Mr Stephen Crane's Adventure

Te Aroha News, Volume XIV, Issue 2133, 21 July 1898, Page 2

Mr Stephen Crane's Adventure

A SENSATIONAL STORY. Mr Stephen Crane, in his account of his adventures on the Commodore, says : —‘ When the Commodore came to the enormous rollers that flee over the bar (at U.S.A.), she began to turn handsprings, and by the time she had got fairly to sea and had turned into the eye of the roaring breakers that were blowing from the south-east, there was an almost general opinion on board the vessel that a life on the rolling wave was not the finest thing in the world. Soon water was emptied out of the machine-room with buckets, and the crew were fighting with the storm for their lives. The-men were full of ‘grit,’ But soon it came to ordering the life-boat to be got away. She swung away at last, and tossed about iD the water; and then a second boat was. lowered, and then a third. They ‘ stood by ’to see the Commodore go down, and at dawn they found that thero were still men on.board. The third boat had swamped, .the men on board Had made rafts, and they wanted the floating boats to tow them along. So the little specks still danced on the waters close by the doomed vessel. When the rafts were floating astern the men prepared to clamber over the ship’s rail and await an opportunity to jump. ‘Jump,’ cried the captain once; ‘jump’ he cried a second time. The first mate plunged after the. chief , engineer and a stoker, and Went i down down. After that oame the wild tragedy of the drifting reft, and Here is; Stephen Crane’s own description:—‘The coloured stoker on the first raft threw us a lino, and we began to tow. Of course, we perfectly understood the absolute impossibility of any such thing, our dingy was within six inches of the water’s edge, there was an enormous sea running, and I knew that under the circumstances a tug boat would have no light task in moving these rafts. But we tried it, and would have continued to try it indefinitely, but that something critical came to pass. The cook controlled the line. Suddenly the boat began to go backward, and then we saw the negro on the first raft pulling on the line hand over hand and drawing us to him. r \ He had turned into a demon. He was wild—wild as a tiger. He was crouched on the raft and ready to spring. Every muscle of him seemed to be 'turned into an elastic' spring. His face yras the face of a lost, man reaehing upward, and we knew that the weight of his hand on ettr gunwale doomed us. The cook let go of the line. We rowed around to see if we could not get a line from the chief engineer, and a l l this time, mind you, there were no shrieks, no groans, but silence, silence, and silence, and then the Commodore sank. She lurched to windward, then swung afar back, righted, and drove into the sea, and the rafts were suddenly swallowed by this frightful maw of the ocean. And then by the men on the ten-foot dingy were words said that were still not words—something far beyond words.’