Czytaj książkę: «Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 686»

DERELICTS

Has the idea ever occurred to any one that at all times there are ships of one kind or other floating about at sea without a living creature on board? They have been abandoned by their officers and crew in what seemed a hopeless condition. Some are dismantled and mere hulks. Some are swimming keel upwards. Some are water-logged, but being laden with timber will not sink. There they are driving hither and thither on the ocean, as wind and waves direct, a dread to the mariner, who may unawares come against them in the dark. We remember seeing an account of one of these derelicts, as they are called, being fallen in with after having been abandoned for weeks. It was water-logged up to the very deck, and sitting on a scrap of the exposed bulwarks was a poor cat, still alive, in the last degree of attenuation. We have often with commiseration thought of that accidentally deserted cat, its hunger, its misery, its hopelessness night and day in the midst of the dreary and spacious ocean. How the creature must have been delighted when rescued from its floating prison! Occasionally derelicts are taken in tow and brought into port, where they are broken up, or if of any value, are reclaimed by owners, to whom they are delivered on a payment of 'salvage.'

We are going to speak of a kind of derelicts out of ordinary experience.

On the 17th of September 1855, while sailing in the American whaler George Henry, in Davis's Strait, and when about forty miles from Cape Mercy, Captain Buddington descried a vessel having something peculiar in her appearance. No signals were hoisted, none answered, and no crew visible when he approached. Going on board, he found no living being in the ship; but in the best cabin were documents declaring the abandonment of the ship, and explaining the circumstances under which it had taken place. The wastrel, the treasure-trove, the lost-found, was the famous Resolute, whose story we shall tell presently.

Jurists and legislators have had to determine the ownership of property that seems for the time to belong to no one. Derelict is the lawyers' name for such property, so far at anyrate as regards abandoned ships. Where a crew merely quit their ship to obtain assistance, or for any other temporary purpose, it is not derelict: they intend to return; but when the master and crew abandon her without hope of recovery, she becomes ownerless for a time, and then falls to the lot of the finder. Not necessarily to keep, however, but, as has been said, to hold as a claim for salvage from the crown, the owners, or the under-writers. If the solitary ship is found near any coast, there is generally some claim put forth by the owner of the sea-shore, whether the owner be government or a private individual; but when out in the open sea, far distant from land, international maritime law may have to settle the matter. In practice, however, very little of this takes place; a ship really abandoned out in mid-ocean is seldom worth the expense of repair; the finders and salvors regard it chiefly in the light of saleable old materials; and the derelict, if it be taken in tow or otherwise navigated to port by its discoverers, usually finds its way into the hands of the ship-breaker.

A curious inquiry it would be, How many abandoned ships are at this moment locked up in densely packed ice? No great difficulty will be felt in understanding that derelicts have a peculiar history in the Arctic regions. When a ship is left forlorn in any sea or ocean, the probability is that fire or leakage has rendered the abandonment necessary as the only chance of escape for passengers and crew. Or it may be that the ship has been cast upon some coast or outlying rock, and so become tenantless. In the intricate channels of the frozen regions, on the contrary, a ship may be in a sound condition, but so hopelessly hemmed in on all sides with huge floes and fields of ice, that the crew would have exhausted all their food and necessaries of life before liberation comes; they quit the luckless vessel, and wend their way by sledge or by boat to regions of civilisation.

Many of the illustrative instances of this kind of derelict are exceedingly interesting. In 1821 Lieutenants Parry and Lyon, in the Fury and Hecla, encountered such terrible difficulties that the first-named ship was nipped and then wrecked; the crew fortunately were able to reach the Hecla, which after a time returned home with a double company of officers and men. The Fury was derelict, but not the stores, as we shall presently see. In 1829 Captains John and James Ross started on the expedition which was destined to last till 1833. What they suffered during four successive winters, their narrative told in moving terms. They lost their ship, and would in all probability have perished from starvation, had it not been that they were able to reach Fury Beach, and there avail themselves of the provisions which the wrecked Fury had on board. This ship, as well as that which had been under the Rosses, probably fell to pieces by degrees, in a grave of ice or water or both.

