I fell once into conversation with a smack-boy—a Yorkshire lad—who told me a story which I privately declined to believe until I saw the printed report of the inquest, and had confirmation of his narrative from other hands. Men who go to sea meet with strange accidents, and perish through causes which landsmen would ridicule as impossibilities in marine novels; but seldom do a vessel’s crew encounter such a disaster as that which befell the people of the smack Apostle, of Hull. I wish I could tell the story as the fishing apprentice gave it me. No painter could imagine a finer study than the figure of the lad in his blue knitted overall, his big boots, his sou’wester, the hinder thatch of which forked out from the back of his head like the tail of a gull on the wing, his young face as he talked warming up into a kind of passionate awe and fear, as it might in his sleep when the dreadful circumstance stood out in the sharp configuration of a dream; whilst now and again he would pass the back of his rough hand across his forehead to rub off the gouts of sweat which gathered there. However, I can do no more than translate the lad’s yarn, and make it complete, in its way, by facts I got from others. The Apostle, then, was a smack, belonging to Hull. Will Stevenson was her master, and John Butler her mate. Besides these she carried two other men and a boy—the lad who told me the story—making in all five souls. She left Hull, however, with only four men, for the boy did not join her until she had been out cruising a week, when he was sent to her in a steamer.

Life on board a smack is but a dull affair, and such excitements as it has are all against the fisherman. It is tedious work drifting for hours with the trawl overboard; but what is to be made of it when, as sometimes happens, the trawl is got aboard and the net found torn to pieces by a piece of sunken wreck or something of that kind, and all the fish gone? Or take a gale of wind blowing for a week, keeping the fisherman waiting and waiting for a spell of moderate weather to fetch his ground. To be hove-to in a smack in the North Sea is such a dance as you must endure—not for a day, but for several days together—to understand. Who that has rolled in a big steamer across the tempestuous stretch of waters which wash our eastern coasts has not watched from the reeling, spray-swept deck the spectacle of some dandy or cutter-rigged boat, jumping as if by magic into the arena of the green, pelting, and foaming amphitheatre, with her storm jib-sheet to windward or well amidships, a slender band of dark, close-reefed mainsail tearing at the quivering gaff, whilst she tosses the high spring of her bows at the rushing snow of the surges, chopping sharply down into the livid vortex and making it flash up in white spume that smothers her like the smoking spray of a great waterfall, vanishing until her gaff is hidden, and nothing shows but the jerking vane at the masthead behind the glittering ridge of the sea that runs at her with the roar of a goods train sweeping through a tunnel; and then springing afresh to the height of the thunderous surge until some fathoms of her keel forward are exposed, and leaning down upon the slope of the mountainous wave, and under the giant pressure of the ringing gale, until her mast seems parallel with the water and her dark shred of canvas a mere black patch upon the snow-storm under her?

One wonders, looking at such a sight, how the big-booted fellows aboard of her hold on; how they manage to cook their food; by what inconceivable art they contrive to “fetch” their bunks, or sleeping closets, without numerous ineffectual struggles, first of all, to hit the holes. But, in truth, no class of sailors make less trouble of dirty weather than fishermen. With his tiller securely lashed, the storm jib slatting a moment or two as the reefed mainsail swings the little craft into the wind, then shoving her nose round again as the sea runs hissing away under her, the air forward dark with flying foam and the water draining overboard in bucketfuls with every send, the smacksman sits cosily in the companion, pipe in mouth, keeping one eye on the look-out and the other eye on the time when one of his mates shall come and take his place, and send him below to toast his hands at the little stove, whose ruddy glow pleasantly tinges the darksome twilight of the cabin, and enables him to find, without groping, another pipe of tobacco before he lies down.

