Authors: H.W. Brands
Progress continued northwest. For nine days they held the same tack. Each day the sun rose a little higher above the horizon; each night the darkness lasted longer and the aurora diminished in brilliance. The cold gradually eased. On the tenth day they sighted one of the many islands off the west coast of Chile, which brought the immensely welcome realization that they had passed Cape Horn. “So we had been floating for several days in the waters of the Pacific Ocean, which seemed to want to justify its name, for we were sailing as peacefully as possible, though nonetheless with speed.”
T
HE FRENCH CAPTAIN
of the
Courrier de Cherbourg
probably didn’t carry copies of Matthew Maury’s
Wind and Current Charts and Sailing Directions
. If he had, he would have learned what he ended up discovering on his own: that the longest way around Cape Horn was sometimes the shortest. In his days at sea, before his injury, Maury conjectured that the prevailing
winds between the Cape and Antarctica flowed in a circular, clockwise direction. His subsequent research confirmed this. In other words, whereas a ship coming from the Atlantic might meet ferocious headwinds near the Cape itself, by swinging south it could pick up winds blowing in the opposite direction.
Robert Waterman appreciated Maury’s insight, but the captain of the
Challenge
had too much riding on a record passage to San Francisco to waste time swinging south. And he was behind schedule already. The weather was partly to blame, but so also the crew—or perhaps it was the officers. First mate Douglass cudgeled crewmen for minor infractions and on general principle; some submitted silently, but others struck back. One seaman named Fred Birkenshaw, after receiving one of Douglass’s blows, took the opportunity of a diversion of the mate’s attention and grabbed him from behind. Several other crew members rushed Douglass, snatching away his heaver and pummeling him with their fists. One man produced a knife; aiming for Douglass’s throat or breast, he slashed but badly missed, merely stabbing Douglass in the leg.
Douglass screamed bloody murder, alerting Waterman for the first time to the mutiny. The captain may have realized that his life was in jeopardy too, or he may simply have responded from righteous wrath. In either case, he hurled himself from the quarterdeck into the midst of the melee. With his sextant he smashed one mutineer, a man named George Smith, who had Douglass’s neck in a death grip. With fists, feet, and rope, Waterman attacked several others. He helped free Douglass, who, with his blood spurting across the planks, went into a frenzy of retribution. Seizing a heaver again, the mate laid about like a demon. The mutineers, losing their nerve, fled for their lives.
The mutiny lasted no more than a few minutes; Waterman took longer weighing his response. Some of the central participants were readily identifiable. George Smith bore the imprint on his scalp and skull of Waterman’s sextant; the captain ordered him placed in irons. Fred Birkenshaw was identified as the leader of the insurrection, but was missing. A crew member said he had seen him dive over the side, apparently preferring death by drowning to a noose at the end of a yard.
Waterman interrogated Smith, who at first contended the violence was extemporaneous. But threats that his punishment would increase from continued lying brought forth an explanation that several of the crew had indeed been plotting for some time to murder Douglass and Waterman and take the ship to Rio de Janeiro, where they would melt into the swirling population of that busy port. Smith hastened to add that he had not been party to the plotting; he had simply overheard it.
Waterman thereupon seized several of the alleged conspirators. Under questioning they too admitted overhearing the mutiny plans; like Smith, all but one said they took no part.
Waterman disbelieved the denials of participation. He pronounced eight men guilty and ordered them flogged. Douglass carried out the sentences, with obvious relish. By the time the convicted were cut loose, they were nearly unconscious (they revived slightly when stinging salt water was thrown on their wounds), and the deck was covered with their blood and gore.
Needless to say, all this hardly endeared Waterman to his crew. Nor did he expect it to. The operative question was whether it terrified them sufficiently to do his bidding against their own will. The answer, as it emerged, was yes and no.
Between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Cape, the
Challenge
encountered generally favorable winds. The vessel skated across the waves as its designer intended, lifting Waterman’s hopes of recouping the lost time and capturing the record. For several days the good luck held, and the ship cruised smartly through the Strait of Le Maire and clear to the Cape.
