In a moment of absolute quiet I lifted my chin, ears straining. A stillness between one heartbeat and the next as the world paused in disbelief and one thing, the thing that I knew to be true, changed into something different. Something unthinkable.
Starboard bow? Hadn’t Mrs Brown said port?
Land both port and starboard? How was that possible?
God in heaven, where were we? Where were we?
The sudden thudding of boots above signalled the men crossing the deck and there was the captain’s voice hammering into the very wood of the ship. “All hands!” he shouted. “Bring her around! Hard on the helm!” The shouting of the men was covered by the squealing of the yards, and the ship lurched with a sickening roll, throwing Mrs Brown to the floor.
I reached out to steady her but found myself shaking her arm. “What does it mean?” I cried. “Why is there land?”
Again we rolled and I wedged my back against the door to lift the heavy woman to sitting. She had a stupid look on her face and was patting her own cheek.
Mrs Oat woke and seized her baby to wrap tightly in her arms, but the baby, indeed all the girls, slept soundly, unconcerned by the proximity of land in the middle of the ocean.
“Barty’s there,” whispered Mrs Brown, as if her husband was the captain and they were not sailing between islands in a fog at night. “We’ll be fine. Trust Barty.”
But I couldn’t. I knew nothing about her Barty. Why would I trust him? I wanted to find Joseph, who would tell me whether or not I needed to worry, but couldn’t think if he was above or below. He should have been with me.
Land?
The rushing of the waves on the hull ceased. The ship sat down in the water. We’d gone from days of open sea to the lee-side of something. The General Grant heaved and rolled like a breathing animal.
“We’ve lost the wind,” I said. There were cries from above now, discordant, not the rhythm of command and response but shouting from all quarters, and the unmistakable squealing of the yards pulled one way and another. There was no corresponding drive forward of the ship, instead she reeled from side to side.
“Barty is there,” said Mrs Brown again, with her absolute trust that her husband would steer us past danger.
I wanted Joseph. Right then. Before the worst happened. I wanted his calm voice, his steadfastness. Joseph was a sailor and he knew about the sea. He had explained to me about ship sails and winds, drawing diagrams with a stick in the sand at the park. But he had said nothing about islands in fog at night and the fear that comes with a sudden calm.
The shouting continued above and the ship moved in a deep heaving motion. She was alive with sound: taps and scrapings and gurgles from deep below like a household rearranging its furniture, horrible on the ears. Without the sound of wind and waves we echoed like a drum.
I opened the door to the corridor and stepped out to hear above.
“We’re drifting!” called a sailor. Not Joseph.
“Current will push us clear.” Another, and another again about drifting along the coast.
One voice, above all the others.
“Land dead ahead!”
And then the most dreadful call, a clear voice calling, “Rocks!” And still the thunder of activity through the planks above and the shouts to “Haul!” “Heave! ”
“No,” cried Mrs Brown, and Elizabeth Oat and I were crying, too. Wailing came from the cabins on either side and men were shouting, doors banging.
I needed Joseph so desperately that I leapt to the door but Mrs Brown held me back, tugging my skirt down. “The men don’t need us above,” she said. “Trust Barty. Trust the captain.”
But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I felt my throat closing up in that tiny cabin and I pushed her hand off me.
The crash of splitting wood screamed through the General Grant like a giant tree ripping apart, magnified through the great cavity of the ship and through the water all around. We were dashed forward across the cabin and the girls thrown on top of us, ripped from their berth and tossed through the air by the hand of some invisible devil, their voices woken and loosed in high wails.
The ship had slammed into a hard mass and a part of her torn away.
* * *
Mrs Brown, Mrs Oat and I clutched the girls and pushed through the salon, joining passengers fighting up the companionway onto deck; the bold Mary Oat of just hours before suddenly small and fearful and clinging to my neck. I surged forward like the sea. I would not be caught like a fly in a bottle when the water flooded in.
Above, sailors ran past, none Joseph. They weren’t working together to save us. They gripped the rails or leapt onto the rig and seemed, every one, to stare into the black nothingness that surrounded the ship and shout to one another, each with a different demand, and made no attempt at order or to listen for the captain’s calls.
“Get below,” one shouted, shoving me back towards the hatch, but “Muster stations!” came from another, pulling my sleeve and pointing somewhere mid-ships. “Go forward, get back, find your husbands!” I could make no sense of their commands and could see nothing.
