第55章 THE HURRICANE(2)

On the 15th the barometer fell to 29.11in.by 2P.M.This was the moment when every sail in port should have escaped.Kimberley,who flew the only broad pennant,should certainly have led the way:he clung,instead,to his moorings,and the Germans doggedly followed his example:semi-belligerents,daring each other and the violence of heaven.Kane,less immediately involved,was led in error by the report of residents and a fallacious rise in the glass;he stayed with the others,a misjudgment that was like to cost him dear.All were moored,as is the custom in Apia,with two anchors practically east and west,clear hawse to the north,and a kedge astern.Topmasts were struck,and the ships made snug.The night closed black,with sheets of rain.By midnight it blew a gale;and by the morning watch,a tempest.Through what remained of darkness,the captains impatiently expected day,doubtful if they were dragging,steaming gingerly to their moorings,and afraid to steam too much.

Day came about six,and presented to those on shore a seizing and terrific spectacle.In the pressure of the squalls the bay was obscured as if by midnight,but between them a great part of it was clearly if darkly visible amid driving mist and rain.The wind blew into the harbour mouth.Naval authorities describe it as of hurricane force.It had,however,few or none of the effects on shore suggested by that ominous word,and was successfully withstood by trees and buildings.The agitation of the sea,on the other hand,surpassed experience and description.Seas that might have awakened surprise and terror in the midst of the Atlantic ranged bodily and (it seemed to observers)almost without diminution into the belly of that flask-shaped harbour;and the war-ships were alternately buried from view in the trough,or seen standing on end against the breast of billows.

The TRENTON at daylight still maintained her position in the neck of the bottle.But five of the remaining ships tossed,already close to the bottom,in a perilous and helpless crowd;threatening ruin to each other as they tossed;threatened with a common and imminent destruction on the reefs.Three had been already in collision:the OLGA was injured in the quarter,the ADLER had lost her bowsprit;the NIPSIC had lost her smoke-stack,and was making steam with difficulty,maintaining her fire with barrels of pork,and the smoke and sparks pouring along the level of the deck.For the seventh war-ship the day had come too late;the EBER had finished her last cruise;she was to be seen no more save by the eyes of divers.A coral reef is not only an instrument of destruction,but a place of sepulchre;the submarine cliff is profoundly undercut,and presents the mouth of a huge antre in which the bodies of men and the hulls of ships are alike hurled down and buried.The EBER had dragged anchors with the rest;her injured screw disabled her from steaming vigorously up;and a little before day she had struck the front of the coral,come off,struck again,and gone down stern foremost,oversetting as she went,into the gaping hollow of the reef.Of her whole complement of nearly eighty,four souls were cast alive on the beach;and the bodies of the remainder were,by the voluminous outpouring of the flooded streams,scoured at last from the harbour,and strewed naked on the seaboard of the island.

Five ships were immediately menaced with the same destruction.The EBER vanished -the four poor survivors on shore -read a dreadful commentary on their danger;which was swelled out of all proportion by the violence of their own movements as they leaped and fell among the billows.By seven the NIPSIC was so fortunate as to avoid the reef and beach upon a space of sand;where she was immediately deserted by her crew,with the assistance of Samoans,not without loss of life.By about eight it was the turn of the ADLER.She was close down upon the reef;doomed herself,it might yet be possible to save a portion of her crew;and for this end Captain Fritze placed his reliance on the very hugeness of the seas that threatened him.The moment was watched for with the anxiety of despair,but the coolness of disciplined courage.As she rose on the fatal wave,her moorings were simultaneously slipped;she broached to in rising;and the sea heaved her bodily upward and cast her down with a concussion on the summit of the reef,where she lay on her beam-ends,her back broken,buried in breaching seas,but safe.Conceive a table:the EBER in the darkness had been smashed against the rim and flung below;the ADLER,cast free in the nick of opportunity,had been thrown upon the top.Many were injured in the concussion;many tossed into the water;twenty perished.The survivors crept again on board their ship,as it now lay,and as it still remains,keel to the waves,a monument of the sea's potency.In still weather,under a cloudless sky,in those seasons when that ill-named ocean,the Pacific,suffers its vexed shores to rest,she lies high and dry,the spray scarce touching her -the hugest structure of man's hands within a circuit of a thousand miles -tossed up there like a schoolboy's cap upon a shelf;broken like an egg;a thing to dream of.