# McClure's Magazine/Volume 7/Number 5/The Survival of the Fittest

pp. 469-477. Accompanying illustrations may be omitted.
THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST.
By Morgan Robertson
HE had started life at sixteen on a small farm in Ohio, had won the heart of the farmer's wife by putting new life and ambition into the disabled old clock during her absence, but had incurred the wrath of the farmer himself by taking apart the threshing machine, which showed signs of wear and which he had sincere intentions of mending. A sound beating caused a vacancy on that farm, and filled a corner of a freight-car with a small boy bound for the West. He never reached that ever-receding section. Hunger brought him out at a small town, and compelled him to beg; and finding this means of livelihood easier than working, he continued at it, and developed in a few years into as picturesque a "tramp" as ever enlivened rural scenery.
He was not vicious, only ignorant and lazy. Sometimes, to relieve ennui, he would work for a few days; but only at labor that brought him into contact with machinery. He was a born mechanic; but this expresses all. He knew by intuition things that successful civil and mechanical engineers would be glad to acquire after years of study, at the same time possessing none of the balance of mind that makes us respectable. He had a bulging forehead, with ears set well back on his head. A phrenologist, in examining such a head, would have described it as showing large imitation, hope, form, and weight; abnormally large causality, comparison, and constructiveness; but sadly deficient in continuity, combativeness, destructiveness, firmness, acquisitiveness, and approbativeness. With a little energy he could easily have earned at least the title of "Jack of all trades," but even this was beyond him. In short, he was a happy-go-lucky vagabond, with an ever ever increasing repugnance for work, and an decreasing community of interest with his fellow-men.
He wandered to New York, and stood with a crowd watching the ascent of a large safe, which men were hoisting by means of a wagon-winch to the upper story of a high building. A man stood on the safe, guiding it. People passed underneath, indifferent to danger, and no one but our "tramp" noticed a slight movement of the rope, just above the wagon, followed by a quick untwisting, as a strand parted.
"Stop!" he yelled, "the rope's breaking."
"Vast heaving," roared the foreman; "stand from under; jump for a window, Tom—jump for your life!"
People scattered to the middle of the street. Among the first were the foreman and his men. The man on the safe frantically climbed the tackle to reach a window just above him. The two remaining strands of the rope quivered under the strain, becoming fuzzy with the ends of yarns that had broken and were forced outward, while the broken strand showed its spiral bulging six feet above the place of fracture, Then the tattered idler on the sidewalk made some very quick movements. Seizing the end of the rope from the wagon, he pulled about eight feet twice around a near-by lamp-post, over and under itself, thus hitching it. Jumping to the wagon with the end, he tied it to the straining rope, as high up as he could reach; then sprang to the ground a second before the overworked remaining strands snapped. Down came the heavy safe a foot or so, and the reinforced rope sank under the sudden tension. The man above barely held his grip on the tackle, and the lamp-post was bent and nearly wrenched from the ground. But the hitch did not slip.
The foreman and his helpers came back with some new ideas. The rope, or rather two ropes knotted together, now led straight to the doubtful lamp-post. Hitching another rope above the first knot, they hove on it, bringing the strain on the winch, and the danger was over.
"Where is that tramp?" asked the foreman. "He's a sailor. I've been there, and know the signs. He's passed a clove hitch on the lamp-post and a rolling hitch on the fall. I'll give him a job."
But the "tramp" had gone.
At Buffalo he fired a stationary engine, on trial, but displayed so keen an interest in the engineer's own work as to lose the job. Later, inspired perhaps by a fleeting self-respect, based on his late usefulness, he secured another, this time as engineer. His employer was suspicious at first of the ragged, unlicensed aspirant; but he talked glibly of grate surface, eccentrics, valves, pistons, etc. (words picked up in his last service); no other applicant appeared, and the engine must run; so he was accepted.
