The Death Ship

by B. TRAVEN

  We found all the fires in very bad shape. For two hours we had to work hard to get the fires trim so that they looked like something worth speaking of. Nobody seemed to care here if the fires were going fine or not, or if the steam was holding on, or if it was low to slugging-point. The furnaces were sick with clogged and burned-on slags. The Negroes had no idea how to fire, how to break a fire, and how to clean it. They just threw in as many shovels of coal as the fire would hold, and after having done this they waited to see what would happen to the fire and to the steam.

  There are so many firemen, even whites, who never realize that keeping a fire in shape is an art which some men never understand. Working five years before boilers on ships does not make a man a good fireman. If he does not know the art of it, he will be as uninteresting in the stoke-hold after five years as he was when he came below for his first watch.

  We had little trouble with grate-bars falling out. The rims were new, therefore wide and strong, so the bars had a good hold on them. One might say it was often hard work to get them out at all, when they had burned away and had to be changed for new ones. It was almost a real pleasure to replace them.

  The Negro drags, real giants, with arms like tree-trunks, looked strong enough to carry away on their shoulders the whole boiler and take it up on deck. Yet they dragged in the fuel so slowly that we had to pep them up and curse them to the limit to get sufficient fuel to keep the fires going. Not only were they, despite their huge bodies, unable to furnish the fuel we needed, they were whining all the time that it was too hot, that they sure were just about to drop dead, that they were choking and could not get any air, that they were going to die of thirst and hunger the next minute, and that their mouths were as full of soot and ashes as if they had died already and were now swallowing earth.

  “Now, just look at these black Goliaths,” Stanislav said, “dying of work which a cabin-boy might do without feeling overworked. What, compared to this, had we to drag in on the Yorikke? I would like to know what these mammoths really mean to do with their bones? One arm of theirs is thicker than my whole chest. Before they get in half a ton I would drag in six without even so much as wiping my sweat off. And here they have got the whole coaling-station right at arm’s length. I can’t figure that out. Not for ten dollars.”

  “A pity,” I said, “to have to leave behind the Yorikke right now, after we have scaled the boilers and have shoveled in all the coal from the most distant bunkers. Now comes the easy time on the Yorikke, with fresh fuel filled up right next to the stoke-hold, and the next five or six days there would have been sheer pleasure sailing. Shit, damn the Yorikke, we have got other things to worry about. So, what’s the good of crying about a dame you can’t have any longer? Maybe she is going to the taxi dance. What do I care?”

  I gazed about the stoke-hold, about all the gangways, hatchways and port-holes.

  Stanislav followed my looks and said: “I have viewed quite a bit already. What we have to do above all is to look for air-holes where to snap out quickest and easiest. We cannot reach the gangway. That much is certain. Usually they break off first thing when the crash comes. Just fly away from the pipes and boilers when you hear the faintest crackling. The gangway leading up and out is always liable to make a trap out of which you have no chance to escape. Once up, you mostly cannot come below any more on account of steam and boiling water. So better don’t try the gangway at all.”

  When I was through with my inspection I reported to Stanislav: “The upper bunker has got a hatchway leading clear out on deck. We have all the time to keep the way to this bunker clear and the hatchway loose so we can’t be caught. I shall take care to fix up a provisional rope ladder, which we’ll keep here in good shape.”

  Stanislav went to examine the way I had told him about. When he came back he said: “You are smart, Pippip. I have to hand it to you. It is the surest and the only safe way out. All right, we will stick to that and make no other trial.”

  Our work before the boilers was easy. We could have done all there was to do with one lazy hand. We didn’t have to worry about heaving out the ashes. The two Negro drags did it.

  The engineers never pestered us; in fact, they never popped in. None of them ever complained about the steam-pressure. As long as the engine was still moving, the engineers seemed satisfied. If the Empress was speeding or just tumbling along on her way to the last ceremony did not concern anybody.

  The funeral could be arranged quite easily in the usual way. Half a dozen good-sized holes drilled into the hull near the bilge. All of them on port side, to make the can lie over softly but surely. The cargo of scrap iron would hasten the effect elegantly. Then it would only be necessary to give all the pumps a punch on the nose. The wireless station would be out of commission accidentally at the very minute the holes begin to suck. Wireless stations do such things. They are not perfect yet. Any shipping board will testify to that and accept it as evidence. A few members of the crew have to go along with the hearse. Otherwise suspicion will arise. The point is, every suspicion has to be avoided. The two or three guys who do the drilling of the holes and the boxing of the pumps must be safe. They are well paid, and if they say anything wrong before the board, they find themselves quickly confronted with three different traps out of which it is rather difficult for them ever to escape again. First, they are accused of being implicated in a crime. Second, they are accused, on account of having been bawled out by the skipper for something, of looking for revenge and trying to get square with the skipper by accusing him of a crime which everybody knows a British licensed captain would never commit. Third, the good old way, taking the guys for a pretty ride. Knowing all this, and keeping it in mind for the rest of their lives, these two or three undertakers keep mum. Anyway, it is not their money that is lost, and other people’s money does not hold any interest for them.