But then, as if it had been lying in ambush behind the Cape, a huge storm slammed the vessel. Giant rollers—“Cape Horn snorters”—bearing the momentum of five thousand miles of open water and towering to sixty feet, raised the great clipper high, then dashed it down. The keel and braces groaned under the repeated pounding; the masts bent and shuddered and swayed before the gale like the trees they once were. Foam from the wave tops mixed with sleet and snow to turn the air a spuming white. The water roared, the wind shrieked, and the guardians of the Cape, become
demons from hell, howled derision at these mortals trespassing where mortals didn’t belong.
Waterman had trespassed before and knew how to defeat the demons. But he couldn’t do it alone. He needed men to climb the rigging, to furl or reef the sails that survived the blast, to cut away those the storm shredded. With sail the ship would survive; without sail it would perish—capsized or crashed on the rocks. At this latitude all could expect to go down with the vessel, frozen blue within minutes of hitting the water.
But to many of the men, death seemed more likely aloft. The lurching of the ship was bad enough on deck; two hundred feet of mast magnified the motion to appalling proportions. The wind, also, was more violent aloft, able to snatch a man from the footropes and cast him to the waves. Nor was the wind or the pitching the worst of the danger. The snow and spume encrusted the ropes in ice, cheating the sailors of purchase for hands and feet. The sailors too were quickly encrusted, their faces frostbitten, their fingers immobilized, the blood that oozed from cracks in the skin freezing before it coagulated. A man didn’t have to be a coward to quail at the prospect of ascending in conditions like these.
Even the kindest captain, under duress of the common danger, might have felt obliged to counter these fears with other fears—of the first mate’s wrath, for instance. Waterman was hardly the kindest captain, and he turned Douglass loose on the reluctant. The mate employed his heaver to drive the men from the forecastle to the deck, where they quickly discovered they risked being swept overboard by the waves that crashed across the bow. Between the blows of the mate and those of the ocean, most decided they were safer aloft. Up they went, as slowly and carefully as they dared. Douglass hastened their ascent by vowing to follow them up and beat them there.
Before long the reckoning of danger shifted. Furling the sails in such a tempest required coordination of the efforts of several men, coordination that would have tested the most experienced crew. The crew of the
Challenge
failed the test, horribly and repeatedly. The first man to fall was catapulted from his footrope by the billowing of an unsecured sail. He plunged
into the churning waters with a scream that momentarily paralyzed all above and below. No rescue was attempted. If the fall hadn’t killed him, the waves quickly carried him out of reach of a line; to lower a boat would simply condemn several more men to the silent below.
Even as it was, others soon joined the dead man. The same loose sail that felled him subsequently snapped two others from their perch. One hurtled overboard, joining his friend in the deep; the other plunged to his death on the deck, his crumpled body serving mute witness to the roaring danger that surrounded them all.
Shorter-handed than ever, the
Challenge
slashed, bucked, and wallowed through seas that grew larger by the minute. The winds reached hurricane strength—eighty, ninety, one hundred knots. But this was no hurricane, no storm that blew itself out in forty-eight or seventy-two hours. Day after day, for a week, for two weeks, for almost three weeks it continued. Clouds hid the sun and stars, making navigation impossible. Waterman had no idea where they were, whether his tacks to north and south held the ship’s position east and west. Was the Cape behind or ahead? Was this Pacific water that crashed across the decks, or Atlantic? All thought of a record passage to California had been blasted away; survival was the sum of hope now.
And survival required more brutal measures than ever—by the logic that ruled the
Challenge
, at any rate. The deaths of the three men terrified all but the most hardened of the rest. Several more reported to sick bay, some with legitimate complaints—pneumonia, frostbite, broken limbs incurred from falls or being battered against rails or bulkheads by waves— some simply from horror. Others wedged themselves in their berths and refused to come out. Still others reported to deck but refused to go aloft.
Among the latter was George Lessing, who had won the name “Dancing Master” for his agility at evading ropes and heavers swung by Douglass. Amid the Cape Horn tempest Douglass ordered Lessing aloft. Lessing refused, saying he was sick. The mate thereupon forcibly delivered Les- sing to Waterman, explaining that the seaman had refused a direct order. Waterman, cursing and swearing that he’d teach this wretch obedience, seized Lessing and threw him headlong into the scuppers, which were
filled with icy slush and water. Douglass took over from there, grasping the seaman by the hair and holding his head below the surface. Just before the victim would have drowned, the mate pulled him up, dragged him to the rail, and tied him fast. For an hour Lessing—who wore only a flannel shirt and thin jacket, a pair of cotton trousers, and no shoes—was exposed to the cutting wind and the freezing water. Finally—whether on Waterman’s order or Douglass’s own volition was unclear—Lessing was cut down and allowed to report to sick bay. Probably he really had been sick; certainly the near-drowning and the exposure aggravated his illness. Within days he died.
