most indescribable confusion and alarm,” said one passenger. “The prayers of the pious and penitent, the curses of the maddened, and the groans and shrieks of the affrighted, were all commingled together, added to which were numerous angry contests between man and man, in many instances amounting to outright fight, for the possession of articles on which to keep themselves afloat in the water.”

Badger ripped a board about six feet long and six inches wide off the front of a berth and made his way to the stern of the ship, there holding on to the stanchion that supported the after awning, ready to leap as far clear of the ship as he could when she settled. “At that time,” he estimated, “there were two or three hundred on the quarter deck, breathlessly awaiting the final sinking.”

Captain Herndon stood on the hurricane deck next to the wheelhouse, his trumpet in hand. The first officer, Second Officer Frazer, and Ansel Easton stood with him. When the ship had settled so deep that the water began to roll across her deck, Frazer got the captain a life preserver, and they set off more rockets. Some fizzled on the deck, others traveled upward only half as high as the smokestack. At 7:50, the captain and Frazer pulled themselves onto the deck above the wheelhouse and fired three rockets downward into the waves, a maritime distress signal to the schooner and the brig that the ship now was sinking rapidly.

Easton had secured neither a life preserver nor even a plank to float upon, but as he was standing with the captain, his friend Robert Brown came up with one of the superior cork life preservers and handed it to him. Brown had found two of them and had already donned one, and he insisted that Easton put on the other. As soon as Easton snapped the life preserver tight and threw his coat around his shoulder, buttoning it at the neck, the captain turned to him and said, “Give me your cigar, Easton, for this last rocket,” and as Easton took the cigar from his mouth and handed it to the captain, a huge sea slammed into the ship, jarring every timber still in place. The ship pitched forward; Frazer looked over the side and saw the water spotted with men who had jumped to get clear of the ship before she went under. But the great mass of men remained on deck.

Then another heavy sea hit and made her pitch astern. Frazer saw a rocket go off to windward from the port paddle-box, horizontally, straight out over the ocean; an old miner yelled, “My God, we shall all perish!” and in a flash of lightning one passenger later swore he saw the entire deck and Captain Herndon standing upon the wheelhouse, his hat in hand, and within seconds a third and monstrous sea crashed across the deck of the
Central America
, breaking her, crushing her, sweeping her deck of nearly everything and everyone, lifting Frazer like a bobbin and carrying him back to midships and over the starboard side.

The stern sank below the waves, and the graceful arc of her bow aimed into the dark heavens, as she struggled, almost desperate to keep her proud head above water, and then as the hoarse screams of five hundred men rose, she began a slow watery spin, the water turning faster and faster and faster and faster, until the swirling vortex sucked the men into a suffocating darkness, deeper and deeper, cracking their ears, ripping the life vests from their bodies, tearing from their hands the planks and spars, sucking them deeper and deeper into the darkness, the pressure squeezing the air out of their lungs, salt water filling their noses and mouths and seeping into their eyes, their bodies twisting, the ship exploding all around them in the blackness, the pieces whirling, slamming into them, deeper and deeper and deeper, trapped in the vortex, entangled in the rigging, swallowing the salty water, their lungs filling, the last thoughts racing across their minds before the final darkness set in, descending with the once majestic steamer through the long column of black water, now possessed by her, and dead long before she crashed into the floor of the sea thousands of feet below.

Others shot upward through black water, bursting to the surface with a desperate gasp, struggling to breathe, coughing salt water, the night dark and the wind still fierce, the waves rolling over them, choking them, and suddenly rocketing upward from deep in the sea came the missiles from a battered ship, the spars, the hatch covers, the stateroom doors, the planking, the heavy timbers propelled up from the water and into the air before falling back with a heavy crash, to stun them, crush them, knock them unconscious, to kill many of those who
had survived being sucked into the whirlpool, the surface of the sea in moments littered with torsos still wrapped tightly in tin life preservers, their arms and legs dangling from the surface, their heads pitched forward, and their hair spread across the water like seaweed.

“On rising again to the surface, the scenes presented to my view were horrifying,” said one passenger. “Men, some holding planks, and others without anything, were tossed about through the sea for a great space, and appeared to me like so many corks. I could not describe my feelings at this awful moment.”

Nearly every man sucked into the vortex had lost the timber in his hands, and those who found new ones upon surfacing often had them ripped away moments later by other desperate men. Many struggled in the water with bruised or broken limbs. Those who could not swim seized larger pieces of the deck, which soon were swamped, or they clung to the necks of those who could swim, pulling them under.

John Black recalled seeing “the heads of the drowning passengers like blackbirds on the water.” His crew, for fear of being swamped by desperate men, refused to row closer.

One man grabbed hold of a door, but three men pulled it away from him. Then a trunk floated by and he drew it closer, but it fell apart. He then found a flour barrel and rode upon it for a while before finding a suitable board. “When I heard the waves coming,” he said, “I would rise up and they would go over my shoulders.”

From everywhere shrieks for help pierced the wind, as hundreds of human heads rose and fell with the waves, the cries of the men becoming an inarticulate wail. Some shouted for help from the brig
Marine
, which was far beyond hailing distance. Others screamed from their wounds or from their terror at being unable to swim. But the calls for help quickly began to subside, as the waves pulled them apart and some of the struggling forms now ceased to struggle.

“In ten minutes,” said Thomas Badger, “three hundred had sunk to rise no more.”