Poor Sir John Franklin's fate will always be bound up in our recollection with that of the Erebus and Terror. It is pretty generally known to our readers that those two ships left England in 1845, under Captains Crozier and Fitzjames, with Franklin in supreme command over both; that they wintered near the south-east entrance of Wellington Channel; and that when the summer heat of 1846 had sufficiently melted the ice, they proceeded south through Regent Inlet to the west side of King William Land. They were hopelessly and helplessly iced in for the remainder of that year, all through 1847, and on into 1848. Poor Franklin succumbed to illness, anxiety, cold, and disease, and died on the 11th of June 1847. Seeing no hope of extricating the ships, and worn down by every kind of privation, Crozier and Fitzjames abandoned the Erebus and Terror on the 26th of April 1848, accompanied by the remainder of both crews – numbering in all somewhat over one hundred souls. How many of them reached King William Land and Montreal Island, in sledges or on foot, we shall probably never know; but certain it is that not one of the hapless men was ever again seen by Europeans; whether any of the Eskimo met them or saw them, is doubtful. There were the two deserted ships, left to fate to decide whether they would ever again be liberated from their icy home, and enabled to render useful service. Rumours were communicated in later years by the Eskimo to some whaling crews that two ships had been iced up for several winters: supposed to have been the Erebus and Terror.

In 185 °Captain M'Clure commenced the famous voyage which, though it led to the abandonment of the good ship Investigator, enabled him to be the first commander who really effected the North-west Passage. (Whether he was the first to discover it, is a question on which much controversy has arisen.) Sailing down the Atlantic to Cape Horn, up the Pacific to Behring's Strait, and through the Frozen Sea to Banks Land, he there passed three frightfully severe winters, from the autumn of 1850 to the spring of 1853. There he quitted his trusty but ice-bound ship; and there, so far as human testimony goes, the Investigator still is, in Mercy Bay. In imminent peril of starvation, M'Clure and his gallant crew were compelled to this abandonment; they sledged over the ice to Melville Island, where fortunately they met with another expedition, and safety was insured. This other expedition, the most remarkable of all for derelict, comes next for notice.

Sir Edward Belcher, at a time when the public anxiety about the unknown fate of Franklin was most intense, was in 1852 placed in command of an expedition more complete than any that had been previously despatched to those regions. It comprised the Resolute under Captain Kellett, the Intrepid under Captain M'Clintock, the Pioneer under Captain Sherard Osborn, the Assistance under Belcher himself, and two or three auxiliary vessels. We have not here to tell how it arose that the ships made few or no discoveries, and disappointed the government in more ways than one. The sledgings, however, were splendid; and it was a joy to all that the expedition brought M'Clure and his crew safely back to their native land. Never were officers more deeply disappointed than when Belcher commanded them, one after another, to abandon their ships in 1854. He had been out two winters; some of the ships had been long ice-bound; and the sense he entertained of his responsibility impelled him to adopt a step which certainly could not have been adopted willingly. He ordered Kellett to abandon the immovable Resolute, M'Clintock the Intrepid, and Sherard Osborn the Pioneer; he himself abandoned the Assistance; and the officers and crews of all four ships obtained a passage to England in such other vessels as happened to be available in the autumn of 1854. Not only so, but they also brought with them M'Clure and the crew of the Investigator (as denoted in the last paragraph). Out of these five abandoned ships four have never, so far as we are aware, been since seen by Europeans. They may perchance be iced up still, or have fallen to pieces by repeated shocks from masses of ice loosened during the brief summers. One at Mercy Bay in Banks Land, two on the shores of Melville Island, two in Wellington Channel – such were the localities of the derelicts. Perhaps some future explorers will tell us something of four of these brave old weather-beaten craft, of which, for more than twenty years, we have known nothing.

Not so concerning the fifth. And here we are brought to the deeply interesting episode of derelict briefly indicated at the beginning of this paper. Judging from such facts as appear reliable, it is probable that the ice around the Resolute loosened somewhat during the autumn of 1854; that she was drifted slowly by the current until another winter nipped her, and held her ice-bound at some point nearer the entrance to Baffin's Bay; that she was again loosened in the summer of 1855, and drifted leisurely down Davis's Strait to the point where Captain Buddington espied the wanderer. Two facts are certainly known: that the distance drifted could not have been less than a thousand miles, from Melville Island through Barrow Strait, Lancaster Sound, and Baffin's Bay to Davis's Strait; and that four hundred and seventy-four days elapsed between the abandonment and the recovery. The tough old ship was still sound; a little water had entered the hold, and a few perishable articles had decayed, but in other respects the Resolute appeared not much the worse for her strange voyage.

