But I was afraid; I had never stood a watch of any sort by myself,and I believed I should be sure to get into trouble in the head ofsome chute, or ground the boat in a near cut through some bar or other.
Brown remained in his place; but he would not travel with me.
So the captain gave me an order on the captain of the 'A. T. Lacey,'
for a passage to St. Louis, and said he would find a newpilot there and my steersman's berth could then be resumed.
The 'Lacey' was to leave a couple of days after the 'Pennsylvania.'
The night before the 'Pennsylvania' left, Henry and I satchatting on a freight pile on the levee till midnight.
The subject of the chat, mainly, was one which I think wehad not exploited before--steamboat disasters. One was thenon its way to us, little as we suspected it; the water whichwas to make the steam which should cause it, was washing pastsome point fifteen hundred miles up the river while we talked;--but it would arrive at the right time and the right place.
We doubted if persons not clothed with authority were of muchuse in cases of disaster and attendant panic; still, they mightbe of SOME use; so we decided that if a disaster ever fellwithin our experience we would at least stick to the boat,and give such minor service as chance might throw in the way.
Henry remembered this, afterward, when the disaster came,and acted accordingly.
The 'Lacey' started up the river two days behind the 'Pennsylvania.'
We touched at Greenville, Mississippi, a couple of days out,and somebody shouted--'The "Pennsylvania" is blown up at Ship Island, and a hundredand fifty lives lost!'
At Napoleon, Arkansas, the same evening, we got an extra,issued by a Memphis paper, which gave some particulars.
It mentioned my brother, and said he was not hurt.
Further up the river we got a later extra. My brother wasagain mentioned; but this time as being hurt beyond help.
We did not get full details of the catastrophe until we reached Memphis.
This is the sorrowful story--It was six o'clock on a hot summer morning. The 'Pennsylvania'
was creeping along, north of Ship Island, about sixty miles belowMemphis on a half-head of steam, towing a wood-flat which was fastbeing emptied. George Ealer was in the pilot-house-alone, I think;the second engineer and a striker had the watch in the engine room;the second mate had the watch on deck; George Black, Mr. Wood,and my brother, clerks, were asleep, as were also Brown andthe head engineer, the carpenter, the chief mate, and one striker;Captain Klinefelter was in the barber's chair, and the barber waspreparing to shave him. There were a good many cabin passengers aboard,and three or four hundred deck passengers--so it was said at the time--and not very many of them were astir. The wood being nearly all outof the flat now, Ealer rang to 'come ahead' full steam, and the nextmoment four of the eight boilers exploded with a thunderous crash,and the whole forward third of the boat was hoisted toward the sky!
The main part of the mass, with the chimneys, dropped upon the boat again,a mountain of riddled and chaotic rubbish--and then, after a little,fire broke out.
Many people were flung to considerable distances, and fell in the river;among these were Mr. Wood and my brother, and the carpenter.
The carpenter was still stretched upon his mattress when he struckthe water seventy-five feet from the boat. Brown, the pilot,and George Black, chief clerk, were never seen or heard of afterthe explosion. The barber's chair, with Captain Klinefelterin it and unhurt, was left with its back overhanging vacancy--everything forward of it, floor and all, had disappeared;and the stupefied barber, who was also unhurt, stood with one toeprojecting over space, still stirring his lather unconsciously,and saying, not a word.
When George Ealer saw the chimneys plunging aloft in front of him,he knew what the matter was; so he muffled his face in the lapels ofhis coat, and pressed both hands there tightly to keep this protectionin its place so that no steam could get to his nose or mouth.
He had ample time to attend to these details while he was going upand returning. He presently landed on top of the unexploded boilers,forty feet below the former pilot-house, accompanied by his wheeland a rain of other stuff, and enveloped in a cloud of scalding steam.
All of the many who breathed that steam, died; none escaped.
But Ealer breathed none of it. He made his way to the free airas quickly as he could; and when the steam cleared away he returnedand climbed up on the boilers again, and patiently huntedout each and every one of his chessmen and the several jointsof his flute.
By this time the fire was beginning to threaten. Shrieks andgroans filled the air. A great many persons had been scalded,a great many crippled; the explosion had driven an iron crowbarthrough one man's body--I think they said he was a priest.
He did not die at once, and his sufferings were very dreadful.
A young French naval cadet, of fifteen, son of a French admiral,was fearfully scalded, but bore his tortures manfully.
Both mates were badly scalded, but they stood to theirposts, nevertheless. They drew the wood-boat aft, and theyand the captain fought back the frantic herd of frightenedimmigrants till the wounded could be brought there and placedin safety first.