Instinct, mechanical and other, is inherited knowledge, and the fact that a correct estimate of the tensile strength of red-hot boiler iron in contact with cold water did not form a part of this man's genius was due, no doubt, to the antecedent fact that none of his ancestors had experimented in this line. Indeed, few who so experiment live long enough to transmit to descendants, in the form of instinct, this acquired knowledge. On the second day he sailed over two fences amid a cloud of hot steam, while the shattered boiler went the other way.
He was picked up scalded, disfigured, and unconscious, and sent to the hospital, from which, in three months, he emerged blind in one eye, minus an ear, and with his whole right side shortened and weakened. On a stormy December morning, hungry and cold, he shipped deck-hand on a steam-barge, the mate taking on the forlorn applicant for the same reason that had influenced his last employer: no other appeared. He scrubbed decks, scoured paint-work, and helped trim sail as the shifts of wind demanded, while the steam-barge dragged herself and two tow-barges up the lake. He soon understood the proper angle that sails should bear to the wind and the resultant force exerted on the vessel. He helped the second mate splice a rope, and knew how before the job was half done. He had seen the rudder at the dock, and explained to his fellows the action of the slanting blade on the water. Scrubbing paint on the bridge, he heard the captain say to the mate: "Pull up the centre-board; she gripes;" and being sent to help, asked the good-natured second mate what the centre-board was for, and what griping meant. The mate explained: the centre-board was a movable blade in the bottom to keep the boat from drifting sideways, and "griping" was the carrying of the rudder to one side under the pressure of the wind.
By the time he had assimilated this nautical lore, the boat had reached Point Pelee, near the head of the lake, and here, as though misfortune was still "camped on his trail," he fell overboard.
"Man overboard, rooster," yelled the second mate.
"Which one?" asked the captain, as he rang the stopping-bells.
"The blind one, the cripple."
"Let the tow pick him up," growled the captain, ringing full speed to the engine. But as a salve to his conscience, he blew a few short barks of the whistle, to signify to the barges behind to "Look out."
Our hero, fathoms deep as he thought, barely escaped a blow from the propeller as he was sucked under the quarter, to come to the surface half the length of the tow-line behind. Being no swimmer, he gasped once and sank; then arose, only to be beaten under by the bow of the oncoming tow-barge. When next he appeared, it was behind the first tow-barge, and the second, approaching at a seven-knot speed, was almost upon him.
"Help!" he gurgled. But no one heard or saw him, although a profane but humane second mate was periling his position and blackening his soul with loud, blasphemous objurgations to the barges, and vows of legal vengeance on his superior, the captain, as he peered aft from the steamer's taffrail.
Just as his head disappeared, the outer bobstay of the second barge struck him in the shoulder. He grasped it. Tearing through the water made it hard work to pull himself up; but he got his head out, and rested; then, inch by inch, he dragged his crippled body up the pair of iron chains to the bowsprit, thence in-board to the deck, on to which he tumbled an unconscious heap. He was carried below, stripped, and brought to with much rubbing and copious draughts of whiskey. But not being used to this stimulant lately, he relapsed into a stupor.
That night it snowed so hard that the men steering the tow-barges could not see the steam-barge ahead, and the captains and mates took turns at standing in the bows, and guided by the trend of the tow-lines, bellowing "Starboard," "Port," and "Steady" to the helmsmen. The captain of the steam-barge, too sure of his position to anchor, yet not sure enough to go ahead without sounding, slowed down, took a cast of the lead, and went on, without being able to see through the snow the position the second of the tow-barges had reached. She had crept upon the first barge, but had given her a wide berth; and now, when the tow-line tautened, it bore at right angles—to port.
"Hard-a-starboard!" sang out the mate of the second barge, as he saw the hawser lift from the water.
It was his last speech. The terrific strain broke the iron casting on the bow through which the hawser led, and the mate, standing on the port cat-head, was struck in the legs by the sweeping recoil of the heavy line and swept overboard. He did not rise. Ropes were thrown out, but the relentless power at the other end of the tow-line carried them away from the spot; the loudest pair of lungs could not penetrate that thick snow; and the mate was given up.