Daybreak on Friday, the Apostle being then very nearly five weeks out from Hull, found the smack with her trawl over the weather quarter and near the north-east end of the Dogger Bank. There was a fresh breeze blowing and a middling sea running, and the smack, surging to leeward with the trend of the waves, rose and fell with the regularity of a pendulum. Many miles distant to windward was another smack, apparently heading for the same ground over which the Apostle was dragging her trawl; otherwise the sea was vacant, and the greenish dawn, flinging a sickly tint into the sky, but leaving the water dark by contrast, and throwing up the great circle of the horizon until the ocean resembled a black and solid disc centring the huge concavity of the heavens, made the immediate aspect of the deep indescribably wild and melancholy. Indeed, there is not a more desolate scene in the world than daybreak at sea. The shadow of the night still hangs in folds upon the water, and the dim illumination in the east only serves to accentuate the chilly sullenness and grim bleakness bequeathed by the black hours, the last of which is drawing away in gloom into the west. But the sun is a noble magician, and one stroke of his flashing wand converts the mystery of the dawn’s vague hints into a glorious revelation of blue heights and sparkling waters. The Apostle’s trawl had been over all night, but a further short spell of drifting could do no harm, and might furnish out another trunk of fish, and the interval would give them time to get breakfast. So the little fire in the stove was stirred into a good blaze, the coffee boiled, and the two men at rest in their bunks routed out for the meal. Fishermen are usually well fed, and that is one reason, I suppose, why they appear to relish their food in a manner you shall not find in any forecastle. They have generally a good freight of fish to pick from, and they are not slow to boil a cod or cook a big sole when fancy and appetite prompt them. Somehow or other, to me, the smoke that comes blowing away out of the little chimneys which pierce their decks always savours of good cheer, and I was not at all surprised, on looking over some victualling accounts shown me by a smack-owner, to discover that the fishermen’s sea-larders—many of them, certainly—are stocked with a liberality that must make owners very anxious indeed to know how much fish there is aboard, when their vessel’s number or burgee comes within reach of their telescopes.

Breakfast done, the master gave orders for the trawl to be got in, and all hands tumbled up on deck to help at one of the few heavy jobs which happen aboard fishing-smacks. I have already said there was a fresh breeze blowing, and the vessel, though hove-to with her jib-sheet to windward, leaned down freely under the weight of the reefed mainsail. The sea was regular, but ran quickly, and every lift of the surges helped the wind to lay the little craft along, until at times her lee gunwale was flush with the water; but, like all boats of her class, she would right with great vehemence, jumping to windward like a goaded creature of instinct, and making the decks, slippery with wet, extremely dangerous even to practised feet. They say that a fisherman’s walk is two steps and overboard, and any one would have thought the saying a true one who had seen this jumping bit of a fabric—sparking like a shrimp in and out of the hollows of the tumbling waters—and watched those big-booted, clumsily-moving, powerfully-built men striding about the decks and making ready to drag the great trawl in.

The process is very simple. The dandy-wink is manned, the beam secured, and the net is then dragged in over the side. The Apostle’s men had succeeded in getting in the net to the cod-end, as it is called. All five hands were employed on this job, as it is one that demands the united strength of such little companies as smacks carry. They leaned over the rail to grasp the net, but the vessel at that moment burying her lee side through the lift of an unusually heavy sea, one of the men lost his balance and went overboard, and the net bellying out and sending away as the vessel rolled to windward, in the twinkling of an eye the other three men whose hands grasped the meshes were torn clean over the beam and buried in the sea alongside, leaving only the boy on deck. It was done in a breath. There was no time even to raise a shriek. One moment there were all four men leaning over the side, the net securely inwreathed about their fingers and waiting for the signal from the master to drag together; the next they were floundering in the water alongside, struggling, desperately clutching at the sinking net, and drowning. There was a portion of the net on deck, and to this the boy—who preserved an heroical presence of mind in the midst of this appallingly sudden and dreadful disaster—clung, that the men might not drag it all overboard (and so have nothing to hold by) in their wild and overhand grasping at the deadly, deceptive meshes which floated and sank under them, and clogged the free action of their limbs, and clung to them like masses of seaweed, settling them lower and lower as new folds of it were swept by the water around them. The net being to leeward, the tendency of every sea was to belly it out and increase its weight, whilst also setting the whole mass of it further and further away from the vessel’s side; but this weight was beyond description increased by the men who battled with the fury of strong dying creatures in the deadly envelopment of the trawl. Every now and again a sea would break under the vessel and bury the poor fellows in foam; and then, as the smack swept down into the hollow and leaned heavily to windward, the drag of the hull upon the net would strike it up again, and the four smacksmen would reappear with dusky despairing faces, their eyes protruding as they strained for breath. Robust as the boy was, here was a conflict it was impossible for him long to engage in. He held to the net with as manly and resolute a heart as ever an English lad brought to a struggle for life; but the weight of the bellying net and of the men clinging to it, increased as it was tenfold at times by the swing and rush of the smack upon the sea, must have taxed and presently exhausted the strength of a dozen such as he; gradually as he failed the net was torn foot by foot away from him, though every time it was wrenched from his hand he grabbed at it again, and held on with clenched teeth until another swoop would unlock his fingers as you might snap a clay pipe-stem.

