The Wreck of the Memphis
I
WHEN the United States ship Memphis crashed against the rocks of Santo Domingo, the catastrophe was too big for any one man to see in its entirety. My part in the event was small, but it is all I know. It is all I shall try to tell.
It was hot and sticky weather, a typical August afternoon in the Caribbean. Occasional light showers drifted across the roadstead and the ship swung easily in the long swell. I had intended making an inspection of the Castine’s pay department that afternoon, but a troublesome error in the balance of my own clothing return kept me hunting for an elusive discrepancy of twenty cents until nearly three o’clock. By that time I was drowsy; and as I came on deck, to find the sun shining through a patter of big, plashing raindrops, I reflected that the afternoon was too far gone to make much of an inspection. My room was on the breezy side, and an air port twenty inches square opened by the head of my berth. I went below instead of going to the Castine.
There was a two-inch batten on the long bookshelf overhead to hold my books when the ship rolled. Nevertheless, I was aroused by the impact of a thick volume of Montaigne landing in the pit of my stomach. Still drowsy, I put the book back. Before it was fairly set on the shelf, six or seven volumes of Decisions of the Comptroller cascaded all around me. I was suddenly wide-awake. The ship had never rolled like that during my time on board.
Automatically I closed and dogged down my air port and pulled on my coat. Was there a hurricane making up? The log, kept in a desk on the quarter-deck, would show. As I started up the ladder to investigate, the engineer officer, Lieutenant Jones, ran into his room next mine, and I heard him call down the voice tube, ‘Light off six more boilers!’ as he began hurriedly to pull on his overalls preparatory to going below.
Another heavy roll sent the ship on her beam ends. The log showed nothing unusual in the column devoted to barometer, wind, or clouds. The yellow afternoon sun was blinking through the wet air. A little shower was drifting slowly a mile inshore, a soft breeze following its thin shadow. At the mouth of the river I could see our motor launch with returning liberty men heading out toward the ship. The surgeon, first lieutenant, and gunnery officer joined me, also peering curiously at the log for some hint of what was causing the queer, dead rolling.
Then the surgeon said, ‘My God!’ in a hushed voice and pointed out to sea. Miles out showed a wavering, racing line like a range of hills. After one incredulous instant — no wave could possibly be so tremendous! — the first lieutenant burst into a roar of ‘Close your gun shutters!' and he and the gunnery officer raced below, one to port and the other to starboard, rousing the crew and directing the slamming of the gun shutters and tightening of the screw bolts that secured them.
The surgeon and I turned startled eyes on each other as the great wave, tearing shoreward at express-train speed, combed and broke off Torrecilla Point, where the chart shows ten fathoms of water. Then we too dashed below, he to his patients and I to see that the water-tight doors of my storerooms were securely fastened. With the semiautomatic habit of the sea, I looked at my watch and ‘registered’ the time as I ran. It was 3.47 on an ordinary, showery-bright afternoon, the twenty-ninth of August, 1916.
I was in the passage under the lower wardroom country when the Memphis groaned like a man with his hand caught in a winch and seemed to lie flat on her side. She boomed like an enormous muffled bell as she struggled to right herself. Up and up she climbed as I passed the ordnance storeroom; then down, down, like a dropping elevator. The electrical storeroom was secured. I remember thinking, ‘Good man, Saunders — I might have known his shop would be — What on earth?’ For my feet stung with a grinding jar, and the old Memphis again trembled and shrieked.
The way to the forward storerooms was hard to negotiate, for by now the ship was behaving like the car of a roller coaster. I could hear hatches clanging shut and the rush and gurgle of water in the gun deck above.
The chief pay clerk met me in the warrant officers’ alley. ‘All secure forward,’ he reported. Then he too said, ‘What, on earth?’ for again came that grinding thump, and the lights went out. Through the dark came his quizzical voice: ‘It looks to me like time to begin picking up papers!’