The old captain, much shaken, took the mate's place at the bow, noting, despite his horror, that the port jib-boom guys were torn from their fastenings by the tow-line, which now bore a little forward of the beam, showing that she was straightening up to her course. The tow-post creaked and groaned with the unfamiliar side strain, and she came around, slackening the tow-line with the increased speed acquired in the wide sweep. Then she swung the other way, the strength of the helmsman, a mere boy, not being sufficient to steady her.
As the tow-line tautened, leading now off to starboard, though the brand-new rope held, the rotten tow-post, weakened by its wrenching, did not. Breaking at the deck, it crashed over the bow at the end of the line, catching and carrying away the port bowsprit shroud as it went; and with her momentum and the wheel still to port, the barge swung around, lost headway, and pointing her nose to the north shore, drifted to leeward, with all the rigging of the bowsprit and jib-boom gone on the port, or weather, side.
The much-wrought-up old skipper, who had barely escaped the flying tow-post, sprang to the rail, and screamed his curses on the steam-barge. "Think I'm goin' t' anchor, do ye? Anchor in this passage—an' wait for you t' take a night's sleep at th' dock 'fore ye come back? Not much! Ye've carried 'way my head-gear, but I'll find a better place—'f I run t' Buffalo— How's her head?" This to the wheel.
"Nor' by east, sir."
"Bring her east by south, half south, when she'll come. Give her the stay-sail, boys."
This sail was loosed, hoisted half up, and lost in the thick maze to leeward as a sudden puff of the increasing gale blew it to pieces.
With decks awash as the seas boarded the weather rail and spilled out the lee scuppers, and in that blinding snow-storm, the flakes of which were attaining a needle-like sharpness, the gray old skipper was more resolved than ever not to anchor in a dangerous channel, and his men began rigging preventer guys to the bowsprit—for head sail must be carried to bring her before the wind. The boy was told to drop the wheel and lend a hand. The darkey cook was called and sent out on the bowsprit with the rest, as they endeavored to hitch a heavy hawser around the end of the spar. It was icy cold. The waves made hungry licks at their legs as they worked, and their fingers were numb, and the ropes and spar slippery with ice. But they completed the task, and had started in when one of those vicious Lake Erie seas, the first of the three which travel in company, lifted up to windward, a gray, nearly perpendicular wall.
"Look out!" cried the captain; "hang on."
When the sea had passed on, and the captain had straightened up, he saw one dark object clinging to the icy gear under the spar, while from the blanket of snow to leeward came gurgling cries. Then, as the next sea crashed over the bows, he heard, "Help, cappen," as the cook also was swept away.
Unable to save them, and trembling with horror, the old man crawled aft and went below, where he buried his head in his hands on the cabin table. "Great God!" he groaned, "all gone, every man; and all in half an hour!"
He sat there, wet, lonely, and miserable, until daylight shone in on him; then he remembered the deck-hand in the forecastle, and started forward to arouse him, if he too had not died in the night.
It had stopped snowing, but the snow was replaced by the drift from the sea, which, freezing where it fell, had already encased deck, rail, and rigging in a coating of ice. It was slippery walking, or, rather, creeping, for an old man of seventy, with the craft rolling both rails under, and it is no wonder that an incoming sea swept his legs from under him, bringing him down with a thud on the icy corner of the fore-hatch.
He groaned with the sharp pain in his back, but could not rise. His legs were useless, and he hitched and crawled as best he could, and in time reached the forecastle hatch, where he called—called until his voice grew weak; then gasped his prayer for help, while the man below slept on, and did not waken even when the masts crashed over the side.
It was high noon when the sleeper opened his eyes—on strange quarters, with an icy ladder leading up to a square of light, blocked by a gray face fringed with icicles, on which death had stamped the agony of its owner's last moments. He shivered with cold as he turned out. His clothes, nearly dried by the now cold stove, hung on the pawl-post, and he dressed himself, with many upward glances at the gruesome thing above. Then he mounted the slippery ladder, shutting his eyes as he neared the staring face, and not opening them until he had climbed over it and floundered on to the deck beside the body, covered now, like the deck itself, with a frozen mantle.
