The Sea Hunters Part 2

Hemstead. Your boys can shovel on the coal."

"As you wish, captain," the chief engineer replied loudly over the tube.

Smoke spewed out her tall stack, thickened and mushroomed. A white bone grew and arched up around the bows as the Lexington leapt forward.

The water beneath her huge paddle wheels seethed and boiled.

To Manchester, she was like an unleashed greyhound. He never failed to be stirred when the big engine flexed its muscle and hurled the hull across the water as fast as if not faster than any other boat ever built.

He checked the thermometer again. Already the pointer hovered at zero.

Not a good night to stand outside, he thought. He glanced down at the water skimming past the hull, spreading into the wake, and couldn't imagine the horror of finding himself immersed in it this night.

Most captains of the pa.s.senger boats plying the Sound were not comfortable mingling with the pa.s.sengers and remained aloof in the wheelhouse or their cabins during most of the trip. But George Child was a warm and friendly man. He felt it was his duty to show courtesy to his pa.s.sengers and rea.s.sure any, and there were a fair number, who were fearful of traveling on a steamboat.

As Child stepped into the main cabin fifteen minutes before the call to dinner was announced, he looked over the pa.s.sengers, who were seated in groups, conversing sociably around the stoves. Job Sand, the tall, distinguished headwaiter, moved around the cabin serving refreshments.

Although Sand was white, the other five waiters, the kitchen help, Joseph Robinson, the boat's esteemed chef, and Susan Holcomb, chambermaid, were all black.

Without checking the boarding list, Child guessed there were approximately 115 pa.s.sengers who had paid the $1 fare, meals extra.

Deck pa.s.sage was 50 cents, but there were no takers tonight.

Counting his crew of 34, there were almost 150 men, women, and children on board the Lexington for the run to Stonington. It was as though the boat held a miniature city.

Several card players were seated at the tables, quiedy engrossed in their game- TWo well-known Boston comedy actors, Charles Eberle and Henry J. Finn, kept the conversation lively as the cards were dealt.

Never ones to ignore an audience, they had generously offered to act out a scene from their new play after the pa.s.sengers had dined.

Peter McKenna, a businessman from New York, won the first pot.

Mothers and fathers gathered on the sofas and entertained their young children with stories and toys purchased in the city. Mrs.

Russell Jarvis, described as a woman of uncommon beauty, kept her two lively daughters occupied by counting beams from the lighthouses rising around the danger points of the Sound. James Bates scanned a newspaper while his wife read aloud from a book of poetry to their young boy and girl. Parents with two children seemed to be the rule on board the Lexington this Monday. William Townsend was giving his wife a hollday by taking their two girls on a trip to Boston.

On a more somber note, the funeral party of Harrison Winslow were sitting quietly off to one side of the cabin by themselves. His widow, Alice Winslow; her father-in-law, William Winslow; and Harrison's brother, John Winslow, were accompanying the body, stowed in its coffin with the other cargo belowdecks, for burial in Providence. On the opposite end of the cabin, Mary Russell giggled happily with Lydia Bates, a young woman her age. Mary had been married the day before in New York, and was returning to her home without her new husband to break the news to her parents.

A party of merchants stood around the stoves discussing business and debating politics. Banker Robert Blake politely disagreed with business proprietors Abram Howard, William Green, and Samuel Henry over the New York bank's tightening of interest rates. John Leniist, treasurer of the Boston Leather Company, had nothing good to say about the bankers, who had recently charged his firm a high rate of interest on a loan to increase inventory.

The lounge was heavily attended this trip by sea captains, who had made port after months at sea and were traveling to their own firesides and their cherished loved ones. Captains J. D. Carver, Chester Hillard, E. J. Kimball, David McFarland, John Mattison, Theophilas Smith, and Benjamin Foster, who was returning from a three-year voyage to India, took turns swapping sea tales with each other.

Other notable pa.s.sengers included Dr. Charles Follen, a respected professor of German literature at Harvard College, and Adolphus Hamden, of Hamden's Express, who was transporting $20,000 in silver coin and $50,000 in bank notes for the Merchants Bank.

Dinner was served at 6 P.m. by Job Sand and his staff of waiters.

Chef Joseph Robinson and his a.s.sistant cooks, Oliver Howell and Robert Peters, offered pa.s.sengers a choice between mutton with boiled tomatoes and baked flounder in a wine sauce with rice.

Amid the clink of gla.s.ses and the soft murmur of voices engaged in small talk, none of the 115 souls a.s.sembled around the dining tables could have known that, except for one man seated among them, this would be their last meal on earth.

