Читать книгу The Sea: Its Stirring Story of Adventure, Peril, & Heroism (Vol. 1-4). The History of Sea Voyages, Discovery, Piracy and Maritime Warfare онлайн

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The Captain was a large double-screw armour-plated vessel, of 4,272 tons. Her armour in the most exposed parts was eight inches in thickness, ranging elsewhere downwards from seven to as low as three inches. She had two revolving turrets, the strongest and heaviest yet built, and carried six powerful guns. Among the peculiarities of her construction were, that she had only nine feet of “free-board”—i.e., that was the height of her sides out of water. The forecastle and after-part of the vessel were raised above this, and they were connected with a light hurricane-deck. This, as we shall see, played an important part in the sad disaster we have to relate.

On the morning of the 8th of September, 1870, English readers, at their breakfast-tables, in railway carriages, and everywhere, were startled with the news that the Captain had foundered, with all hands, in the Bay of Biscay. Six hundred men had been swept into eternity without a moment’s warning. She had been in company with the squadron the night before, and, indeed, had been visited by the admiral, for purposes of inspection, the previous afternoon. The early part of the evening had been fine; later it had become what sailors call “dirty weather;” at midnight the wind rose fast, and soon culminated in a furious gale. At 2.15 in the morning of the 7th a heavy bank of clouds passed off, and the stars came out clear and bright, the moon then setting; but no vessel could be discerned where the Captain had been last observed. At daybreak the squadron was all in sight, but scattered. “Only ten ships instead of eleven could be discerned, the ‘Captain’ being the missing one.” Later, it appeared that seventeen of the men and the gunner had escaped, and landed at Corbucion, north of Cape Finisterre, on the afternoon of the 7th. All the men who were saved belonged to the starboard watch; or, in other words, none escaped except those on deck duty. Every man below, whether soundly sleeping after his day’s work, or tossing sleeplessly in his berth, thinking of home and friends and present peril, or watching the engines, or feeding the furnaces, went down, without the faintest possibility of escaping his doom.