He made his way aft, and called down the cabin door: "Any one here?"
Hearing no sound, he descended, and opened all the stateroom doors, but found no one. His hunger brought him to the galley, where he partook of some food, and then returned to the deck. It was a situation to appal the heart of even an experienced sailor. The vessel had once been a fine three-masted schooner, degraded later to a barge by sending down her topmasts. Now she was a dismantled hulk, with ice on deck making a curve from the rails inboard to where it raised in hummocks over the hatches. And on this dismantled, ice-bound hulk, rolling in the trough of the sea, somewhere on Lake Erie, he was alone with a dead man. This much he knew. Ahead and astern were two lines of blue, which he took for land. But no sail appeared to cheer him. As he stood in the companion-way, sheltered from the furious blast, the memory of his fall from the steam-barge, his being swept under by the first tow-barge, and his painful climb up the bobstays of the other, came back to him. But he remembered nothing more.
"Somethin' orful's happened," he muttered. "S'pose every one got washed off—or, mebbe, they're in the boat; that's gone. Wonder what killed the man forrard? I've got t' do somethin'."
He noticed the thumping of the spars alongside, where they lay held by the rigging, and concluded to cut them away; they might knock a hole in her. An axe alone would do it. He looked at the frozen deck. Axes suggest wood-piles, and wood-piles suggest stoves. This inductive reasoning brought him to the galley, where he found a hatchet; and with this he chopped at lanyards and running-gear until the spars drifted away. The jib-boom had snapped at the bowsprit end, but the bowsprit still stood; otherwise he would have had to cut through a chain bowsprit-shroud—a thing practically impossible.
He saved as much of the running-rigging as he could; not that he knew why; he had no use for it as yet. He obeyed an instinct,—the same that impelled him to put the hatchet carefully away in an oval-shaped hole in the after part of the cabin. As it was day-time he felt no nervous fears of the dead man forward, and crawled around the deck, inspecting what was left of her fittings. He examined a hummock of ice amidships, showing a black skeleton of iron. "Centre-board winch," he said. Another pillar of ice enclosed the capstan; the steam-barge had carried these things. Creeping aft, he looked over the stern, and discovered the rudder, ice-covered, but free in its movements, which a sailor would have known by the spinning of the wheel.
He was now wet with the drift and chilled through. He went below, and in the mate's room found dry clothing, with which he replaced his wet rags. The captain's room furnished a good pair of rubber boots and a suit of oil-skins. While here, he noticed a bundle of paper rolls, which he examined. "Maps," he said. He found the chart of Lake Erie, and for the first time in his life valued a much neglected accomplishment: he could read.
A cursory glance showed him a long, bag-shaped outline of coast, with Buffalo at one end, and other cities, most of which he had visited, marked on the edges. In one corner was a circle, filled with numerous interlocking stars, which he could not understand. He put the chart away, and clad in his warm, protective clothing, returned to the deck, where he did an hour's hard thinking and experimenting.
"She don't lay even in the holler of the waves," he said. "Why?" He thought of the centre-board. "She drifts sideways, an' if the board's down it makes a point, kinder, an' she'd hang on it. If it's forrard o' the centre, it ud hold that end to the wind a little. I'll see."
The rubber boots gave him good sea-legs. He went to the centre-board winch, measured the distance forward and aft with his eye, and returned for the hatchet. As he took it from the hole in the cabin, he saw a curious, whirling disk inside, which, when it had ceased its gyrations, resembled the diagram on the chart. He had never seen or heard of a compass, but the letters E, S, and W, on the edge of the disk, and the fact that it retained a steady position independent of the yaws of the vessel, were data for later deductions.