“Aft!” shouted another, more clearly. It was the big man, Mr Teer. “To the aft deck.” He stretched out his arms to gather all the passengers into his embrace and herded us away from the danger.
Mid-ships the lamps were lit but they threw scant light into the fog. People poured from the steerage companionway and followed us back, carrying wrapped bundles, children and blankets. Beneath our feet the deck came and went with no rhythm and we staggered like drunks.
“Jibboom’s gone,” a sailor shouted to Mrs Brown’s Barty, who didn’t look at all in control. He was dragging his sailors from the rails and slapping them to attention.
“She’s smashed right back to the cathead.”
The ship juddered and slipped backwards, away from the rocks that had risen from the middle of the ocean to catch us dead. We made the aft deck and could go no farther. We clutched our people to us as we drifted.
We drifted.
Windless. We waited.
I knew enough to know that there was no steering a ship without wind. We might drift all night until a morning breeze filled the sails to set us free or we might drift forward again, on the tide and the currents, and smash ourselves against the rocks ahead.
Mary Oat buried her face in my neck and I held her fast. Halos draped misty gold around the lanterns; beyond was dense black. We waited, clutching each other, and still we drifted with sickening lurches.
It seemed a long time later that the cry came from up the mast. Was it Joseph, still above? His cry was joined by those all around. Over the stern behind us, where there should have been open sea, there rose a wall of rock, flaring wide, blacker than the night. Driven backwards at speed, gripped by a dark current, we fell down a great swell towards it.
The General Grant struck.
I grasped the man next to me and we all went down, thrown to our knees, spilled, rolling over the deck, and Mary fell beneath me with a big woosh of air. I cradled her below the wheel as the man above screamed through the crowd, “Rudder’s crushed, Captain! Steering’s gone!”
We lifted and fell again. Then the spanker boom hit rock and split, and the slivered shards thrust forward to catch the man through the back of the chest and impaled him, splayed across the wheel.
We pitched forward but there was a cliff face there as well, dead ahead and again the foredeck smashed into unforgiving rock. We were caught side-on to the swell in a narrow cove with the tide pushing us in, crashing back and forth on a surging sea, and the rocks grew tighter and higher overhead until I thought the ship must be crushed and we all squeezed to our deaths. The cliff closed overhead and with a pull and a slide, ship and all, we were sucked into the gaping mouth of a cave.
* * *
Joseph was there beside me. I collapsed into his arms. I heard my voice on the air still calling and calling for him and couldn’t stop myself. He held me steadily, though in the swaying light of the lanterns his face looked so afraid.
“Back, Mary. Back from the rails.” He pulled me so I turned and staggered against the skewered helmsman with his punctured soul and bulging, lifeless eyes. Mary Oat screamed and I covered her eyes and bent over to clutch my stomach as I heaved and heaved my guts onto the deck, heaving the horror away.
The man’s face hung backwards on a loose neck, his fantastic grimace staring up into a swinging lamp of looping shadows that stretched his features this way and that as if he was trying to escape from his face.
“Oh God—oh God have mercy!”
Above, the mast scraped across the cave’s ceiling, catching in a pocket of rock and jerking the ship like a puppet. We tilted and the wood creaked, pulling and forcing until something must break, and then it came: the splintering crash as the top foremast split, ripping canvas as it fell through a billowing drape of sails and into the water ahead. The ship wallowed and dragged.
A cascade of rocks from above bounced off the deck around us and I pushed Mary into the folds of my skirt, as if a layer of Manchester cotton could save her from the rocks raining down.
But the shock settled and the screaming paused and I raised my head. We shuddered, trapped on slow swells. It seemed miraculous that we were out of the weather and harboured from the sea, that we were contained, somehow, and safe from being dashed to our deaths against the cliffs. I looked up, we all looked up—faces turning, astonished, at the cave’s glossy black rocks in flickering lamplight.
We were afloat, still, not listing.
The tide pushed us farther until the ship wedged fast, now with the mainmast scraping above in a crevasse of rock, knocking loose stones and dirt that clattered through the rigging. My mouth sagged and I shivered violently.
“Steady, Mary,” said Joseph, his face bent to mine, eyes huge in the eerie light. “I need you to be sensible so I can go to the captain. I need you to calm the women. Deep breath, my girl. Can you do it?”
