by Gary Collins
The sail from leech to luff was ripped to shreds with the strain. The spar swung farther over than the gooseneck could handle. Its swivel broke, releasing the sail at the clew. The boom snapped like a frozen twig and fell to the deck in pieces. The crew were running with fright and adrenaline amid frantic yells coming from the skipper’s throat.
“Grab the bloody sails, men, ripped or no! Use yer knives to cut ’er free from the mas’! Git the sail below the main hatch before it washes over the gunnels. Fer God’s sake, b’ys, be careful!”
With the mainsail down the schooner slowed some, but she was still in grave danger. The gale, having destroyed the biggest sail so effortlessly, now attacked the smaller foresail. The Catherine B. careened far out on her port side, her weather rail dragging into the sea and shipping a torrent of water aboard. She righted with a lurch as her master spun the helm over. The foresail, attached to the foremast, took a punch from the vengeful wind. It couldn’t take the strain. The foreguy sheared away from the fore gaff and the sail was now in danger of being torn apart like the mainsail. With the exception of the bow jumbo to aid in steering, a downed foresail would leave the Catherine B. with bare poles.
“Don’t try to reef ’er, Jim! Make a sheep’s leg out of the bugger! ’Urry up, b’y, we ant got much time,” Janes shouted.
Jim Loder heard the anguished cry from his skipper at the wheel and understood. To lower the foresail and tie it off in several places, as the job of reefing required, would take time. There was a quicker way. The mutton cut, or shoulder of mutton, was a relatively quick way to shorten sail in a dangerous blow. It took its name from the way the tied sail looked like the hind leg of a sheep. Janes referred to it as a sheep’s leg. The rope that held the gaff to the forepeak was untied and rapidly tied securely to the mast as it dropped, drawing the foresail down to only half of its height.
Jim Loder finished the work and pulled his sodden cuffs over his freezing fingers. He had removed his woollen mitts to feel the ropes better and now his fingers were numb.
The wind tore through the naked rigging with a whining cry. It snapped at ragged bits of sail and carried the stricken Catherine B. away east over the sounding sea. And far below her thin, heaving keel, lay hundreds of feet of unfeeling, uncaring water.
* * *
All day Saturday and throughout the miserable night the Catherine B.’s valiant handlers kept her afloat. They had drifted steadily eastward and a bit south. The snow came on thicker, a terrible blinding snow for men peering through it to see if help was on its way.
The schooner was starting to ice up, which would add to her weight and drag her deeper into the stormy seas. Janes decided on a long shot. They had been drifting southeast for two days. He figured if he could get his vessel to veer farther south they would have a better chance of surviving. South to the Gulf Stream meant warmer waters. But it also meant busy shipping lanes, for outside the island of Newfoundland great ships travelled between America and Europe. Janes would head farther out to sea. Instead of fighting the gale, he would run with it, hoping the wind that was bearing them away would rescue them instead.
* * *
Sunday morning broke with a steely grey sky and an icy wind blowing out of Trinity Bay. The gale was keenest in the small village of Hant’s Harbour on the outer south side of the bay.
An uneasy early night had come. The wind tore around eaves and piled snow against fences. Lamplight glowed from otherwise dark houses. A lone church bell drew the faithful with its knelling. Men, women, and bundled children walked from warm houses and crunched on snowy paths along the blustery shore road. Everyone piled inside the quiet, lamplit church. The bell stopped. A child was hushed. Someone coughed. The chapel was cold, the windows frosted with its own Sistine Chapel–like designs.
The minister opened the postern door and his feet made a shuffling sound as he approached the lectern. He stared out over the crowd and saw that his flock had grown today. They had all come to pray for their own. They were seeking comfort from him. He looked at the open black book in front of him and cleared his throat. His breath drifted coldly above his head. Not a sound came from the filled pews. Everyone was waiting for this man to speak words of comfort.
