She felt trapped. Her entire world now was the children in this comfortable, if simple, salon and stateroom, with light and warmth on a ship that seemed to be a captive of Cape Horn. She didn't know what to do. There was nothing to be done. She shouldn't be complaining or feeling sorry for herself. She had her children for company and the steward, Walter, took care of them the best he could with all his other duties. James checked in on them whenever he could. She couldn't imagine what it had to be like for James, spending so much time on deck in such ghastly conditions. And the poor sailors having to tend sail in the ice and horrible winds—it was almost beyond imagining.
A moment later, the ship took a particularly violent roll and there was a horrible crash. Smoke filled the cabin. Mary spun around and screamed. The last roll had ripped the screws holding down the stove from the deck. It slid across the cabin, hitting the bulkhead and setting it on fire. Mary, still screaming, scooped up Tommy from up off the cabin sole, grabbed Amanda's hand and dragged her into the companionway. Walter rushed past her and then ran out again.
“Help! The cabin's on fire and the stove is adrift," he yelled as loud as he could.
Captain Barker and Mr. Atkinson arrived in the salon at almost the same instant. Red-hot coals were scattered across the carpets, furniture was broken, part of a bulkhead was smashed and burning. It was hard to see or breathe for all the smoke and soot. Barker grabbed a bucket of wash water from the steward's pantry and threw it on the bulkhead, putting out the fire but adding to the smoke. Making their way to the stove, lying on its side, they saw the rivets that had held the top to the sidewalls were broken and twisted. Barker snorted. "Looks like a dying dragon, don't you think?" He shook his head. "It looks beyond repair to me. Mr. Atkinson. Get your gang in here, take it on deck and toss it overboard.”
Harry, Fred, Tom, Santiago and Jerry arrived in the cabin with broad grins on their faces. They had been in the mess room, but had never ventured in the captain's salon before, and to see it in such a state was somehow very satisfying. They wrapped wet sacking around their hands, and with a couple of hatch beams they hoisted the broken and smoking stove up and out of the cabin and onto the main deck. Timing it with a roll of the ship, they heaved the stove into the ocean and cheered as it sizzled and sank.
A small spare bogie stove was located in the lazarette, and Pugsley and the apprentices set to repairing the damage to the salon as well as they could. With a bit of new paneling and some paint, the salon was at least in order, if still not quite what it had been. Mary and the children now spent most of their time in the stateroom. The crew spent the next week chuckling over the captain's stove coming adrift. It seemed to lift everyone's spirits forward of the mast.
Captain Barker commented to Mate Atkinson, "If I had known that the bloody stove would do this much good I would have loosened the deck bolts myself." Atkinson laughed freely for the first time in what seemed like an age.
10. Rogue Wave
Captain Barker stared at the chart. The plot of their course was a sickening zigzag, back and forth, trying to capture every favoring wind shift while going nowhere but farther south, ever closer to the ice. In three weeks, by his reckoning, they had gone one hundred and seven miles south and lost twelve miles of westing. There was nothing to be done but to hang on and to outlast the westerly winds.
He reached for his jacket and went up on deck. It was two hours into the first watch, 10 p.m. They were hove to under reefed topsails and a storm staysail. The ship was plunging and rolling in the darkness. Barker made his way over to Atkinson, who had tied himself to the mizzen pin rail behind the weather cloth lashed to the shrouds to give him some protection from the icy spray.
Just then, the moon broke through the clouds and, well to weather, the captain saw a wave — a wave like he had never seen before. It seemed three times larger than the other waves and came from the wrong direction. He blinked and looked again. "Oh my God," he said beneath his breath.
It was a wall of water, stretching endlessly northwest and southeast; the top, breaking and tumbling, roaring toward them at an impossible speed. It towered so high above the other waves that they seemed to be barely swells by comparison. The mighty wave was rushing straight at the Lady Rebecca and there was absolutely nothing that he could do. The helm was already lashed down, keeping her bow as high into the wind as it would bear. No change of sail would save them from being hit by this monster, even if there was time.
Barker bellowed with all his might to the watch, "On the deck there, drop everything, jump up into the rigging! Jump for your lives! Climb high! Now!”
The sailors looked to windward and most ran for the rigging. Jerry the Greek stood for a moment, startled, and then turned and ran with the others.
Atkinson, tied to the pin rail, was secure, so Barker ran aft for the wheel and shouted to the helmsman, "Hang on." The captain grabbed the other side of the wheel and waited.
Time seemed to slow. The wave that rushed at them with such ferocity seemed to hang in his gaze for a moment before crashing in upon them. The thought flashed through his mind that no ship could survive such a wave, that they were all dead already. No one could survive such a wave.
The ship slipped sideways into the tremendous trough, momentarily sheltered from the wind, rolling to leeward into the oncoming wave, until the great vertical wall of water crashed over them. The roar of tumbling water was like a thousand cannons. The foaming, breaking crest looked higher than the lower yardarms and it fell upon them in a massive hammer blow that shook the ship, rolling her down, and seeming about to drive her wholly and forever beneath the sea.
The wall of water lifted the captain off his feet. He held on for his life, but the spoke cracked and he was thrown backward, to be stopped by the steel bulwark with a tremendous and painful crash.
The wave rolled the Lady Rebecca on her beam-ends. For what seemed an eternity she lay there, pressed by the wave and the relentless wind, like some great animal struck down, lying on its flank. Captain Barker was crumpled against the bulwark, dazed and confused. Everything was on its side. The deck appeared to be a wall, rising nearly vertically skyward. The masts were canted oddly just above the sea, and the lower yardarms were buried in the roiling water.
Then slowly, almost imperceptibly, the old ship began to right herself. She rolled up, knocked back by a passing wave once and again, but she steadily fought back against the wind and sea like a pugilist too stubborn to stay down. The ship wallowed, as if punch-drunk, but she rolled up once again. The reefed topsails and staysail luffed loudly, cracking like gunfire over the howl of the wind. In a minute or two, the cacophony of the sails died down as the fine old ship fell back onto an approximation of what had been her course, seven points off the wind.
Slowly, Captain Barker tried to move. He crawled across the deck, feeling awash in pain, and pulled himself up on the weather rail. He shivered in the cold in the howling wind, as the icy water drained from his jacket and pants. He was bruised from head to toe, but somehow nothing seemed to be broken. He looked over for the helmsman and saw him jammed against the shattered wheel box. Barker yelled, "You all right?" The helmsman raised his hand and nodded.
“Captain, are you injured?" Mr. Atkinson called, looking wild-eyed.
“I'm fine," the captain responded, not yet sure that that was true.
The deck forward was chaos. The rigging looked all out of kilter, yards akimbo. The main t'gallantmast was bent sidewards, probably cracked. The boats on the poop deck were gone. Only the twisted steel davits remained.