by Terry Deary
“I suppose so,” Captain Wright said with a sigh. “We need cheering up. We are just a day away from New York and Sirius should be in sight if we are going to win the race. She should have run out of coal by now. Mr Brunel said she would.”
The seven passengers all sighed. The sound was like a winter wind in a Christmas chimney.
Ben set off with the terrific tale of the little British ship that met with a fleet of huge Spanish galleons. The Revenge’s captain could have run away but he chose to stay and fight. The ship was smashed by the Spanish cannon but still he wouldn’t give in…
“For he said, ‘Fight on! fight on!’
Tho’ his vessel was all but a wreck.”
The Spanish were shattered but the damage to Revenge was too great. The next storm sank her.
Ben finished with a heartbreaking sob on the last lines …
“And the little Revenge herself went down
by the island crags
To be lost evermore in the main.”
Ben smiled and bowed. The captain looked stormier than any storm cloud.
“Stupid lad,” he snarled.
“I thought you liked songs of the sea …” Ben began.
“We are a mighty ship like a galleon – we are trying to defeat a poor little, useless piece of Irish matchwood called Sirius. We do not want to hear about a brave little winner. We need a poem about a brave and battling big ship, you donkey. Get below decks and scrub the boilers before I throw you overboard to swim with the fishes!” Captain Wright roared.
“Eeeek!” Ben squeaked before he turned and ran.
* * *
Next morning he climbed on deck at first light when he heard the cry.
“Smoke ahead … it must be Sirius. She’s twenty miles ahead of us – but it looks like she’s almost reached New York.”
The crew groaned.
“Lost evermore,” Ben moaned and shook his fist at a circling seagull.
“Awk,” the seagull replied.
“How did Sirius do that?” the captain cried.
Chapter 6
New York, 23 April 1838
Grace laughed when she met Ben on the docks of New York.
“Ah, Ben, it’s so good to see you,” she said.
“What kept you?” Patrick asked cheekily.
Ben glared at him. “You had four days’ start,” he said.
“Sure, but you said you would be here first,” Grace replied and her eyes sparkled in the spring sunshine.
She took out his letter and wafted it in front of his nose. “Look, cousin, it says here …”
“Master Brunel said your little Irish ship had no chance,” Ben argued, stubborn. “You should have run out of coal.”
“And we did, clever Ben,” Patrick said.
Ben looked at him sharply. “So you used your sails? You didn’t cross the ocean by steam alone? You lost the race?”
Grace shook her head. “We ran out of coal – but there’s more than coal will make a fire to heat the boiler. I remembered that when young Patrick recited the poem about the boy who stood on the burning deck. It gave me the idea,” she said.
“If we had no coal, we could burn the deck,” her brother nodded. “Burning deck, see?”
“Well, maybe not the deck exactly. But anything on the ship made of wood,” Grace said.
They began to walk into the busy city, dodging the horses and wagons that clattered through the crowded streets.
“First, we burned the furniture,” Patrick explained. “Chairs and tables and cupboards, you know?”
“Yes. I know what furniture is,” Ben said sourly.
“We sighted New York twenty miles away just as we sighted you twenty miles behind,” Grace said. “But we’d burned every last bunk bed and table.”
“So the ship’s carpenter climbed up the mast and cut off the top,” Patrick went on. “We chopped it up for firewood. It burned well, so we cut off some more. Soon we had no mast left and New York was just a mile away. A few of the planks from the deck were thrown in the boiler and we just made it.”
Ben shook his head. “That’s cheating,” he muttered.
Grace wrapped an arm around his shoulders. “Come on, Ben, you lost the race. But everybody knows your Great Western is the greatest ship on the oceans. She’s the fastest ship ever to sail the Atlantic and you were there on board when she did it. You should be proud.”
The boy nodded. “I suppose so.”
“And we all got here safe,” Patrick added. “We had the luck of the Irish.”
“So come along to the lodging we found for us,” Grace said, leading the way through the tall wooden buildings that shaded the sun. “The landlady will have a fine dinner ready for us.”
“My first American dinner,” Ben said, cheering up. “What will it be?”
Grace stopped and frowned. “Irish stew, of course. What else?”
Epilogue
Sirius only made one more trip across the Atlantic then went back to paddling from London to Cork. Nine years after her great Atlantic adventure she was caught in a storm off the coast of Ireland and sank. Twenty people were drowned. She wasn’t a great or even a lucky ship, but she will always be the first steamship to cross the Atlantic.
The story of a steamship crew burning the ship to finish the journey became a famous one. A writer called Jules Verne used that true tale as part of his famous adventure story, Around the World in Eighty Days.
Great Western’s journey to America took fifteen days, and over the next eight years it made sixty crossings.
Isambard Brunel went on to build even greater ships to cross the Atlantic.
Brunel became ill in 1859, just before the Great Eastern made her first voyage to New York. He died ten days later at the age of 53.
“Casabianca” (“The boy stood on the burning deck”) is a poem by British poet Felicia Dorothea Hemans, written in 1826. It became one of the most popular poems in Victorian Britain. Thousands of children learned it at school and recited it at parties.
The “Revenge” poem was written by Alfred, Lord Tennyson forty years after Sirius won this race – so Ben could not have recited it on Great Western – but it shows how the Victorians loved sea stories about little heroes beating monsters.
First published 2012 by
A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc
50 Bedford Square
London WC1B 3DP
www.acblack.com
www.bloomsbury.com
Copyright © 2012 A & C Black
Text copyright © 2012 Terry Deary
Illustrations copyright © 2012 Helen Flook
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
The rights of Terry Deary and Helen Flook to be identified as the
author and illustrator of this work have been asserted by them in
accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
ISBN: 978 1 4081 8091 4
A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library.
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