Living Cradle for Last From the Wreck: Schooner Days DCLXXXIX (689)

by Roy Snider

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IT took three hours of hard and dangerous work by all hands to get a volunteer crew overside in a lifeboat. It took four terrible hours to take off the crew of a sinking ship on the North Atlantic in February. And Ordinary Seaman John Ward, now Rev. John Ward, lived through the ordeal to tell the Shellbacks' Club about it at the annual banquet with which the club closed its winter lay-up season.

Rev. John Ward is a Liverpool man. He went to sea when he was 12 years old in the Norwegian barque Florence, rated cabin boy and was three years and seven months on his first voyage. He was paid off in London, and six weeks later shipped as ordinary seaman in the barque Persia, one of the largest wooden vessels in the world, 55 years old, changed from a full rigger to a barque to save crews' wages, and changed from British to Norwegian registry so that greedy owners might evade adherence to strict British regulations of Plimsoll marks, and overload the old ship to make her pay bigger freights.

They shanghaied a drunken crew in Liverpool, and sent the old relic across the western ocean in late January, 1897, to pick up a timber cargo at Saint John, New Brunswick—and incidentally to save the expense of sending two smaller and better ships for the same cargo. The Persia had not made a winter trip for 20 years .

LOST IN "DEVIL'S HOLE"

It was in the storm-wracked region north of the steamer track, roughly a third of the way from Ireland to Newfoundland and fitly termed "The Devil's Hole" that the poor old Persia came to grief. Leaking, storm battered, with boarding seas pouring through her opened deck seams into her gravel ballast, the ancient hulk struggled with wicked gales that "blew from any direction; then went half way round the compass and blew harder." They cut away her top hamper to steady her and even cut away her topmasts. They tried to bend on a storm spanker to head her up into the wind, and lost two of the crew off the spanker boom. The galley had been carried away. They had no fire, and their only food was such handfuls of raw salt meat and ship's biscuit as they might grab. Their boats were stove in and carried away. They were adrift and helpless in a sinking hulk.

Then a seaman thought that he saw a gleam of light. He aroused the ship with a cry of "Light ho, off the port bow." No one else could see any light. The man failed to catch the gleam again. But the Old Man, a giant Norwegian, ordered pitch pine flares broken out and lighted and for five or six minutes the flares burned from the shattered mast heads.

The flares were seen by the lookouts of a passenger steamer, blown forty miles off her course. But the Persia's crew had no means of knowing that their distress signal had been noted and in their bitter despair they cursed the man who had claimed that he had seen a light.

Hours later the steamer Mohawk, of the Transport Line, bound for New York, and driven northward from her course, hove in sight, bore up to the derelict, circled her twice, and finally went about the perilous chore of getting a lifeboat over side. It took all the crew and all the passengers who were able to stay on deck to launch the lifeboat, and it used up full three hours of time.

LIVING CRADLE

Meanwhile the Persia's crew had drifted two lifebuoys thirty feet apart, on two stout 120 fathom lines down toward the Mohawk. The rescue boat picked up the buoys. The Persia's crew, man by man, went hand-over-hand through seas that ran 40 feet high, over the life lines to the waiting, heaving lifeboat. John Ward was the last of three to leave the ship. At a word from the Old Man, the sturdy Norwegian mate seized one of the life lines with arms and legs, and made a living suspended cradle of himself. The captain picked up Ordinary Seaman John Ward and placed him in the living cradle. Then he wrapped his great arms about the mate's body, and locked his huge legs over the lifeline. "We go now," he said simply; and with a muscular heave and twist of his big body, he sent the three sliding down the line to the raging seas.

Four hours overboard in the North Atlantic in early February. And John Ward lived to tell the Shellbacks about it 48 years later.

NOW SKY PILOT

John Ward, ordinary seaman in the PERSIA 48 years ago, now the Rev. John Ward and a wonderful story teller.