Shortly after 7:30, the first mate, Edwin Furber, came to the wheelhouse door and alerted Captain Manchester that the boat was on fire. Manchester immediately stepped outside and stared aft. Flames were coming through the promenade deck around the smokestack casing.

He scanned the darkened sh.o.r.eline and took a quick bearing. The boat was well past the beacon at Eatons Neck Point and approaching the lighthouse on Old Field Point, both on the Long Island side of the Sound.

The lights of Bridgeport to the north appeared further away. He immediately took the helm from steersman Johnson and swung the wheel hard-a-starboard in a vain effort to Turn the boat and beach her on Long Island.

Seemingly out of nowhere, Captain Child rushed into the wheelhouse.

"We've a fire on board!" he shouted. "Set a course for the nearest land!"

"I'm bringing her about now," Manchester answered, "but the wheel is not answering the helm."

Together, the three men gripped the spokes and applied their strength in an effort to steer the boat toward safety four miles and twenty minutes away. Suddenly, the wheel spun out of their hands.

"She's not responding," Johnson muttered in dazed bewilderment.

"The fire must have burned through the port steering rope below the wheelhouse," said Child.

Now out of control, with the engines still turning, the Lexington began helplessly running in wide circles. Child leaned out the door and gazed toward the stern. The beautiful boat, once the pride of the Vanderbilts, was vomiting fire and smoke from her entire Midsection.

He realized with sickening certainty that his boat and everyone on it was lost.

Leaving Child and Johnson, Manchester ran outside and called to the deckhands to operate the fire engine and break out the water buckets.

The deckhands appeared frightened and confused. They attempted to put the fire engine into operation but they couldn't seem to find the buckets. At that moment smoke poured into the wheelhouse. Child and steersman Johnson were forced out on the deck, choking and coughing from the deadly fumes.

Second Mate David Crowley rushed to the center of the boat and found flames leaping from several bales of cotton. At that point, the fire had yet to spread to the boat's woodwork. He organized the deckhands and the dining-saloon waiters into a bucket brigade and began throwing water on the growing holocaust. Short on buckets, they spilled the Merchants Bank's silver coins from their wooden crates onto the deck and hurriedly began filling the boxes with water and pa.s.sing them on to the men nearest the flames. Their efforts made no headway as the flames spread with incredible speed. If cool heads had prevailed early on, the fire might have been contained. Now it became a moment born in h.e.l.l.

Any hope of saving the boat had evaporated.

The blaze quickly forced Chief Engineer Courtland Hemstead and his men from the engine room before they were able to shut down the engines. Immune to the fire, the big steam cylinder kept the paddle wheels turning, making it impossible to launch the boats.

The Lexington surged on through the dark waters as if driven by some unearthly force.

The strength of the flames soon overwhelmed the firefighters.

They retreated past the towering walking beam to the paddle-wheel guards.

Since it was too late to make their escape, the crew on the forecastle deck were trapped by a wall of fire reaching up to the top of the smokestack.

To Captain Chester Hillard, who helped strip away the canvas covering the lifeboats, "The Lexington is a gone case."

Crowley stood by Captain Child and asked, "Sir, what is to be done?"

Child looked around at the fear etched on the pa.s.sengers' faces and calmly replied, "Gentlemen, take to the boats." Then he walked aft to direct the launching of the lifeboats.

l' Twenty minutes before there were informal pleasantry and relaxed gaiety in the main cabin. Now the entire scene was one of horror.

Utter confusion and terror swept the pa.s.sengers. Calm gave way to the inevitable contagion of panic. As one, they made a frantic rush for the lifeboats, brushed aside the crew, who were attempting to ready them for launching, and took possession. Caught up in mindless panic, the pa.s.sengers flooded into the boats as if they were lemmings; overwhelmed by ma.s.s frenzy, they unknowingly destroyed themselves.

Dangerously overfilling the boats, the pa.s.sengers dropped them into the black water that was still swirling past, agitated by the thras.h.i.+ng paddle wheels. The boats, along with their helpless occupants, were immediately swamped and swept into the night.

The remaining pa.s.sengers were left to fend for themselves, and none of them knew which way to Turn. Few jumped into the water.

Drowning was nearly as unthinkable as being incinerated. During the early nineteenth century, fewer than ten people out of a hundred knew how to swim. In any event they would have expired within minutes from hypothermia in the frigid water.

Captain Hillard rounded up a few deckhands and a small band of pa.s.sengers, and directed them to throw overboard any cotton bales that had not caught fire. After a dozen were heaved over the side, Hillard and stoker Benjamin c.o.x climbed down and positioned themselves astride a bale, each facing the other. Their combined weight settled the cotton bale until only one-third of it was above the surface of the water.