When the English government heard of this remarkable recovery of the old weather-beaten craft, they at once waived any right or claim they may have had to it, and surrendered it to Captain Buddington and his crew as the salvors. After nearly a year had elapsed since the recovery, an Act of Congress was passed, empowering the United States government to expend forty thousand dollars (about eight thousand pounds) in the purchase of the ship and its trappings from the fortunate finders, and the presentation of it to England as a graceful act on the part of the Great Republic. The plan was excellently carried into effect. In one of the American navy yards the Resolute was thoroughly overhauled, the defects repaired, all the equipments and stores replaced – even the officers' books, pictures, and miscellaneous articles returned exactly to the places they had occupied in the cabins. Captain Hartstein, of the United States navy, was commissioned to bring the ship to England. He arrived near Cowes shortly before the close of the year 1856; the Queen, the Prince Consort, and other members of the royal family went on board and inspected the old Resolute. The royal visitors having taken their departure, the vessel was towed into Portsmouth harbour amid much gay ceremonial, and was handed over to the authorities of the dockyard. Early in 1857 Captain Hartstein and his companions returned to America. It is mortifying to have to read that, owing to some niggardliness at the Admiralty, or perhaps more correctly that want of sentiment in English officials, we gave a shabby return for a graceful act. The Resolute should have been maintained as a memento of a most remarkable episode, even if not actually employed in further service; instead of this, the ship was dismantled and converted into a mere hulk! Another derelict was the Advance. This vessel, provided by the munificence of an American merchant, Mr Grinnell, was placed under the command of Dr Kane, and sent northward in 1853 to search for Franklin. Kane made an historically famous progress up Smith Sound to such a latitude as to bring that route into favour among Arctic explorers. The return journey was, however, a terrible one. After two winterings in the ice he abandoned his poor ship in April 1855, and made a three months' sledge-journey to the Danish settlements in Greenland. Has the Advance ever been seen by later explorers; has it been iced up for twenty-two years; or have shocks and nippings shattered it to fragments?

The Polaris, connected with an American expedition, was abandoned in October 1872, and the officers and crew returned to the United States by boats. Storms, driftings, and other calamities led to a division of the crew into two parties. One worked their way down Davis's Strait, or were drifted thither, and were picked up in April 1873 by the Tigress, off the coast of Labrador; the others, making boats out of some of the timbers of the Polaris, managed to reach the eastern side of Baffin's Bay, where they were picked up by the Ravenscraig whaler in the autumn of the same year. The poor Polaris scarcely deserved the name of a derelict; for only portions of a hull were left stranded on a coast of the icy sea.

One more example, and this also from the Arctic regions. In 1872 the Austrians did excellent work in furtherance of maritime research by fitting out a private expedition in the small ship Tegetthoff, under the management of Lieutenants Weyprecht and Payer. Instead of taking the Baffin's Bay and Smith Sound route, the Tegetthoff coasted round Norway to Nova Zembla, and wintered off that island. Instead of being free to sail in the following summer, the ship was fast locked in an ice-floe from which she could not be extricated, and drifted when the floe drifted. Luckily the drift was just in the direction which the explorers wished to go, almost due north. They came most unexpectedly to a group of islands until then totally unknown, the largest of which they named Franz Josef Land, in honour of the Emperor of Austria. They wintered in the high latitude of eighty-one degrees north, and made excellent sledge-expeditions in the spring of 1874, an account of which, together with other interesting details, was given last month in this Journal. Returning to the Tegetthoff, they found her still immovably fixed in the ice. A prospect of exhausted stores and provisions led to a resolution to abandon the ship; this was done in the summer; and a boat-voyage of three months brought the hardy adventurers to the mainland in the autumn of the same year. We cannot help fancying that the abandoned ship will one day fall into friendly hands; and if it does, the salvors will find many interesting things on board; for the crew brought away as little as possible with them, in order not to overload the boats. Meanwhile the Tegetthoff is 'waiting till called for.'