“I would remind you, my friends, on this day, that Christ must have had a particular liking for fishermen, for it was those men of the sea He chose first to follow Him. There was Simon and his brother Andrew, James and his brother John. They were all fishermen. God likened them as fishers of men. One of the greatest of Christ’s miracles was the one with seven loaves of bread and fish from the sea. He calmed great waves with but an outreach of His robed arms.”
The preacher paused and looked down at the white faces staring up at him. They were hanging on to his words. Expectant. He felt inadequate and useless. He knew little about the sea, but he knew its ways and its ceaseless demands from those who wrested their existence from its depths. Now eight of their own were missing at sea.
He knew all of these people: simple, hard-working families of the sea who went about their daily tasks independently, even competitively. But when one of their own was in need, they all helped one another. When they were helpless they came together as one, and many of them prayed. It was always the way of simple people. The thought inspired him and, closing the Bible, he spoke again.
“Look at you—all of you. Without being asked, you have come as one. Therein lies the true human comfort. It is more than a gathering in the house of God to ask a favour. It is a plea from an entire community. From the weakness of one there is the strength of many. Such a supplication must surely be honoured by Him who hears all.”
The minister paused and swallowed hard. A woman sobbed quietly. Another was trembling, a lace handkerchief partly hiding her pretty face.
“I would ask you all to kneel and clasp the hand of the one next you so there can be no disturbance in our request. Pray from the silence of your collective hearts. Ask that the Catherine B. shall not succumb to the fury of the sea.”
The minister stepped away from the pulpit, turned, and bowed to the Cross hanging on the wall behind him. Walking to a woman in the first pew, he clasped her hand. He knelt down, the shepherd among the sheep. Now, hand to hand, from every silent mouth the Catherine B. was borne before the throne of grace.
“Amen,” said the preacher.
“Amen,” said his penitent flock.
Above the roof, just below the tall wooden spire, the wind moaned through the louvred bell tower vents. A sorrowing sound rose from the people as one voice and the lun of the wind carried the dirge-like tones out into the night. The song ended. The strain “For Those in Peril on the Sea” escaped upward to the steeplechase. It lingered for a moment before dying from human ears and lifting to a higher plane, over the edge of the frozen white land, away to the black, tormented sea.
Just up from the shoreline, with its painted, peeling clapboard back to the barren granite cliffs, was a house, its cold black windows staring seaward. Suddenly, a light appeared in one of the upstairs windows. The shadow of a shawled woman filled the pane, as if the lamp-bearer standing silently within was holding her own pitiful vigil for her man in peril on the sea.
* * *
Janes saw the light first. It glinted through the snow dwighs like a faint star at first. He soon realized it was a ship bearing down on them—on a collision course. They carried not one light in the rigging aboard the Catherine B. All of the storm lanterns had long since been destroyed by the gale. They had made it out to the shipping lanes only to be rammed, for surely death was riding the seething bows of the leviathan coming at them. Men shouted and waved, their voices muted in the furious wind and water.
Skipper Janes roared to his crew. “Draw a bucket of kerosene from the drum! Stuff ’un full of brin bags an’ set ’er ablaze!” His voice was hoarse with excitement: either rescue or doom was at hand. His ragtag crew h
oled a steel cask and splashed oil into it, followed by two brin potato sacks.
Numb fingers scraped damp lucifers across the brimstone ends of matchboxes. A match broke. A match flared and died. The thrum of the ship’s mighty engines pounded in their ears. Even the top of the Catherine B.’s masts never reached the top deck of the steamship that was lumbering toward them. Cupped hands held another match to the oil-soaked cloth. It held its flame for an instant before the cruel wind snuffed it out.
A yell of desperation burst from Janes’s mouth. “Stan’ to win’ard of me, b’ys! Break the damn win’, fer gawd’s sake! ’Tis our last chance!”
The men huddled together and, crouching down, shielded their skipper from the gale. Janes rasped the match head across the stone again. It flared as before, glowing inside Ellis’s leathery hands. He held it to the soaked brin. The flame grew and flared upward, and the wind created a roaring, torch-like beacon of light. Janes grabbed the bucket handle and kept swinging the light like a brakeman leaning out of his caboose. Pieces of burning brin flew from the bucket and glowed ever brighter, arching like big flankers before falling black on the surging deck.