  There are still other ways. Ways often tried out, and just as safe. Who the hell knows how that bomb with nitroglycerine happened to be in an innocent-looking case among the cargo? We had better arrest a couple of anarchists and well-known communists, search their lodgings, and find a few similar bombs right under their beds in an old leather bag. The judges and the gentlemen of the board and all the experts who testify in court hate anarchists and communists; they know that all communists do such nasty things, and so the insurance is paid. The judge does not pay. Nor do the gentlemen of the board. The underwriters pay. They also hate communists. So this case helps them to make better laws against communists and criminal syndicalists.

  It was not our business to worry about which way it would be done this time. Fact is, we had no time to find out. The whole affair happened, even to us who were prepared, at a time and moment when we least expected it.

  48

  We had thought the music would start a day later. As it happened, it was only two days after we had been for the first time below before the boilers.

  We had just relieved the former watch at midnight, and we were about to break up the fires when there was a terrific bang, and right afterwards a crash. I knew by instinct that the funeral was to take place when Stanislav and I would have the watch. Because then two white men who had every reason to wish the skipper the worst in court or out of court would be done away with. The Negroes, the Portuguese, the Italians from Malta, and the Greeks did not count. They were all tramp sailors who knew nothing about ships.

  When the crash came, I was thrown against the furnaces. With the bump that followed I fell back into a big pile of coal.

  I had a queer feeling, the cause of which I could not figure out for a second. For a moment I thought that I had gone partly nuts since I felt so strange. But then it dawned upon me that the boilers were standing up vertical, the furnaces above me. So I knew that the bow had gone down and the stern was high up in the air.

  All this thinking and reckoning, of course, rushed like a flash through my mind. I had no time to reflect on this or anything else. For some of the furnaces, on which we had
been still working when the crash came, had not been closed fully. They now broke open and shed out their fires into the stokehold. As only a few furnaces had broken open, I found that I could step out of the mess by jumping between those heaps of white glowing coal and cinders. The electric lights went dim, and almost at the second when I reached the starboard hull they went out. There was still sufficient light in the stoke-hold from the heaps of glowing coal now spilling out faster and faster. I knew that it would be only twenty seconds or so and the boilers would explode. The steam-pipes would bust even before that, filling the stoke-hold with so much hot steam that you could never find your way out safely, because the steam would boil you and make you sightless and utterly helpless.

  I did not see Stanislav. I made for the rope ladder leading up to the bunker. It was not necessary to climb up the ladder, because, since the bow was now down I could walk straight into the bunker and out through the hatchway as if on a plain floor.

  When I reached the bunker I saw Stanislav already climbing out.

  At this very moment when I felt safe we heard a pitiful yell.

  Stanislav, with one leg over the hatchway, turned around and called to me: “That’s Daniel, the drag. We can’t leave him. Guess he is caught.”

  “Damn it all,” I said, “we have to get him.”

  “Snappy,” Stanislav answered, “come in again and get him. But, for all the devils, run or we are finished.”

  In a whiff we were back in the stoke-hold. The boilers seemed still to hold on for a few seconds. The heaps of fires began now to fill the whole cave with smoke. But they were still glowing and rendering enough light so that we could make out where Daniel, one of the giant Negroes, was lying. With all this smoke and glow the stoke-hold looked like the underworld for ghosts.

  Daniel was caught with his left foot under a heavy slab of iron broken off or fallen from somewhere. We tried to lift that slab, but we could not even move it. We tried madly to raise it with the poker. We failed.

  “Can’t make it, Daniel,” I yelled at the Negro; “your foot is stuck and stays stuck.”

  We tried to drag him out under the plate. We saw we should have to tear him apart to get him out this way. We could not leave him. And we had to go out or we would never make it.

  It was then, when the hold brightened up from a flare of the open fires, I noticed the cracking of a steam-pipe, which was bent and upon which one boiler was sinking. The crack just began to hiss, and while not actually seeing it, one could feel that the crack was beginning to widen like the seam of a garment.

  “Gadsake,” I hollered to Stanislav, “the main pipe is coming.” Stanislav gave it only a glance and yelled at the same time: “Where is the hammer? Get it.”

  Before he had ended his words I had flung the sledgehammer into his hands. He grasped a shovel and with one mighty stroke of the hammer he flattened out the shovel so that it looked like a crude plowshare with a handle. He set that plowshare against Daniel’s knee-joint, put the handle in my hand, and cried: “Hold it this way, hell of it.”

  I did. With another heavy stroke with the hammer upon the plowshare he cut deep into Daniel’s leg. He had to give it two more strokes before the leg was cut through. Now we could drag Daniel out into the bunker and then through the hatchway on deck. The deck, like all other things, was naturally no longer horizontal, but standing up vertically.

  Close to the hatchway was Daniel’s partner, the other Negro drag of our watch. He had not cared about his brother. He had made his get-away as quick as he could. Now we handed him his crippled pal, and he took good care of him. That must be said.

  The whole bow, and with it the forecastle, was under water. The stern was high up in the air. Such a position for the ship had never been tried out at the life-boat drills, which were held every Saturday at two o’clock sharp. Everything about the ship was in a position to which a sailor can seldom find himself accustomed.