II
The pay office was next to be visited; and to reach there I had to go out again on the quarter-deck, for all other hatches seemed to be closed and fastened. Between ship and shore the sea was an incredible nightmare. The little Castine, dancing like a mad thing, had come out of the river, and a small knot of our men who were lashing the gasoline drums at the break of the superstructure cheered her each time she poked her gallant white nose through a howling, gray-backed wave.
Our liberty boat was half a mile from the ship, riding low and heavily. She had taken much water and the men were bailing feverishly. Then she stopped and slewed uncertainly. A man seized the colors and began frantically to wigwag ‘E-n-g-i-n-e b-r-o — ’ Then she broached to and the insane sea took her. An old petty officer in the lee of Turret Two cried, ‘Oh, Jesus Christ!’
Inside the superstructure I had to wrap both arms around a stanchion and hold on until my breath returned after that mad dash across the open deck. I distinctly remember thinking, ‘What is this? There’s not a hatful of wind out there.’
The grinding jars were frequent and monotonously regular now. Crunch! crunch! crunch! at half-minute intervals. There was no longer any puzzle about it. The Memphis was crashing against the coral bottom of the roads with every wave trough. The deck ahead was dark with hatches and gun shutters closed; but as I clung to the stanchion the sea crashed heavily against the starboard side. The heavy nuts stripped the threads from the dogs of number three three-inch gun port; and half the shutter crashed on the deck as a two-foot stream of water roared in.
I reached the pay office at last. Two feet of gray water was swirling around the desks; and the file-case drawers had spilled their contents and were hanging drunkenly. My chief yeoman, with angry face, was grabbing furiously at the falling papers and lashing them in soggy bundles. ‘Hell, Paymaster,’he growled, forgetting all else in his irritation, ‘it’ll take me a month to get this place clean!’
Together we lashed the most valuable records to overhead pipes and beams, out of reach of the charging water. We each arranged the package we should take in case the ship had to be abandoned. This was for the yeoman’s benefit. He did not know what I had seen — no boat could live in the seething hell of that sea.
A crash and confused shouting in the compartment outside made me leave the pay office. The mess tables had come down from their racks and were surging about as the heavy rolling sent the ankle-deep water swirling across the deck. The crew’s piano tore loose from its chocks and dashed crazily toward the side, taking complete charge of the passageway. We knew that many men were still below. The passage must be cleared. So the half-dozen apprentice boys and the young boatswain’s mate I found in the compartment set out with me to capture the piano. It was very like capturing a wise and frolicsome mule in the middle of a rushing stream. As my foot slipped the accursed thing whirled wickedly,striking my hip and knocking me down. Like a flash a lean arm flew under my chin, and, with a jerk that made my neck bones crack, the boatswain’s mate pulled me clear. ‘Careful, sir!’ was his only comment.
The piano’s charge on me was its last, for it wedged itself in the training gear of number four gun long enough for the boys to get a line around it and lash it to the gun mount.
Then a boy who was clinging to the guard rail of a companionway called, ‘There’s somebody down in the gun deck!’ and we made our way in short spurts across to the ladder head. The ship was now rolling drunkenly through a fifty-degree arc, with always that sickening pounding at the middle of the swing. Down in the gloom of the gun deck three or four feet of water surged back and forth, now leaving the glistening red linoleum bare, now roaring through the overhead beams as the poor old Memphis labored. Six-inch drill shell, loose from the racks, leaped and rumbled back and forth, making the footing dangerous.
Two or three men were at the other end of the lower compartment, watching their chance to win through the water and the spinning shells to the ladder. ‘Make a chain,’suggested the boatswain’s mate. The heaviest bluejacket wound both legs and an arm around a near-by stanchion. The rest of us, fingers around wrists, formed a rope of men down the ladder, reaching a free hand out to the marooned men below. Another gun shutter smashed in; and the inrush of water boiled down the ladder over our backs and shoulders.