He couldn’t leave me. There was a dead man behind me. I couldn’t turn around. Couldn’t do anything. Dear God. What did he expect me to do? I hauled in a breath, the air icy and smelling of rock. His arms were steady on my shoulders.
“Mary. Look to the little girl, look to her mother. Help them. I’ll be back.”
The tall shipmate, Mr McClelland, strode past, hands busy with a long coil of rope. He called to Joseph, “Captain wants depth soundings, port side, Jewell. Let’s see what we’ve got.”
And Joseph was gone.
The men swarmed around, cutting lines, pulling and heaving and carrying lamps, calling and shouting, their voices loud in the enclosed space but seeming to achieve nothing in the darkness. Faces swung by on the lamplight but Joseph didn’t return. I closed my eyes as men stepped past to pull the helmsman from the shards, but I learned the sound of ripping flesh. When they laid him out on the deck the blood poured from his heart and ran slippery under their feet.
I untangled Mary Oat and brought her to her mother, who lay slumped with the younger girls in the nest of her dress. Despite her burdens Mrs Oat had one hand clasped firmly to Mrs Brown, who was flailing her arms and crying for her husband, throwing her fear around the assembled crowd so it caught and grew.
“Mrs Brown!” I took her arm and slapped her hand. “Your husband is an officer. This will not do.” The older lady turned to me, the side of her face a mess of blood. There was mud and gravel in her hair, and a loose, slippery thing on her cheek. I reached up to brush it away but found it was attached to her. Flesh. The inside of her cheek, hanging on papery skin.
Over the crying came the harsh sound of another mast scraping like a fingernail against the rock above and I realised the top mainmast, too, might split and fall. A sailor turned his face aloft and a rock smacked into his eye socket and felled him. He rolled into the darkness. We covered our heads with our arms.
A pair of shiny shoes appeared and a man thrust a baby down at me. I grabbed the child to stop it falling and the man shouted something unintelligible about a blanket and headed for the hatch, his accented voice loud as people were suddenly unnaturally silent, drawing breath perhaps, poised for the next surge, the next rain of debris.
I stared at the bundle in my arms, bewildered as to why this heavy whimpering thing had suddenly become mine. I had to give it back. It was not my responsibility.
“We’re safe for the moment,” Mr Brown said, a calm voice amongst us, taking his wife’s hand, helping her to stand, gentling the frightened woman. He folded the flap of skin back across her cheek and held it in place with steady fingers, placing her hand under his to press on the wound. “We’ll wait until daylight and see what’s to be done.” He took his wife’s arm and nudged her forward. “Come on, old thing,” he said, and led her off and we followed behind: Mrs Oat with her girls and the cabin passengers, men from steerage gathering their families, tripping over the sails that draped the deck, past the smashed spars. Me with a foreign man’s baby.
I fell, twisted, and my nose smashed into skin. A folded face with a wet mouth gaped in a great curdling cry, just one more sound in the wretched night. Boy or girl? An Italian man, I remembered, with his baby daughter. No mention of the mother. Poor baby. I blew and she blinked, startled out of her cry. Poor baby.
Joseph was there again, crouched down before me, hand on my shoulder.
“When the time comes,” he said, “I want you first into the boats.”
“Oh no, no.” I looked past him. Sailors were upturning the ship’s boats and dragging them to the side. I couldn’t understand this. The General Grant, for all her smashed masts, was not sinking. We surely weren’t going back out into the wild sea in the little boats?
“We’re safe here,” I said. But as I spoke there was another rolling surge and a crack in the mast that was now wedged firmly above and straining down on the deck.
“Tide’s coming in. The mast will be forced through.”
“Through where?” I didn’t want to understand. I needed Joseph to tell me.
“It will breach the hull. She’ll sink. You be ready, Mary. First in the boats when the call comes. Promise me.”
He took my face in his hands, this new husband of mine, his eyes so fierce they hurt. “Promise me, Mary!”
Into a little boat? I couldn’t promise that.
“Give the baby back,” he said, “right now.” And he was gone to join the others: Teer and Bill Scott and Mr McClelland, who together had heaved fallen debris from a quarter boat. They turned it and lowered it into the water.