Suddenly turning his head—for hitherto he had been engrossed by the dreadful struggle in the water just a fathom or two away beyond him—he spied the smack that had been sighted at dawn, about half a mile to windward. She was manifestly heading for the Apostle, and the boy shouted to the miserable drowning men that help was coming, and urged them to hold on. But it was doubtful whether they heard the lad’s voice. Close upon the water the seething and hissing of foam would be deafening; moreover, their eyes were glazing—death had his hand on their throats; they presented a row of asphyxiated faces, now and again revolving in the eddies amid the trawling gear, sometimes thrown up until their bodies as high as the waists were out of the water, in which posture they would remain poised with uplifted arms that gave them a horrible appearance of entreaty, then vanishing utterly, to emerge a few seconds after as the roll of the vessel swung them up and out. The boy’s strength was now completely exhausted, and also he had to let go in order to signal to the approaching smack. The whole of the net then went overboard.

About an hour had passed since the men had fallen into the sea, during all which time this most shocking tragedy was being enacted, whilst the boy with magnificent courage protracted his shipmates’ lives by maintaining his hold of the net. But the moment he let go the net veered out to its full sweep, and an instant after one of the men sank and rose no more. The smack was now within hail. The boy rushed to the weather side, and shouted out the dreadful story with such strength as remained in him, at the same pointing frantically at the water where the drowning men were. The dreadful scene was by this time visible to the crew of the vessel, which proved to be a Yarmouth smack called the Esther. They tumbled their boat over the side; a couple of hands jumped into her and rowed at once for the perishing fishermen. The boy ran back to the lee side of his vessel to encourage the poor creatures, but, looking, he discovered that the third man was gone; the master and mate only were to be seen, both clinging to the gear and scarcely living. The little boat—hardly better than a walnutshell in such a sea—came along fast; but before she could come up to the master, he let go his hold and floated away, face down and arms hanging lifeless, upon a running wave. A few strokes of the oars, however, brought the rescuers abreast of him, and he was seized and lifted into the boat, which then returned and took off the mate from the gear, to which he clung like a mass of black seaweed torn from the rocks. Calling out to the boy that they would see to him presently, the Yarmouth fishermen rowed back to the Esther with their dreadful freight, but when they came to hand the men up over the side they found that the master was dead. The mate was carried below, stripped and dried before the cabin stove, then wrapped in rugs and laid in a bunk. But he was little more than a corpse when rescued, and the skipper of the Esther, going presently to see how the poor fellow fared, found that he had expired. This was the last of the four seamen who a couple of hours before were full of life and hope and heartiness. Meanwhile the master of the Esther had sent three of his men aboard the Apostle, and two days after the disaster both vessels arrived at Yarmouth.

I know not how this simple little narrative may affect others, but the relation of it moved me deeply. That four English sailors should meet with death so unexpected, so full of anguish in its protraction, so bitterly cruel throughout a long, long hour’s suffering, is perhaps significant only as another illustration of the perils of the deep. It is just one of the brief and simple annals of the poor sailor. But I cannot but think that the behaviour of that young apprentice—named Frederick John Graham—makes it worthy of record. Those who have any acquaintance with English fishermen are only too painfully well aware that the relations between owners and apprentices are by no means of a cordial kind, and in several places I hear of the clergy and others taking up the cause of these boys, and asking the public for funds to help to give them homes and to educate them into some knowledge of religion and morality, and out of the deplorable ignorance in which they are suffered to live. I am well aware that some apprentices are decidedly trials to smack-owners. They will run away with their master’s clothes. They will refuse to go to sea in the hope of being taken before a magistrate and sent to prison instead. But, nevertheless, I cannot quite satisfy myself that smack-owners—taking them as a body, granting many exceptions—treat their apprentices with the consideration that even the most hard-worked and ill-paid servants in other walks of life expect and extract from their masters. One does not want them to act the part of schoolmasters, and teach the boys to read and write; but upon what principle do they oppose the efforts of others who are willing to perform that duty? and why do they find something obnoxious in homes established to furnish smack apprentices with certain comforts and harmless recreations—calculated to keep the lads out of the streets when they come ashore from a voyage—which smack-owners themselves do not apparently see any reason for providing? For these and other reasons, therefore, the endurance and hearty English spirit of Graham may be thought a proper subject to hold up to applause; for, accepting the lad as a type, the public may witness enough merit in the hardly-used and laboriously-worked community to which he belongs to justify them in giving a helping hand to the humanitarians who are struggling to make the lives of the apprentices when ashore happy and useful to themselves; whilst the smack-owner will recognize in this narrative of Graham a spirit to which he is by no means unaccustomed, though he needs perhaps to have it more diligently emphasized than he has yet found it, before he will accept the hint it offers to his forbearance and to his humanity as the owner—in a most literal sense—of lads who, taking them all round, are the most friendless beings in the world, with the whole machinery of the law against them, and only here and there a few seaside dwellers to take their part by endeavouring to give some little wholesome sweetness to their existence when out of their vessels.