He chopped the ice from the winch, and roughened it under his feet; then, little by little, with his feeble strength, hoisted the centre-board. A man can lift a great weight with a worm-geared winch. Going aft, he proved his reasoning: she lay plumb in the trough of the sea.
He chopped the ice from two large, octagon-shaped boxes, abaft the stumps of the fore and main masts, and looked in. They contained heavy hawsers, tackles, etc. He noticed the heavy, cross-plank construction of the covers as he replaced them. A barrel was lashed to the fife-rail around the stump of the foremast. Chopping into it, he found salt, and remarked that where he spilled some on deck the ice crackled and melted to water, which did not freeze again. Then he went aft, and puzzled over the action of the compass, which, not being governed by purely mechanical laws, was beyond his comprehension. But he divined its scope and utility, and out of his environment of screaming wind and heaving water, evolved a plan of salvation,—apparently so wild, so baseless and hopeless, that no sane seafaring man, hampered by experience, would have considered it for an instant. But this man was not a sailor: he was a mechanic, heaven-born.
"She's driftin' 'bout as fast as a man kin walk," he mused. "If she'd point with the wind she'd move faster. How kin I make her? More pressure on one end or less on the other; a sail forrard ud do."
The fore-mast had broken about ten feet from the deck, and the boom and gaff, with the fore-sail furled to them, lay with the jaws in place on the stump and the after end frozen fast to the ice on deck. The main and mizzen masts had snapped at the deck, and everything pertaining to them was overboard except what he had saved of the running-rigging. Forward, from the bowsprit end, descended an immense icicle, the accretion of ice to the jib-stay, broken aloft and hanging down, while on the bowsprit lay the furled jib—an elongated cone of ice; a solid mass with the spar. He shrank from attempting to chop loose and set this sail to the stump of the mast, and considered the alternative: less pressure aft; he could rig a drag.
His ideas were crystallizing. He searched for and found a well-equipped tool-chest; then spent the rest of the afternoon chopping from the icy deck the ropes he had pulled in, and coiling them, or rather, crushing them, in the cabin, where he sprinkled them with salt from the barrel. Then, building a fire in the stove, he cooked and ate his supper, first bringing all the rope's-ends into the galley to dry.
By the light of the galley lamp he studied the chart, but could make little of it except that he was somewhere on a line, midway between the shores, which he creased with his thumb-nail from Buffalo to the head of the lake. If he could get her before the wind and steer, and the wind should shift, he might make one of the ports on either shore; and in case the wind held as it was, he could not miss Buffalo, for the compass told him the wind was blowing him there. He schemed and planned until sleepy; then "turned, in all standing."
Morning showed more ice on deck and a slight change to the northward in the wind, which had been due west, but no lessening of its velocity or of the bitter cold. After breakfast he went to work. His ropes were now pliable and the ends dry. With an auger he bored four holes in the rim of one of the heavy box-covers, into which he inserted the ends of ropes, making a bridle such as boys put on their kites. Weighting one side with a heavy piece of iron, he fastened the end of a hawser from the box to the bridle, and pushed the contrivance over the stern, paying out the line as the vessel drifted away from it. When about a hundred feet were out, he made it fast to the quarter-bitt (a strong post), and watched the effect as the line tautened. It certainly did bring the stern to the wind, but not enough to give the craft headway. He rigged the other box-cover as a drag on the other quarter, and had the satisfaction of seeing the boat pay off and go staggering through the water, and, though yawing right and left, keep a general direction eastward. He hurrahed his delight, and took the wheel, but found that he could make no improvement in the serpentine wake the barge left behind her. Deeply laden and weighted with ice, she now shipped every sea over the stern, and to escape them he went below, satisfied for the time that she was going somewhere at a fairly good rate. Had he been successful at the wheel, he would have cut away the drags to increase her speed, but he feared to. Could he put sail on her, and increase her speed with the drags still out? The sound of the drag ropes, straining on the bitts, gave him an idea of power that he could use—power beyond the strength of a hundred men.