With a terrible crack, the main top-mast split and swung free, caught in a spiderweb of rigging that tangled into the shrouds below. I scrambled to my feet, clasped the baby and ran for safety.
* * *
Below was a riot. Decency had disappeared into a shoving brawl. Bags were upended, possessions strewn as people grabbed and stuffed valuables into purses and pockets.
The Italian man was there, struggling into an oversized coat, a heavy thing with bulging pockets, his fingers unable to bend for golden rings.
“What are you doing?” I cried, but he elbowed me aside and rummaged in his boots, little sacks moving to his pockets, a bulky hat on his head. “Your baby. Sir—your baby!”
He reluctantly took the burden from me and wedged the child precariously on a sloping table. In the corner sat Mrs Brown, keening as the doctor put a stitch in her cheek with a coarse black thread. I stood apart from them all, listening to the calls from above, trying to summon courage, not knowing what to do.
The ship groaned and creaked. I went above.
The first light filtered in, uncovering our tragedy. We were a ship in a stone bottle, rammed hard into the cave end. Grey-faced sailors stood beneath tattered sails. Shredded spars were strewn over the deck but the remaining mainsail stood tall, jammed into the rock. I felt the pressure bearing down and thought of Joseph’s prediction that the rising tide would force the mast through the hull.
Once again, we were called to assemble on the aft deck, sombre as Captain Loughlin explained we would climb down into the boats.
“Leave all that,” he said, pointing to the bags and bundles of possessions the families tripped over. “Keep calm and hold on to your children.” Even as he gave his instructions the sea began working again, waves surging into the cave. The first ship’s boat rowed away towards the entrance with three men aboard, hauling a heavy line and anchoring iron. As the craft passed to the outside world it dipped, tipping perilously close to the rock face. Joseph couldn’t ask me to get into one of those flimsy boats and go out there, out onto the sea.
“Women forward!” called the captain, and from behind him Joseph shouted my name. It sounded like a betrayal. I couldn’t do it. There was a contraption rigged up, a rope and a spar out over the side with the look of the hangman’s scaffold. I was pushed to the front of the crowd and peered at the quarter boat down in the water, banging dangerously against the ship’s side. The height was too much, the sea too dark. I cringed but there were hands on my shoulders, urging me forward. They wrapped me in a rope and led me to the edge. It happened so quickly I had no chance to step away, to step back and say: No, not me. Someone else must go first.
“I can’t!” I cried, but it was Joseph there then, fastening the knot around my waist, holding me steady, lifting my foot to stand on the rail, pushing me up onto the scaffold.
“You can, my love,” he said. “You must. The others will follow you. We need a leader. Be brave.”
The boat was below.
The swelling sea lifted it towards me and I saw Mr McClelland and Mr Brown holding the oars. Teer stood with his arms outstretched for me, and on Joseph’s nudge I cried, “God save me!” and jumped.
The boat wasn’t there. It sucked back on a wave like a chair pulled from a table. I dropped a long way and hit the sea, plunging down and clamped by a freeze that filled me. The shock of it felt final. An end, like death. And I felt such surprise that it had happened. I never expected to die. It had never happened before. Death happened to other people. But it was here. Now.
Joseph, who I had loved and trusted, had killed me. He had called for me and sent me to my death.
God couldn’t mean for me to die. But still I sank, pulled by the weight of my gold-seamed dress.
The downward fall stopped abruptly as the hauling rope jerked taut, punching the air from me. Death came with such pain. Life to death. It wasn’t one thing or the other but a process of crossing. I was obliged to feel myself leave, to witness my own death’s occurrence, and it was a horrible thing to be alive as one died, to feel the heart stop and the mind freeze and for one breath to go never to be replaced by another.
When the rope pulled I was bashed against the ship neither alive nor dead, dragged head first up against a wall of barnacles.
I sucked in the ocean as I was grabbed from above. Hands hooked into my clothing and manhandled me through the water that wanted to take me down.
As I died I saw Joseph. His hands were under my arms now, pulling, and I wanted him to leave me alone. It was over and he tugged at my corpse. But I had no control over myself, the involuntary thrashing of arms and legs, the death spasm as my mind disappeared into a black dot. I felt a final bashing of my head and the black dot exploded but I hadn’t been swept through that point of darkness. I was still on this side of life, gasping against the small boat, scraped the length of my torso and hauled like a fish on a line, past Joseph’s face, so long and wet, and flung on board. Strong hands gripped my ankles and hoisted me upside down so water poured from me like a jug. My arms flung wide and I breathed while all around us people fell from the ship into the water. I was laid spluttering across someone’s lap and Teer was there with his arms around me. Close. Huge.