The first to try to reach us was a short, plump machinist. Barely five feet in height, he had a girth of over four. As the roll left the compartment momentarily dry, he danced daintily between the tumbling shells like a fat, bewhiskered bacchante. As the ship started to roll back, sending roaring tons of water into our side of the deck, a tall sheet-steel locker came down from its moorings on the bulkhead and dashed at him. He escaped its blow by leaping for the overhead piping, swinging by his hands and raising his feet clear. His fat little hands and stubby arms resented such unwonted use, and as the locker swam dizzily beneath him his grip broke and he fell astride of it. In some miraculous way he kept it right side up; and three or four times he rode his bucking steel steed back and forth across the deck as the water rushed here and there. Finally his straining hand reached mine and he scrambled up the chain of men to the comparative dryness of the upper deck.
Comparative dryness only. As the second man gripped my outstretched wrist with spasmodic fingers, the Negro mess boy next above me in the chain yelled and violently swung us both to one side off the ladder. I turned my head just in time to catch a smother of down-rushing water and to see a sixfoot mess bench whiz end-on past my head. I have an idea that black boy saved me some broken bones.
Then for a while we clung, each to his anchoring stanchion, and wondered what it was all about. I kept saying over and over to myself, ‘But there’s no wind! But there’s no sign of a storm! ’
A white-faced boy less than thirty days in the navy had been working with the rest, silently and well. He now seized his opportunity, when the others could not hear, to ask in a low voice, ‘Have we got a chance, sir?’ I knew that the Memphis lay too deep in the water to float close to the shelving shore. I knew that the pounding had badly crushed the bottom. I had seen how that yelling, maniac sea had blotted out boats and swimmers. But I could not bring myself to tell the boy what seemed inevitable to me. Through my head the singsong was running, ‘But there’s no wind! But there’s no wind!’ So I told him, ‘Son, this is something we may never have a chance to see again. It’s undoubtedly a seismic disturbance.’ And I watched the color come back into his face, and hoped that my own looked as calm.
III
Overhead, the boom and chatter of the sea were broken by the stamping of feet and a clang as a hatch cover was thrown open, letting in the light of the dying afternoon sun. Down the ladder plunged the chief master-at-arms, a kapok life jacket around his burly body and white water whipping past his thick legs. “The Captain says all up from below, sir. They’re serving out the life preservers.’
As he spoke there came the last of the long pounding. The Memphis staggered, righted, dropped on an almost even keel with a crushing sound like an egg dropped among pebbles — and moved no more. The men were already scampering up the ladder, dodging and chuckling as the downpour of water from above snatched at their knees in wide green surges. Halfway up the ladder, I had to seize both manropes as my feet were whirled from under me. This time it was no cascade, but a solid green mass, filling the wide hatch from coaming to coaming. It lay on my head like a crushing weight, and its rush tugged as if it would tear my arms from their sockets. Solid green, it shut out the sunlight. ‘She’s gone down!’ I thought; but still my fingers clung. Suddenly, with a roar, the water was below me; and I managed to scramble out on to the boat deck before the next great wave came aboard.
Out in the air, we blinked in amazement. The ship had been two miles from the rocky shore when that first incredible sea came in. Nowhere within a mile and a half of the beach was there water enough to float the Memphis. Shoal spots — one with barely four feet of water — abounded. Yet, as we looked shoreward across the deck, we stared into the faces of hundreds of people who shouted and waved their arms, trying to be heard against the screaming surf. Each pounding crash as we hit bottom had been a step toward shore. Broadside on, dragging a sixteen-thousand-pound anchor, the Memphis had stumbled that two miles, hopping the shoals and coral heads, grinding over the ledges; and at last she rested snugly across the mouth of a shallow cove bitten into a black, waterworn cliff. She had come right into the city, and all the city was there to meet her. Hardly one hundred feet separated us from the crowd on the cliff edge.