Up he came and surveyed the ground, inspecting first the jib. It was covered with six inches of solid ice. It would be too dangerous to climb out there and chop it loose. Besides, when set, it would show little surface, and would only help to keep her before the wind. He needed a mast and a larger sail. So he inventoried his material. The furled fore-sail was there, with a good boom and gaff; the boxes were filled with strong hawsers, and on top of the coils were tackles, small line, and deck tools. He had a cabinful of running-gear, and, counting the pulley-blocks in reach, found himself possessed of four large double and three large single blocks, all shackled to their places. With salt, hatchet, and tools, he disconnected these and carried them below.
The forward hawser-box was in his way, and he emptied it, coiling the lines in the cabin. Disdaining to chop it clear of ice, he merely scored a rough groove, knotted a heavy rope to the box, and leading this aft, hitched it to one of the drag-lines—with the same knot he had used in New York—and slacked away. The surrounding ice crackled, split, and went to pieces as the heavy box bounded from its bed and rolled about the decks. A friendly sea carried it overboard, and he cut it adrift. He spliced ropes for tackles, and an able seaman could have spliced no better—though, possibly, more quickly; for sailors are made, not born like poets and mechanics. He chopped ice and manipulated tackles—with the drag for power—and by noon had the heavy boom, sail, and gaff on deck, and two holes sunk in the solid bed of ice abaft the stump to receive the jaws when his mast should arise. Salting his work as he left it, he labored on, perspiring with his efforts, and drenched by the merciless seas which boarded the craft amidships. Ice formed on his back, but he worked with an energy new to him. Was it love of life, or love of mechanics that impelled him?
Late in the afternoon he first felt hunger, and surveyed his work before going aft to eat. The sail was cut away and lay on deck, a frozen cylinder, lashed to the rail. Not wanting the gaff, he had sped it over the side by clever handling of ropes and drag-line. The boom lay nearly amidships with the middle of a brand-new hawser knotted to its after end, the ends of which, equally cut to the length of the boom, he had secured to two strong iron rings in the rails, one each side,—stout shrouds for his new mast. A strong tackle led from the end of the boom to the jagged head of the mast stump. Another from the same end led to the bows, hooking into the still intact dead-eye of the broken fore-stay. The first was to lift his mast until the other could act, which would then complete the work, and when the mast was up, act as a permanent support from forward—a fore-stay. A single block, with a long rope pulled through, was secured to the underside of the boom, close to the end. Although he might not have named it, this rope was his halliard—to hoist his sail. His fertile brain had worked, in advance of his crippled body; he had lost no time in planning the next step.
After a hurried lunch he studied his drag-line—his power. Could he lift that mast with one drag? He knew nothing of foot-pounds, horse-power, or mechanical equivalents, but he "guessed" that he could not. So, knotting the ends of both to his last hawser, he threw them overboard, and soon had both drags straining on one rope—a doubling of power, but an unseamanlike waste of good manila. He then led the falls, or hauling parts, of his tackles aft, and hitching the one he was to use first to the drag-line, slacked out until it tautened. But his mast must go up straight as a jack-knife blade from the handle; it must not swing; he needed side guys to steady it. These he rigged from the end of the boom through two blocks hooked in the rails, thence aft to where he could slack away from two iron belaying-pins. Then he was ready.
First, inspecting everything, he payed out carefully, and had the satisfaction of seeing the boom lift amid a shower of crackling ice from the tackle, staggering its way upward, and jerking violently on the guy-ropes as it swayed back and forth. But they soon tautened, and, leading the drag-line across the deck, he slackened these guys alternately, paying out on the drags as he moved back and forth, thus keeping the spar comparatively steady. When the tackle had reached the slippery angle of forty-five degrees, he fastened the fall of the long bow-tackle to the drag-line, and soon got the weight of the boom on this. Then, cutting the other way, he payed out roundly, fearing the guys would part from the merciless tugs they received as the spar, nearly on end, thrashed from side to side. But they held nobly. Soon the heavy shrouds tautened, and the new mast, describing a few jerky circles against the gray sky, settled itself, a rigid mass with the hull, held by its icy socket at the deck, aft by two hawsers to the rail, and forward by a strong four-part tackle to the bow. But he must secure this fore-stay, now depending on the uncertain tension of the drag-line. By the time he had done so, darkness had almost arrived, and the ghastly mound on deck, looking ghastlier in the lessening light, sent him aft for the night. First, however, he salted his halliard, coiled on the fife-rail, and threw the rest of the salt on the frozen cylinder which he was to transform to a sail in the morning. Then dropping the tackles and deck tools down the stairs, he looked around the shortened horizon before following them.