At first the waves had thrown them together, the living striking against the dead and the dying, the dying screaming for help. Every man gripped his plank so tightly as to paralyze his hands, but he was afraid
to relax or the waves would rip the plank from his grasp and he soon would be as many of the others he saw around him, facedown in the water. “The scene presented can scarcely have a human parallel,” said Obed Harvey, “hundreds of souls launched into the boundless sea and left at the mercy of the waves.”

In the blackness, lit only by the occasional flicker of lightning, they floated, the swelling and cresting of the waves drowning calls of friendship and cries of despair, pulling them apart, then bringing them together in the trough of the sea, then separating them again at the top of the next wave. And at each successive flash of lightning, the men discovered fewer of their comrades around them, some now sinking through the black water, the waves scattering hither and yon those still afloat, until most found themselves drifting in the dark, on a slender plank, soaked, exhausted, and frightened. And alone amid the fury of a vast and indifferent sea.

“I
GUESS
I had been about four hours in the water,” recalled one man, “and had floated away from the rest, when the waves ceased to make any noise, and I heard my mother say, ‘Johnny, did you eat your sister’s grapes?’ I hadn’t thought of it for twenty years at least. It had gone clean out of my mind. I had a sister that died of consumption more than thirty years ago, and when she was sick—I was a boy of eleven or so—a neighbor had sent her some early hot-house grapes. Well, those grapes were left in a room where I was, and I ought to have been skinned alive for it, little rascal that I was, I devoured them all. Mother came to me after I had gone to bed, when she couldn’t find the fruit for sister to moisten her mouth with in the night, and said, ‘Johnny, did you eat your sister’s grapes?’ I did not add to the meanness of this conduct by telling a lie. I owned up, and my mother went away in tears, but without flogging me. It occasioned me a qualm of conscience for many a year after; but as I said, for twenty years at least I had not thought of it, till when I was floating about benumbed with cold I heard it as plain as ever I heard a voice in my life, I heard my mother say, ‘Johnny, did you eat your sister’s grapes?’”

Far at sea, the men drifted in the night, the great swells from the storm lifting them high into the wind then dropping them again far
below the next wall of water. Many rafts floated on the sea, hatch covers pulled off the ship or planking lashed together, and many men floated on each raft, clinging to ropes, their legs dangling in the water, sometimes so many men crowded onto the raft that the raft never rose higher than a foot beneath the surface. Storm waves rolled over them, immersing them time and again, and they swallowed the salty water, which caused them to choke and vomit. Often the waves twisted the rafts from their grip, flipping the boards into the air, sweeping them away, and the men had to swim in the dark to catch them again. But some of the men had muscles severely cramped, and even where the will still lived, the muscles stopped working, and the men perished with a cry for help within feet of the raft, as their comrades watched, powerless to pull them back on. Others simply quit, loosened their grip, and slipped quietly into the sea.

Those without comrades fought more than exhaustion, more than the fierce attempts of the sea to claim their souls. The waves that had thrown them together when first they surfaced, by the same motion had slowly pulled them apart, so that now as they floated in the dark, on a plank, on a door, their bodies immersed in water and shaking from the cold, they were alone. And the sum of all of their fears of deep water and storms, of high waves and darkness, could not equal their fear of loneliness, the fear of having to face all of the other fears “without seeing or hearing anything,” recalled one man, “except the roaring of the dreadful storm or the faint cry of some of my companions in misfortune.”

The vortex had pulled the shipboard poet Oliver Manlove down twenty feet into the black sea and ripped the life vest from his body. When he surfaced, he broke from the clutches of drowning men, and as he pulled away from the center of the wreckage, he met a friend who had two life preservers and who gave him one, and they each had grabbed pieces of the wreck, gripping tightly so the waves did not rip the boards from their hands, and as they floated on the surface of the sea, the waves began to pull them apart, until Manlove was “entirely alone drifting with the cruel and merciless waves I knew not where, often times covered up and pounded by them till I was near the end of my life. I would go down into the valley, and get nearly to the crest, when a wave would break over me and cover me up, I don’t know how deep,
and I would have to hold my breath till it rolled, or I could get to the surface again. It was a desperate fight for life and it seemed a hopeless one. There was no moon and I could only see a few rods. But once in a while from out of the black look of the night that shrouded the raging waves I could hear the call of a lonely voice, a wailing cry of a hopeless soul, for there was nothing to place a hope upon in such a place. I had to be ready when the waves would break over me, and hold my breath to keep from strangling, for the water was salty.”

The men and the flotsam soon scattered across the ocean for a mile, and hope fled that lifeboats from the vessels they had spoken earlier would come to their rescue. About an hour after the ship sank, some of the men saw a light to leeward, that of the schooner
El Dorado
, but they knew that a ship to the lee could be of no help. The light soon disappeared, anyhow, and they turned and searched the darkness, facing into the wind, because if help were to come, it would come from that direction.

Occasionally, the wind-driven clouds parted, and they could see stars in the heavens above them, signaling perhaps that after four days, they finally were at the edge of the storm. This came seldom, but it provided for some the faintest hope that if they could survive the night, the morning might dawn fair and calm.

Besides the struggle to stay afloat, the men used a portion of their dwindling energy to cheer one another. Despite being wounded by debris in the water, the San Francisco vaudevillian Billy Birch clung to a hatch window with several other men, “as cool as a cucumber,” said one of them. “To keep up their spirits he mimicked the sea monsters, told humorous stories in his own peculiar way, and on that frail bark, stretched on his back, bleeding from wounds, at midnight, tossed to and fro upon the angry waves of mid-ocean, he not only showed himself a true philosopher, but inspired courage in others.”