The wind was fresh and the cur-rent carried them away from the boat at a speed of a knot and a half As Millard drifted around the stern, he noticed a lady, whom he took to be Mrs. Jarvis, shouting frantically over the railing. Somehow, one of her children had fallen overboard.

The men pa.s.sed the child so closely Hillard could reach out his hand and touch the little body. From its dress and long hair streaming in the water, Hillard could see it was a female. He also saw that she was already dead. Mrs. Jarvis beseeched him to pull her daughter from the icy water, but he was more concerned with saving his own life. This was a time when self-preservation prevailed before the cry of "Women and children first" became a worthy tradition of the sea.

Hillard turned away from the heart-rending scene, pulled out his watch, and calmly noted the time by the light of the fire. It was just 8 P.m.

The Lexington would take a long time to die.

An immense, billowing cloud of black smoke reached hundreds of feet into the sky, blocking out the stars. The main deck had fallen in, and the only parts of the boat the flames had yet to devour were the stern and bows forward of the capstan. Ten people still stood on the stern while thirty more milled around the forecastle, including Manchester.

"Shouldn't we jump or something?" a dazed Adolphus Hamden asked Captain Manchester.

"To do so would be to perish," replied Manchester.

"We can't just stand here and be burned to death." "Every man for himself," Manchester said solemnly.

He turned away and lowered himself over the side onto a raft of debris. There were two or three other men on it already, and his added weight sank it under the water. He grabbed a piece of the railing that was under water and used it to pull himself onto a bale of cotton that was floating nearby. He found that pa.s.senger Peter McKenna had climbed aboard the bale first. Hamden, still on the forecastle, shouted to Manchester.

"Is there room for another?"

Before Manchester could answer, Hamden jumped, knocking McKenna off the bale and falling in the water with him. Ignoring Hamden, Manchester hauled McKenna back on the bale. Then he found a length of board that was floating past and began paddling away from the blazing boat. As had Captain Hillard earlier when abandoning the boat, he checked his watch. It was just midnight.

Lexington had burned for four hours.

Second Mate Crowley also reached a cotton bale empty of life. He Pulled himself aboard, and with surprising presence of mind stuffed his clothing full of cotton to ward off the frigid night air. He was luckier than the others who had reached the temporary safety of the cotton bales. Without the added weight of a second body, he was able to lie the full length of the bale without immersing his legs and feet.

Drifting with the current, he could do little but fight to keep warm and identify the different points of land as he floated past.

The most harrowing escape from the inferno was by stoker Charles Smith. He had just fallen asleep between s.h.i.+fts of firing the boilers when he was awakened by a friend, who informed him there was a fire.

He quickly rushed to the engine room, attached the fire hose to the water and opened the valve. But he was unable to reach the end of the hose to spray water on the blaze. The smoke and flames drove him aft, where he intended to board one of the lifeboats. He found Captain Child standing by the davits that swung out the starboard lifeboat, and heard him shouting for Chief Engineer Courtland Hemstead.

In less than a minute, Hemstead appeared, his eyebrows and much of his hair singed away. "You wanted me, captain?"

"For G.o.d's sake, stop the engine," Child implored. "We can't launch the boats while we're underway."

Hemstead shook his head wearily. "The fire drove us from the engine room before I could shut down the pressure valves. There's no going back in the inferno. I'm sorry."

Child nodded. "You did your best. Take your engine-room crew and see what you can do to hold back the flames for as long as it takes to get everyone safely off the boat."

Hemstead vanished in the smoke while Child stepped over the rail and tried to steady the lifeboat as it was lowered with a full load of frightened pa.s.sengers. At that instant, someone cut the stern line and the boat swung outward, its bow plunging under the turbulence from the rotating paddle wheels. Child fell into the boat. Pa.s.sengers, Captain Child, and the half-sunken boat drifted away and disappeared into the night, joining the dead bodies already floating in the wake of the Lexington.

Soon after, the engine finally stopped and the boat began to drift.

By waiting another few minutes the doomed pa.s.sengers in the swamped boats might have been saved. Only four souls would survive.

Smith climbed over the stern railings, kicked in three cabin windows, and using the sills as footholds, lowered himself on top of the rudder.

After half an hour, . a young boy climbed down beside him. Smith looked into the face white with fear. He pointed to a cotton bale floating nearby.

"If you want to save your skin, son, you'd better get yourself on that bale."

"I... I can't swim," the boy stammered.

"Hang on. I'll bring it closer."