The aspect had not changed. The same black and gray waste of wind-driven cloud and foam-crested sea met his eye; and yet he fancied the darker line of land to the southward looked larger. He went below, wet, benumbed, and exhausted, but feeling within him the exultation of a victor and the strange stirrings of a newly aroused manhood. Dry clothes and supper refreshed him a little, and again he studied the chart. Reaching down the cook's rolling-pin and placing the chart on the floor, he knelt on it.
"Now, that circle in the corner," he said, "can't mean nothin' but to show the way the lake runs. That line on it marked E an' W means east an' west, an' the one crossin' it with S at the bottom means south, an' t'other end must mean north, o' course. An' that thing in the hole upstairs is marked just the same an' allus points the same way—wonder why? Now, le's see.
"In the mornin' I 'spect she'll be pretty close to that shore." And he placed the rolling-pin so that by ranging his eye he struck a line from Buffalo nearly parallel to the south shore and touching it two-thirds of its length from that port.
"Now, I'll jess guess that in the mornin' I'll be somewhere near this line." He rolled his improvised parallel rule; it would not reach the compass diagram in the corner, and he supplemented it with the edge of the chopping-board, which he placed on the centre of the circle and flush with the rolling-pin.
"Eight divisions o' that circle 'tween east an' north," he mused. "This strikes off 'bout two an' a half o' them. Two an' a half divisions north o' the east line. I'll remember."
His sleep was troubled. All night he chopped ice and poked frozen ropes through blocks too small for them, tied hitches that slipped, and spliced ropes that broke. Once he was up. The mast was still in place, and the drag still kept her before the wind. He could not see the compass, but the wind and sea were unquestionably milder. So he turned in again, and aroused at daylight to find himself within two miles of the shore, an angry surf showing, and the wind brisk from the north. But the gale was over.
The barge was heading straight for the nest of breakers, and he must do something quickly. A few moments of dazed thinking and he was awake and himself. With some small dry rope from the cabin, he lashed the forward upper corner of the sail to the foot of the mast; he could not haul it snug to its place, but made it secure. Then with the axe he chopped one of the blocks from the rail, where he had left it, securing it to the same place, and, knotting one end of the halliard into the after upper corner of the sail, he passed the other through this block, and leading it aft, fastened it to the drag-line, not by a hitch—both ropes were icy—but by a firm lashing of small line.
Before paying out to hoist the sail, he took his axe and made mighty dents in the ice which bound it. He chopped, hammered, and pried until he dared wait no longer, and then he threw off the drag-line turns and chopped again, where most needed, as the sail shook itself loose and arose with a thrashing and crackling that was deafening.
He was driven away by the hurling pieces of ice, and ran to the drag-line. Taking a turn, he dubiously watched the sail ascend as he slacked out, not knowing as yet how he was to secure the lower part, until he noticed a ring worked into the edge which was just ready to slip over the side out of his reach. Making fast, he ran below, emerging with some small line and his best tackle, one block of which he hooked to this ring, lashing the hook, and the other to the ring-bolt in the starboard rail, left vacant by the single block. Hauling taut, he secured the tackle, then paying out more drag-line, brought the sail up.