“Good girl,” he said, “hold on.” And he pushed me onto a bench behind him.
I rubbed my eyes, saw Joseph in the water dragging a man by the collar. Teer grabbed both men and hefted them aboard, then turned to catch a man who’d slid down a rope from the ship into the boat. The man scampered past to the stern and kept his face turned away from the ship.
But the women? I lay winded and in pain waiting for the others to go through the trial and land spluttering on the bench with me.
They never came.
Not one woman followed. Not one of the children.
“Come on!” The Irishman’s voice filled the cave, roaring like thunder. “Come on—jump!”
I screamed at them, to the dark shadows gathered on deck, “You must! You must!” But I had no breath and my cry didn’t carry.
Great bubbles burst from the water as the mast of the General Grant split her hull and her body filled, and with decks awash she listed, the upsurge pushing our boat far away. The Italian man rolled to the edge where the gunwales had been smashed clean off, his long legs kicking in the air. I willed him to save himself, my hands twisting the fabric of my dress in fists, but he clenched only his bag and toppled into the water from the ruined deck. He sank, instantly gone, with his gold secure in the pockets of his large coat and his bag clutched to his chest. A bundle wrapped in a shawl rolled from the deck soon after, across the broken planks. His daughter. Emilia. I remembered her name as she hit the water and began to unravel, a pale wrap drifting.
Joseph was on his feet, and in terror and desperation I prayed for him to leap in to save the baby but the heavy hand of Teer pulled him back from the edge.
“No one gets out of this boat!” He shoved Joseph back onto the planks. “You can’t save ’em.”
Mrs Oat, oh, dear heaven, Mrs Oat and the girls scrambled aboard a long boat as a sailor cut its tether with an axe and I could see her tucking her girls in while she shouted back for her friend. But Mrs Brown clung to the ship’s rigging and the long boat drifted away without her.
The captain, climbing the mizzen, lifted his voice over the cries in a command to free the one remaining boat. It was hopeless. It lay smashed under the debris of the fallen masts.
Mrs Brown was abandoned.
Her husband, in command of the quarter boat in which I crouched, saw his wife left behind as men slipped from the deck into the water. He tried to turn us back but Teer and the other men pulled clear as a swell came from below.
All our eyes were on the General Grant as she sank and Mrs Brown, the captain and remaining souls fell into the churn and were swallowed.
We were nearly out of the cave when the wave hit and bounced off the end wall. We gripped on. Thirty, perhaps forty people cowered behind us in the long boat. The wave lifted and swamped them. Capsized, there were screams and frenzy and bodies falling.
I saw them drown.
The talkative Mrs Ray and her husband went down fast. Two sailors from Joseph’s watch, Dutnold and Collin, tried to catch the Oldfield boys but they sank together in a tangle of young limbs. Mrs Roberts sank before her buoyant babies, and I reached out as if I could scoop them up from that distance. They were three and two and one years old, and they bobbed about in the threshing before they went down. Reverend Sarda stayed with the French family until the end: little Emily with her arms wrapped around his neck, and the baby held aloft as the reverend kicked and kicked while the parents sank fast. Then other desperate hands grabbed at him and they all disappeared beneath the water, God reclaiming his own.
Sucked by a strong pull, we couldn’t reach them. Elizabeth Oat held a girl by each arm with the baby around her neck, and I watched my friend and her children sink. Darling Mary struggled for a few moments after her mother went down, her dark hair floating loose on the icy water like a shroud. Mr Brown tried desperately to pull us back to them, and I prayed aloud to God that we might save Mary, just Mary, a sweet child innocent of all things, but the flood hit us then and I fell back off my seat onto the boards.
I didn’t see Mary again. I didn’t see her drown.
Only three men swam clear of the wreck to join the few on our boat, and when no one else remained above water we rowed out of the cave to join the boat that had waited outside. Fifteen souls floated in two twenty-foot boats out on the turbulent sea and wept and cried and prayed, but it made no difference. Every other person on the General Grant died that day.