By then the terror had claimed another victim. “Pawpaw” was an Italian immigrant who fell afoul of the crimps and wound up aboard the
Challenge
without shoes, experience at sea, or understanding of English. The lack of shoes left his feet especially subject to frostbite, which in turn made it nearly impossible for him to climb the rigging. The lack of experience intensified the horror he felt at the storm, at the brutality of the officers, and at the general circumstances in which he found himself. The lack of English made him slow to understand what was being demanded of him. This last deficiency infuriated Waterman during one maneuver on deck, when all hands had to work in unison. Pawpaw continued to pull after the captain ordered a halt. Waterman grabbed a belaying pin and pounded Pawpaw on the back and shoulders for his failure.
Pawpaw retreated to his berth and refused to return to deck at the next order. Douglass entered the forecastle, bodily dragged Pawpaw out, and, pointing aloft, made clear that he was expected to start climbing. Pawpaw replied in Italian, pleading that his frozen feet forbade any such effort. Douglass began beating him savagely with his fists; when Pawpaw tried to take refuge in the forecastle, Douglass followed, and beat him further. Pawpaw was still breathing when one of the ship’s boys lifted him into his bunk. But he soon lost consciousness, and within an hour died.
Nor was even this the end of the terror. The second mate, Alexander Coghill, imbibed some of the ferocity of his superiors; when he discovered one of the crew trying to evade his watch, Coghill kicked him so hard the man was incapacitated for days. Waterman took a heaver to a Finnish
crewman who complained that scurvy made it impossible for him to answer orders. Meanwhile two more men died in sick bay, of dysentery.
Then a crewman reported that Fred Birkenshaw, the mutineer who was said to have gone over the side, in fact was hiding out between decks. Evidently this crewman had decided that Birkenshaw ought to share the danger the others were enduring. Douglass didn’t seem surprised, apparently having doubted the drowning story from the start. Now he delivered Birkenshaw to the quarterdeck, where Waterman ordered him placed in irons.
Birkenshaw initially indicated willingness to confess to his role in the mutiny, but during Waterman’s interrogation he changed his mind. He said he had nothing to do with it. Waterman refused to accept this. He swung a heaver at Birkenshaw, who raised his arm to defend himself. “I felt the bones of my arm crack when he hit me,” Birkenshaw recalled afterward. The captain then fashioned a hangman’s noose from a rope and hitched it to a block and tackle. The noose went around Birkenshaw’s neck; the block and tackle was raised till Birkenshaw’s toes just touched the deck. As the seaman slowly strangled, Waterman asked him again about his role in the mutiny. Birkenshaw decided to confess. The captain let him down.
Yet Birkenshaw still tried to wriggle free. He implicated Coghill, the second mate, in the conspiracy, besides the several others Waterman had previously identified.
Waterman might have believed Birkenshaw—but realized he couldn’t afford to. As shorthanded as the ship was, the captain needed the second mate, even if his loyalty was suspect. He sent Birkenshaw to sick bay (where, Birkenshaw later claimed, his broken arm was deliberately neglected), and kept Coghill at his post, albeit under close observation.
By this time, finally, the storm had abated. After eighteen days the Cape’s guardians were exhausted. The sky cleared, and Waterman discovered that the
Challenge
was in fact in the Pacific, several degrees west of the Cape.
A
FTER THE CAPE
, the passage up the Pacific to California was anticlimactic for most ships. The
Courrier de Cherbourg
had a close call with
some fog-shrouded rocks on the Chilean shore, and with an earthquake that shook the waters near Valparaiso; but otherwise Jean-Nicolas Perlot and La Fortune had leisure to count their blessings, recent and prospective. Six months and three days after leaving Le Havre, they arrived at Monterey.