When Mr. Wood and Henry fell in the water, they struck out for shore,which was only a few hundred yards away; but Henry presently saidhe believed he was not hurt (what an unaccountable error!), andtherefore would swim back to the boat and help save the wounded.
So they parted, and Henry returned.
By this time the fire was making fierce headway, and severalpersons who were imprisoned under the ruins were begging piteouslyfor help. All efforts to conquer the fire proved fruitless;so the buckets were presently thrown aside and the officersfell-to with axes and tried to cut the prisoners out.
A striker was one of the captives; he said he was not injured,but could not free himself; and when he saw that the fire waslikely to drive away the workers, he begged that some one wouldshoot him, and thus save him from the more dreadful death.
The fire did drive the axmen away, and they had to listen,helpless, to this poor fellow's supplications till the flamesended his miseries.
The fire drove all into the wood-flat that could be accommodated there;it was cut adrift, then, and it and the burning steamer floateddown the river toward Ship Island. They moored the flat at the headof the island, and there, unsheltered from the blazing sun,the half-naked occupants had to remain, without food or stimulants,or help for their hurts, during the rest of the day. A steamercame along, finally, and carried the unfortunates to Memphis,and there the most lavish assistance was at once forthcoming.
By this time Henry was insensible. The physicians examined hisinjuries and saw that they were fatal, and naturally turned theirmain attention to patients who could be saved.
Forty of the wounded were placed upon pallets on the floor of a greatpublic hall, and among these was Henry. There the ladies of Memphiscame every day, with flowers, fruits, and dainties and delicaciesof all kinds, and there they remained and nursed the wounded.
All the physicians stood watches there, and all the medical students;and the rest of the town furnished money, or whatever else was wanted.
And Memphis knew how to do all these things well; for many adisaster like the 'Pennsylvania's' had happened near her doors,and she was experienced, above all other cities on the river,in the gracious office of the Good Samaritan'
The sight I saw when I entered that large hall was new and strange to me.
Two long rows of prostrate forms--more than forty, in all--and every faceand head a shapeless wad of loose raw cotton. It was a gruesome spectacle.
I watched there six days and nights, and a very melancholy experience it was.
There was one daily incident which was peculiarly depressing:
this was the removal of the doomed to a chamber apart. It was donein order that the MORALE of the other patients might not be injuriouslyaffected by seeing one of their number in the death-agony. The fated onewas always carried out with as little stir as possible, and the stretcherwas always hidden from sight by a wall of assistants; but no matter:
everybody knew what that cluster of bent forms, with its muffledstep and its slow movement meant; and all eyes watched it wistfully,and a shudder went abreast of it like a wave.
I saw many poor fellows removed to the 'death-room,' and saw them nomore afterward. But I saw our chief mate carried thither more than once.
His hurts were frightful, especially his scalds. He was clothed inlinseed oil and raw cotton to his waist, and resembled nothing human.
He was often out of his mind; and then his pains would make him raveand shout and sometimes shriek. Then, after a period of dumb exhaustion,his disordered imagination would suddenly transform the great apartmentinto a forecastle, and the hurrying throng of nurses into the crew;and he would come to a sitting posture and shout, 'Hump yourselves,HUMP yourselves, you petrifactions, snail-bellies, pall-bearers! goingto be all DAY getting that hatful of freight out?' and supplementthis explosion with a firmament-obliterating irruption or profanitywhich nothing could stay or stop till his crater was empty. And nowand then while these frenzies possessed him, he would tear off handfulsof the cotton and expose his cooked flesh to view. It was horrible.
It was bad for the others, of course--this noise and these exhibitions;so the doctors tried to give him morphine to quiet him. But, in his mindor out of it, he would not take it. He said his wife had been killedby that treacherous drug, and he would die before he would take it.
He suspected that the doctors were concealing it in his ordinary medicinesand in his water--so he ceased from putting either to his lips.
Once, when he had been without water during two sweltering days,he took the dipper in his hand, and the sight of the limpid fluid,and the misery of his thirst, tempted him almost beyond his strength;but he mastered himself and threw it away, and after that he allowedno more to be brought near him. Three times I saw him carriedto the death-room, insensible and supposed to be dying; but each timehe revived, cursed his attendants, and demanded to be taken back.
He lived to be mate of a steamboat again.
But he was the only one who went to the death-room and returned alive.
Dr. Peyton, a principal physician, and rich in all the attributesthat go to constitute high and flawless character, did all thateducated judgment and trained skill could do for Henry; but, as thenewspapers had said in the beginning, his hurts were past help.
On the evening of the sixth day his wandering mind busied itself withmatters far away, and his nerveless fingers 'picked at his coverlet.'
His hour had struck; we bore him to the death-room, poor boy.
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