WE lay three days in New Orleans, but the captain did not succeed
in finding another pilot; so he proposed that I should stand
a daylight watch, and leave the night watches to George Ealer.
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 of
some 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 new
pilot 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 sat
chatting on a freight pile on the levee till midnight.
The subject of the chat, mainly, was one which I think we
had not exploited before--steamboat disasters. One was then
on its way to us, little as we suspected it; the water which
was to make the steam which should cause it, was washing past
some 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 much
use in cases of disaster and attendant panic; still, they might
be of SOME use; so we decided that if a disaster ever fell
within 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 hundred
and 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 was
again 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 below
Memphis on a half-head of steam, towing a wood-flat which was fast
being 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 and
the head engineer, the carpenter, the chief mate, and one striker;
Captain Klinefelter was in the barber's chair, and the barber was
preparing 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 out
of the flat now, Ealer rang to 'come ahead' full steam, and the next
moment 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 struck
the water seventy-five feet from the boat. Brown, the pilot,
and George Black, chief clerk, were never seen or heard of after
the explosion. The barber's chair, with Captain Klinefelter
in 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 toe
projecting 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 of
his coat, and pressed both hands there tightly to keep this protection
in 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 up
and returning. He presently landed on top of the unexploded boilers,
forty feet below the former pilot-house, accompanied by his wheel
and 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 air
as quickly as he could; and when the steam cleared away he returned
and climbed up on the boilers again, and patiently hunted
out each and every one of his chessmen and the several joints
of his flute.
By this time the fire was beginning to threaten. Shrieks and
groans filled the air. A great many persons had been scalded,
a great many crippled; the explosion had driven an iron crowbar
through 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 their
posts, nevertheless. They drew the wood-boat aft, and they
and the captain fought back the frantic herd of frightened
immigrants till the wounded could be brought there and placed
in 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 said
he believed he was not hurt (what an unaccountable error!), and
therefore 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 several
persons who were imprisoned under the ruins were begging piteously
for help. All efforts to conquer the fire proved fruitless;
so the buckets were presently thrown aside and the officers
fell-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 was
likely to drive away the workers, he begged that some one would
shoot 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 flames
ended 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 floated
down the river toward Ship Island. They moored the flat at the head
of 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 steamer
came 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 his
injuries and saw that they were fatal, and naturally turned their
main attention to patients who could be saved.
Forty of the wounded were placed upon pallets on the floor of a great
public hall, and among these was Henry. There the ladies of Memphis
came every day, with flowers, fruits, and dainties and delicacies
of 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 a
disaster 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 face
and 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 done
in order that the MORALE of the other patients might not be injuriously
affected by seeing one of their number in the death-agony. The fated one
was always carried out with as little stir as possible, and the stretcher
was always hidden from sight by a wall of assistants; but no matter:
everybody knew what that cluster of bent forms, with its muffled
step 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 no
more afterward. But I saw our chief mate carried thither more than once.
His hurts were frightful, especially his scalds. He was clothed in
linseed 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 rave
and shout and sometimes shriek. Then, after a period of dumb exhaustion,
his disordered imagination would suddenly transform the great apartment
into 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! going
to be all DAY getting that hatful of freight out?' and supplement
this explosion with a firmament-obliterating irruption or profanity
which nothing could stay or stop till his crater was empty. And now
and then while these frenzies possessed him, he would tear off handfuls
of 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 mind
or out of it, he would not take it. He said his wife had been killed
by that treacherous drug, and he would die before he would take it.
He suspected that the doctors were concealing it in his ordinary medicines
and 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 allowed
no more to be brought near him. Three times I saw him carried
to the death-room, insensible and supposed to be dying; but each time
he 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 attributes
that go to constitute high and flawless character, did all that
educated judgment and trained skill could do for Henry; but, as the
newspapers had said in the beginning, his hurts were past help.
On the evening of the sixth day his wandering mind busied itself with
matters far away, and his nerveless fingers 'picked at his coverlet.'
His hour had struck; we bore him to the death-room, poor boy.