  The electric lights on deck were still burning. The engineer doubtless had switched the light over from the dynamo to the storage batteries. Apparently the batteries began to draw water, or their fluid had started to leak out. So the lights were getting fainter.

  Climbing and crawling about the deck we saw the mates, the skipper, the engineers, the cook, and a few others whom I could not distinguish. They went about with lanterns and flash-lights, trying to get the boats clear.

  I did not see anybody from the foc’sle. They had been drowned like mice in a trap.

  The officers, with the help of the galley-boys and the cook, were working hard to get the boats below. Boat two tore off and was, at the same moment, carried away by the sea without a man in it.

  Boat four could not be cleared at all; neither could boat six. Boat five could not be reached, and, besides, it was already so heavily battered that it would have been of no use.

  So there remained only two boats with a chance to get off. Boat one came clear. The skipper ordered the men who were to man it. I was not among them, nor was Stanislav. The skipper did not go with it. He was standing on the aft wall of the main-house on midship. He tried to give us the impression that he knew it was his duty to be the last to leave the ship.

  When such a gesture comes up in the investigation court it looks fine, and it always makes a good story for the sob-sisters. So the underwriters do not feel plucked, and they admit that it was the will of the Lord, against which we can do nothing, and therefore they pay the insurance in full.

  Now, all the men still aboard, hanging and crawling against the vertical decks, tried to catch boat three, the last left for use. We got three clear and after much trouble had it jumping upon the waves.

  The skipper ordered the manning. Stanislav and I were about to go with the boat, also two of the engineers, the Negro Daniel and his Negro partner, who carried and guarded him. Later there came with us the first mate, a junior assistant, and the steward.

  It appeared that the boilers were holding on boldly, obviously for the reason that some of the fires had fallen out and the others lost their strength since, owing to the position of the ship, they were no longer right underneath and within the boilers, but sideways. The stoke-hold, of course, was by this time so full of poisonous carbon gas, heat, steam, and boiling water that anybody caught there would be standing already outside the gate of well, wherever he had to wait for the trumpets. If the boilers hadn’t behaved so well, nothing of the ship or of us would still have existed.

  The skipper, after hollering and whistling several times for any man who might still answer, finally ordered the boats to make off. He took his place in boat one. We had an emergency lantern, and so had the other boat. Besides, there were a few flash-lights still in the hands of the officers and the engineers. All together they yet gave only a dim and restless light.

  We made our boat clear and pushed off. So did boat one.

  The sea was not heavy. A sailor with a good ship under his feet would even have called it a sunshine sea. But it was rough, really rough. One had not felt it while the ship was under weigh. Yet in these small boats one got the feeling of a very lively sea. Close to reefs and rocks in the open the sea behaves in general rather differently from the way it does farther off the reef. While elsewhere the waves may reach a height of only from four to seven feet, near a reef and hidden rocks the waves may reach often three or five times this height, especially when, as often happens, two or three different currents meet at the rocks. The wrecked ship sets up another obstacle to the free movement of the sea, and therefore close to the wreck the sea acts even more unruly.

  Taking into consideration these circumstances, it will be easy to understand why those peculiar accidents occurred which changed the whole pile of beautiful plans the skipper had worked out so carefully. It is safe to say that our strange position had never entered his reckonings.

  Boat one struggled hard to come clear of the ship. It was a difficult thing to do. It might have been easier in full daylight. Perhaps. In daylight one may get the timing of
the waves and try to make off on an outgoing one. Now, when the boat was about twenty yards off and the men were just about to stretch the oars and bring them into the water, a mighty wave crashed the whole boat against the hull of the ship.

  Something else happened, right at the same moment when the boat was hard against the hull. One huge part of the ship broke loose and fell with a bang upon the boat, shattering it to uncountable pieces. We heard the cries and yells of the men. But as suddenly as these outcries had appeared, so did they drop into silence. I had a feeling that bang, yells, and boat had been swallowed in one single gulp by a giant sea-monster all at the same moment. Nothing more was heard of this boat. It sure was the most elegant insurance collection, because “even the skipper had sacrificed his life to save the ship.” All persons present in court would rise and stand in silence for two minutes in honor of the skipper and his brave crew.

  We had managed fine to get out of the crashing and sucking waters near the ship. But we had practically no skilled oarsmen with us, save the first mate. Usually mates do not know much about it, but Stanislav was a first-class man at the oars. I did my best to help him. Daniel could do nothing. He was moaning and begging for a shot of gin to dope his terrible pain. The other Negro had never had an oar in hand any time during his life. The steward was useless. The mate was out of practice. His strokes were brakes rather than pulls. So we could not make any speed.

  The mate had a compass. He gave us the supposed direction toward the coast.

  The sea was far more unruly than we had imagined. We were tossed high upon the waves and thrown into deep valleys. The oars, so badly manned, did not pull our boat in any given direction. We appeared to circle about the same spot.

  Then all of a sudden the engineer said: “Mate, I think we’re on shoals or rock. Hardly more than three feet.”

  “Can’t be,” the first mate answered. He took his oar and sounded the depth: “You are right, chief. Get out of here, you men, or we go to the devil.”