They were hoisting wounded men out of the firerooms through a ventilator as I reached the deck. I learned then that the first crashing blow on the bottom had jarred loose the steam lines, sending scalding steam whistling through the engine and fire rooms. Then solid water had dashed down the funnels as the ship rolled into the face of some following wave, and several boilers had burst. Two officers and eleven men, ten of whom later died, had been caught in the steam and cruelly scalded. They could not be brought up the usual ladders — for one reason, slimy black rocks were now jutting up four feet into the engine room and the lower ladders were broken. So the sound men had clambered up the ventilator shaft, and were now hoisting out coaling bags, a moaning, semiconscious man in each. Blood oozed slowly from cracks in their black-charred faces and arms.
An ensign had seized a sounding line and was whirling the heavy lead in circles around his head. With a warning shout to the milling, hysterical crowd on the beach, he let it fly toward the shore. As the snaky line writhed over the rocks a dozen men seized it. By the time the scalded men were up from below, a heavy hawser had been passed ashore and a breeches buoy rigged. One at a time, the wounded men were sent sliding down this swaying bridge, each in his coaling bag hung on a snatch block. The controlling line by which the swiftness of the slide was checked broke with one of them. Two black men on the beach threw themselves under the hurtling bag, forming a battered living cushion between the wounded man and the knife-edged rocks.
Then the sick went ashore. Eventually there were five lines to the beach; and after the last sick man was safely over the side the abandoning of the ship went on apace. On the bridge, Captain Beach was pacing slowly back and forth, his demeanor as cool as if he were waiting for his carriage at the door of a theatre. With a little smile on his face, he gave low-voiced orders and advice, chatted with the navigator, and joked with the men. His coolness was magnificent; and he planned the landing of the nine hundred and eighty men of his crew in the same detached way in which he conducted a routine drill. In orderly queues men fell in by each sagging line to the shore, and each line had its appointed crew of handlers, one to the block with its dangling ‘bos’n’s chair,’ two to the uphaul. The petty officers in charge soon began to make a game of it, as bluejackets will. A water tender on the line from the wing of the bridge began with the high shrill yelp of a side-show barker. ‘One more couple wanted!’ he cried. ‘A ride like this is ten cents at Coney Island!’
The coxswain at the break of the superstructure took up the refrain. ‘One more couple wanted! Don’t crowd, don’t push; free rides for one and all! Ladies’ cloakroom to the right, gents’ in the back of the hall! One more couple wanted!’
In the lee of the engine-room hatch, one negligent arm hooked through the canopy cover and a useless, drenched blanket across his mighty shoulders, towered the electrical gunner. Foursquare he stood, his back to the seas that swept over the ship at half-minute intervals. His shoulders and head split the rushing water like a rock in a freshet. Kept dry, deep in the palm of one huge hand, his corncob pipe was burning. As I stopped in his lee to let a wave go by, he gave me a pull on the pipe, and never did tobacco smoke taste sweeter.
‘I was in the New Hampshire’s liberty boat when she overset in North River,’ he drawled, grinning, ‘and I lost my best clothes. I was in the E4, and lost all my kit. And I was in the Annapolis when she tried to knock a rock out of the ocean down Samoa way. That claim for clothes is n’t settled yet, and here’s this darn thing! Next time I’m ordered to sea I’ll file an inventory of my clothes and gear with the Bureau of Supplies and Accounts, with instructions to consider it a claim for lost property when my ship sinks!’
The men were fairly scampering off the ship now, ten or twelve a minute sliding down the lines to be caught in the arms of the crowd on the rocks. As they landed, the people — and we were technically at war with these people, please remember — would swarm around them with blankets and rum or hot coffee. As the blankets gave out, hysterical women would tear off their petticoats to wrap around the shoulders of the shivering bluejackets. And how they shivered! The water that, surged over us was almost hot, and was greasy with a stinking gray slime; but when the water subsided, the air that struck our wet tired bodies cut through with a chill like a raw March day. Still there was no wind, or the cold might have numbed us as we waited our turn at the swaying lines.