Smith slipped into the freezing water, swam over to the bale, and got on top of it. Using his hands, he tried to paddle the bale close enough to the stern for the boy to jump aboard, but he could not make enough headway to reach the boat. At last, he regained the burning steamboat, and unthinkingly climbed back on board. This time, he found himself amids.h.i.+ps, near the starboard paddle wheel. There he found a dozen people still hanging onto different sections of the smoldering remains.

The flames had decreased to where the a.s.sengers were able to cling to p the side by standing on the chines, an extended rib of the hull made of solid timber running fore and aft to keep the boat from rolling.

Smith found himself clinging next to Engineer Hemstead; Job Sand, the headwaiter; Harry Reed, a deckhand; and another stoker, George Baum.

All around the burned hulk they could see the sea filled with a blanket of debris, ashes, and dead bodies of all ages. Smith clenched his jaws as he stared at the appalling reality of the tragedy. He choked off the bile rising in his throat and looked down at the water below his feet that waited patiently to engulf them.

At three o'clock, seven hours after the fire was discovered, the smoldering remains of the steamboat slipped beneath the cold waters of the Sound, accompanied by a great hissing sound as the cold water surged through the cremated interior of the hull. Steam mingled with smoke to create a pall that was slowly carried away by wind, and soon the flotsam drifted away, leaving the grave of the Lexington shrouded and unmarked by a merciless sea.

As the hull sank from under them, Smith, along with four othersHarry Reed; George Baum; the actor and comedian Henry Finn; and the boy who had taken Smith's place on the rudder-struggled onto a large piece of the paddle-wheel guard that had ripped away and bobbed to the surface after the s.h.i.+p sank. Like Manchester and Hillard before him, Smith also did his best to keep the others alive on the paddlewheel guard.

He shook and ma.s.saged them, and tried to force them to exercise, but overcome by the cold, the living had reached the limit of their endurance. They died one by one and rolled into the water.

Smith, a tough drinker and brawler when ash.o.r.e, stared at the devil and shook his fist.

The unnatural glare of the fire across the dark water was seen from the Long Island and Connecticut sh.o.r.es. The flames shot up in huge columns, lighting the water for miles around.

William Sidney Mount, an artist of some renown for his paintings of Long Island country settings, witnessed the calamity and described how local mariners struggled to sail through pack ice clogging ports and inlets. Fishermen, thinking they might rescue victims while the steamboat was only two miles away, set out from their harbor in the bitter cold. But just when they thought they were within hailing distance of the flaming wreck, the winds and the tides s.h.i.+fted, sweeping the Lexington back into the middle of the Sound. Defeated by the whims of nature, the intrepid fishermen had no choice but to return home, the water being too rough for them to venture into the Sound.

Captain William Tiffell, of the sloop Improvement, sighted the burning pyre, but failed to offer a.s.sistance, claiming that he thought the steamer had her boats, and he was afraid that if he stopped he would lose the tide coming into the harbor. Like Captain Stanley Lord of the California seventy-two years later, who was accused of standing by while the t.i.tanic sank, Terrell was denounced as a cruel and heartless man. Because of his alleged indifference to the suffering of the pa.s.sengers on the Lexington, he came within an inch of having his master's papers revoked. But later studies showed that he was a good twelve miles distant and facing a contrary wind. Investigators considered it doubtful that he could have reached the stricken vessel in time to save its ill-fated pa.s.sengers had he tried.

Discovering the steamer on fire, Captain Oliver Meeker of the sloop Merchant tried to sail his vessel from the pier at Southport.

But the combination of a shallow harbor and a falling tide caused the Merchant to run aground.

Captain Hillard and Benjamin c.o.x had drifted about a mile from the Lexington when she went down. A scattering of clouds strayed over the mainland and a bright moon illuminated the Sound. The night air was incredibly cold, and the men tried to keep warm by whipping their hands and arms around their bodies. They were as miserable as two humans could get. Then, as if ordained to multiply their agony, a large swell overturned their cotton bale. Plunged into the frigid water, Millard and c.o.x struggled to climb on the opposite side. Losing the paddle was a double blow. Besides employing it as a means to keep warm through exercise, they had found it useful for steering against the tide. Now the bale became uncontrollable and rolled heavily under the onslaught of the waves.

c.o.x had abandoned the boat wearing only a flannel s.h.i.+rt, loosefitting pants, boots, and a cap. An old mariner, Hillard had wisely worn his heavy woolen pea jacket. He gave c.o.x his vest, and then rubbed the pa.s.senger's arms and legs, beat him on the body, and made every attempt to keep his blood circulating.

"I want to die," c.o.x suddenly announced.

"You talk like a crazy man," said Hillard. "Do you have a wife and family'?"

c.o.x nodded drunkenly. "A fine wife and six children."