The ship loomed above them and the crew yelled. Janes swung the burning bucket. Pieces of cloth blazed upward, illuminating the men, lighting the stumbling schooner. The black ship veered away, her bow wave falling and hiding under her huge forefoot. The bucket handle grew too hot to hold. Janes flung it away from him and it spread its burning contents over the deck for just a minute before a wash of sea water doused the light.
The great hulk of the steamer passed the narrow windward bows of the schooner, taking with it the shelter it had given from the wind. She bore away to leeward, turning ponderously as she went. Her lights wallowed below and above the rollers when she lurched broadside in her turn.
The crew of the Catherine B. could do nothing to aid in their own rescue. Their own lifeboat, which was lashed to the deck, was reduced to splinters of wood. The small boat that was to be their final hope had wrecked in its lashings earlier that morning. Casks of kerosene were loosed all over the deck. Janes intended to scuttle his vessel before he left her. He wouldn’t leave the Catherine B. a floating derelict adrift in these waters.
One of the discarded empty drums floated high in the water alongside the tossing schooner, driven by the fierce wind. The Catherine B.’s bowsprit had been torn out of its step by the same heavy seas that had flattened their lifeboat. The port and starboard bowsprit shrouds that held it secure, as well as the bobstay bolted to the raking stem, had been severed like cotton thread. Even the stronger forestay and the fore-topmast stay had let go from the foremast.
All of this rigging was draped and dangling over the side of the schooner, holding the downed bowsprit in a tangled mess that rose and fell with every move of the schooner. The rusty steel drum caught in the surging rigging as it rounded the bows and stayed there like a baby in a snarled steel cradle. At every downward pitch of the schooner’s bows the wrecked bowsprit fell across the drum, emitting a steady booming death knell for the Catherine B.
The big ship rounded the Catherine B.’s stern well aft, and it was only as she heaved closer that the men on the schooner noticed her name. The SS Holplein stood to the weather of the Catherine B. A tall, dark figure shouted slowly in broken English through a loudspeaker from her high bridge.
“Vee vill attempt rescue to you! A lifeboat is comink! You vill haft to chump in board! Take nothink of belonginks!”
Several of the crew on the schooner had bags and worn suitcases hanging from their hands. The stench of kerosene was everywhere and the schooner’s deck was slippery. A calm oil slick ran away from the schooner’s bows. Wesley Short had his new accordion, still in its box, tucked under his arm. It pained him to do so, but he threw it over the side, where it bobbed out of sight alongside one brown wooden suitcase. The drum boomed again, the sound deeper, duller. The barrel was leaking sea water.
In one of the recesses of the forecastle Janes had found a discarded lantern, its chimney cracked and blackened. He shook it and found its small bottom tank was dry. Back on deck he poured fuel into it from a bucket. Heading astern, he clung to the safety lines with one hand while in the other he held the short storm lantern.
* * *
The Holplein kept pace with the schooner. The captain of the lumbering ore carrier was using all of his skills to lay into the wind and stay close to the Catherine B. while at the same time avoiding collision. His ship, half loaded with iron ore from the Bell Island mine, needed a surge of power to answer her helm in such a gale. Captain Schapp knew that too much power would carry his ship ahead of the schooner. He also knew that without his ship’s bulk as a shield against the gale, his lifeboat would never get alongside the schooner.
Captain Schapp wouldn’t soon forget this trip. They had waited on Bell Island for days to be loaded. When their heavy cargo was finally brought on board and the holds of the Holplein was only half full, the loading was stopped. His order was filled, he was told. Schapp argued that he was to take a full load.
“Der must be voul-up in papervork!” he argued.