IV
It was apparent now that our safe arrival on shore was assured, provided the ship held together long enough. Nine hundred men on shore require housing and food; and they would look to the paymaster to provide it. Housing and food on shore require money, and the money was down below.
The junior surgeon had a flashlight in his hand; and together we plunged below between waves. My room was two decks down; but after a little blundering we found an open hatch and reached the safe. The surgeon, over his knees in black water, held the light while I opened the combination.
The government had provided me with a handbag for transporting government money, a huge black thing with a steel frame. Empty, it would drag down a fair swimmer. I decided that ‘monkeying’ a swaying line nearly a hundred feet, over crashing surf, carrying that bag, was a job for a better man than I.
There were safety pins in my mending kit, which I found, miraculously, where I remembered seeing it last. I fastened a row of them around my waist, pinning my shirt to underclothing. Then between shirt and undershirt I packed the bundles of money. My pistol belt clamped snug around my waist held them in place, and my tightly buttoned blouse over all made all secure. ‘Now,’ I told the doctor as I pulled on a padded life jacket, ‘I guess I’m ready to go.'
I could not understand why the doctor laughed as we groped our way out again. Then, as I mounted the bridge ladder, I found it strangely narrow. As I reported to the Captain that the ship’s money was ready, he too burst into a shout of laughter. I looked myself over for the first time. Figure to yourself a rather small but stocky individual, who would normally look plump in a life jacket. Then, in your mind’s eye, stow fifty-six thousand dollars in ordinary-sized bills about his middle, and you will have an idea of the figure of fun I presented.
Next day Captain Beach found time to write me a pseudo-official letter, as follows: —
SIR: —
When next serving under my command and in the process of carrying out your duties in the salvaging of government funds in event of shipwreck, you will attach to your person one eighty-pound boat anchor with adequate chain, and one buoy with thirty fathoms of line.
These instructions are to enable your shipmates to recover your remains in order to render due military honors — and for other reasons.
E. L. BEACH
Captain, U. S. Navy, Commanding
The crowds of drenched, chattering men on the boat deck were thinning rapidly by now. The Captain’s laugh sank to a chuckle and then to his customary smile. ‘ Your turn now, Paymaster,’ he said. ‘Take your bales of filthy lucre and go ashore. You can buy our dinner to-night.’
It was a tight fit to crowd my laden carcass into the loop; but a hundred ready hands jerked me out of it as my feet scraped the rocks. By the time the money was safely stowed in the safe of the marine quartermaster on shore and I had run back to the beach, the biggest cigar I could find in my mouth, the crowds were cheering. Two slings, laden with men, were sliding toward the shore. From the first landed the navigator, Lieutenant Withers, and the chief electrician. In the last load came Quartermaster Rose and Captain Beach. Not a man had been lost in the process of reaching the shore over the surf.
Ten of the engineer’s force died of their burns. Twenty-nine men were lost in the boats that were in the water when the raging hell broke loose. Two were lost overboard at some time during the terrible two-mile journey to the beach; and one mess boy, in need of a stimulant, mistook the labels on the shelves of a small Dominican shop just after he landed, and swallowed a killing dose of hair tonic. But where the risk of injury and death was greatest, there was Captain Beach, with his quiet, forceful voice, his twinkling smile, and his seaman’s resourcefulness. He saved his crew.
And still there was no wind. The savants have decided that there was a hurricane offshore that sucked the sea off the eight-fathom ledge before hurling it back. It was on the hypothesis of a hurricane that the Court of Inquiry proceeded; and the letters written the surviving officers by the Navy Department contained the phrase, ‘while your ship was being destroyed by a hurricane.’
But you cannot convince a Memphis man that there was a hurricane. The roaring water was hot and stank with the ooze of long-buried sea bottom. We believe that my haphazard reply to the apprentice boy may have been right. We believe that it was a seismic disturbance — and from a ‘chance to see it again,’ good Lord, deliver us!