It set beautifully, a picturesque leg-of-mutton above, but sadly blocked the deck with the unused portion below. It increased the barge's speed toward the shore, and he took the wheel to throw her round. She would not come; so, lashing the halliard to the bitt, with some misgivings he cut the drag-line. Then she answered her helm, and soon was clawing off that lee-shore as bravely as though carrying a complete equipment of spars, sails, and able seamen.
He found the course he had selected and held her to it, not steering true, but very well for a novice. When hungry he dropped the wheel, rushed to the galley, and coming back with some bread, found her rounding up to the wind. But she payed off when he put the wheel over, and, munching the bread, he steered on, watching for ports on the south shore. He saw no signs that his judgment approved of, however. The wind was freshening and hauling back to its old quarter, and he resolved to go on; he could not miss Buffalo.
As night came on he reasoned out the necessity of light on the compass, and investigating, found two lamps, one burned out, the other full, approachable from the inside of the cabin. He lighted the full one, and, returning to the wheel, found the vessel in the trough of the sea and threatening to roll his mast out. But it held, and he brought her back to the course, resolved not to leave the wheel again.
Darkness descended, and he steered by compass alone, as the wind freshened to a gale, and by midnight to a hurricane that at times flattened the seas to a level. His lame side ached; his blind eye, inflamed with cold, smarted as though torn with needles; but he bravely made his course good. The seas poured over and drenched him, and ice formed on his back and shoulders, descending as a curtain from the rim of his sou'wester. Working the wheel made his arms and breast perspire, while his feet smarted, burned, and grew numb as the water in his boots congealed. All but engulfed in a liquid world, he felt the torture of thirst until he bit ice from his sleeve. He talked to and about himself.
A bright light flared out on the port bow and went out. It appeared again and again. What was it? He did not know, but it cheered him. It passed astern, and another appeared to starboard. And so he steered on through the night, on the course he had chosen and remembered: northeast by east, half east.
A sleepy life-saver, patrolling the beach, saw a curious craft approaching port in the gray of the morning, making wild, zig-zag yaws, as though undecided which shore to strike. He awakened his comrades and then the nearest tug-captain, and having nothing better to do and with plenty of time, turned out all the tugs moored on his side of the river. Six puffing, snorting, high-pressure tugs ranged up alongside of the shapeless iceberg floundering into port, their captains roaring out requests for a line to the dishevelled creature at the wheel. A vacant stare and a backward wave of the arm were the only answer.
Gayly and noisily the procession passed up Buffalo River, and it was only after the leading craft had torn three vessels from their moorings; after passing the foot of Main Street, black with cheering men, and through the bridge, barely swung in time to save it, that the tugmen managed to get aboard and take lines. The barge was stopped just in time to save a canal boat that lay in her way from a fatal ramming.
She was moored to the dock, and crowds poured aboard and passed comments. And her helmsman and navigator—where was he? In the galley, lighting a fire; he had earned his breakfast and wanted it. Newspaper men sought him and asked questions, which he answered between mouthfuls, mainly by a simple, "Dunno." One brought him a looking-glass, into which he looked, wonderingly; his lips were shrunken and drawn, his face wrinkled, and his hair, which had been dark, was white as the crests of the seas he had conquered.
The captain of a windbound liner appeared and interviewed him. "He's not a sailor," he reported, later; "but he has accomplished the greatest feat of pure seamanship I ever heard of. I met that craft at the head of the lake three days ago. She must have been dismasted that night in the first of the blow. He told me how he found himself alone, rigged drags for power, put a jury-mast in her, and struck off a course with a rolling-pin, and clawed her off a lee-shore, and sailed her down this lake in the wildest hurricane we've ever had here. Yes, sir, it's wonderful; but it's possible. And it's a salvage job, too; he'll get several thousand dollars."
But though every reporter on every paper in Buffalo hunted for him high and low, he did not put in a claim for salvage.
That night a south-bound freight train carried a wrinkled, white-haired, one-eyed "tramp," bound for sunnier climes, where ice and snow were unknown.
This work was published before January 1, 1929, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.
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