It was no use. By this time another larger ship from the British Isles was already being loaded. Another one was impatiently sounding for a pilot just off shore. The Holplein would be delayed for days. Schapp ordered his hatches bolted down and he left for his Atlantic crossing. The Holplein was out of the port of Rotterdam in Holland, where the Rhine River meets the sea. The Rhine River, which begins life with an icy drip from the Rheinewaldham Glacier in the Swiss Alps, flows through Germany’s black forest before maturing 820 miles later, blending with the delta where seagoing ships come.
Leaving Bell Island, Schapp plotted a course that would take his ship up through the English Channel and into the north sea to home. He chose the more southern crossing to avoid the winter storms prevalent in that reach of the North Atlantic north of the British Isles. Then the gale spawned from faraway warm African waters hit them.
Schapp was no stranger to Atlantic storms. He had made several difficult crossings but had never seen anything to match the hurricane that was coming at them now. He was glad his ship was only half-loaded. Schapp usually ignored the guide for safe weight painted on both sides of his ship—the Plimsoll line—and always loaded heavy. In the seas they were encountering, he was doubtful if the Holplein would rise above them if she had a full load.
His ship had already rescued the crew of the Newfoundland schooner George K. and had seen them safe aboard a tug that was searching for several schooners out of St. John’s, all believed to be adrift in the same terrible gale. Now here was another one across their pitching bows, a pitiful remnant of the flotilla that had so proudly sailed forth. Schapp was a stickler for time and schedules. He was already delayed in his Atlantic crossing, but there was no hesitation in his decision. He and his crew would do everything possible to rescue the men aboard the doomed schooner. It was the way of the sea. Men home from the sea edge and tied to dockside would leave their vessels in any foreign port and go their separate ways without talking, but away from land on the endless sea, all men were sailors who held to an invisible bond of brotherhood that knew no bounds: seamen all, adrift on the mother of tears.
A lifeboat was lowered in several stop-and-start plunges down the heaving, sea-washed side of the Holplein. The gooseneck ends of the overhead davits squealed as the rusty cable paid out. The boat slammed onto the sea surface and was quickly freed from its lines. Oarsmen stood from their thwarts with the strain of pulling and headed away from their ship.
Now began a feat of seamanship that only small boatmen knew. Afloat on a deadly sea in a thin shell of flexing wood, the lifeboat was carried along by the roaring wind and the men at the oars guiding and keeping her in check.
Men shouted from the closing lifeboat. Men shouted back from the deck of the schooner. None of them understood the other’s
language. The boat neared the schooner and pitched and dipped rowlock deep. The men on the deck of the Catherine B. readied themselves for the daring jump to safety.
Then there came a throaty roar from above that wasn’t the wind. It was accompanied by a black plume of smoke from the stack of the Holplein as she pulled away. There was a garbled shout from the coxswain holding the tiller. Oars flashed and the boat turned, laying into the terrible wind and wave, and the little Catherine B. was alone again.
* * *
On the sheltered bridge of the Holplein, Captain Schapp was sweating. He had ordered the sudden burst of power from his engines reluctantly. His ship was powered down to keep abreast of the drifting schooner. He had to break the mountainous swell or his boat would never get close enough for rescue. At the same time, the dead weight of his ship could not be allowed too close. The Holplein’s hull would crush the schooner without the slightest shudder. Now he had the added worry of his own men bearing the full force of a North Atlantic Gale. As his ship bore away for one more turn, Schapp saw his lifeboat immediately turn her blunt bows into the wind. His men knew what they had to do.
* * *
Janes knew why the ship had pulled away. He also knew her captain had done the right thing. The barrier the ship had provided against the storm was necessary if rescue were to be accomplished. And now the gale was increasing.
The white lifeboat rose above the grey seas, the black-clothed men aboard displayed high for a minute like a huddled group of children waiting to slide down their favourite snow hill. Then they disappeared down the steep sides of the combers, for minutes at a time, before rising again to repeat the ride all over again.
An eternity passed before the Holplein returned, rounding abaft the taffrail of the Catherine B. as before. She came nearer this time, giving maximum shelter.