The Royal Tar Tragedy

And then there was no light at all in the East, save the flash of lightning out over the archipelago, which gave brief glimpses of the raging Atlantic, of giant monsters rolling directly into the cove, which was our supposed haven from the storm. The Steamship The Royal Tar was tossed around like a child’s toy, and we with it like ragged dolls. The captain stood grim-faced in the pilot house. None of the crew dared say what all were thinking, nor need they; the skipper knew what he was doing, and knew what he had done.

“Check the hold, that the fire is out, Samuel. Check the engine, see if we have the means to leave the cove ” said the Skipper. Not shouting.

“Aye, Sir. Will do”

I bade my friends farewell, not with words, but with a salute. The waves were breaking over the port side the Royal Tar making the deck a perilous conduit. The omnibus was gone, torn from the fore deck, the tether frayed; it had crashed through the starboard gunwale. What might Neptune make of such a contraption? What would Neptune make of our drowned watchman and cabin boy? How many crew had been lost already? It was my turn. There was no merit in timing. In the dark I could not see the wind and waves coming at us. I could not measure the risk. The boat tilted port, and I leapt for the railings, where by God’s good grace, I found purchase. It was not my turn.

I threw myself below deck, first through steerage, where I fought my way through clutching hands, and desperate pleas. It was an outer circle of hell that I left when I jumped into the hold, and into an inner circle below decks.

I landed in a slurry of straw, urine and feces, mixed in with bilge brine, slopping back and forth. It was slither beneath, I lost my footing and slid between a barrel and crate. More clutching hands, only these in the slit-windowed barrel were furred and taloned, and the jabbering faces more fearful than those above for want of understanding. A camel was loose, had burst from its balsa pen. A rear leg was broken, the snapped bone protruding, red marrow at core, and the beast was stumbling, falling, stumbling and crashing against crates and the bulkhead, near the caged lion, which cowered, which was like seeing the King without a crown.

I climbed over the broke camel. The horses were still standing, three drays, wild-eyed, frothing at the mouth. When they saw me they bucked and kicked, splintering lumber with their hooves. The elephant was bleeding from a wound in its side, from which protruded a shard of wood; the beast was laboring to breathe, and would likely die in this wooden coffin called the Royal Tar. I moved on to the engine room, where I could see the flare-up fire had consumed a bulkhead and a crate of dogs, dead, dying, burned and drenched. Buckets and hoses lay about where the engineer and stokers had fought and won a battle at a cost of both men and beasts, but they had won. Raw and red were the faces of the men. Black-faced was the dead man, that lay in repose by the coal bin. We would envy the dead.

“What of the fire?” I shouted at Turner the engineer, a stocky man of immense strength. He was covered in soot and grease, wet to the skin, but there was no fear in the man. Like the Captain, he spoke quietly and was therefore hard to hear above the noise of the animals, the thumping of the waves, and the cries of the passengers, audible through the vented mid-deck.

“The fire is out, Sam, the fire is dead, and the engine is good. On t’other side of the wicked wind, the wheel will roll again and save us”.

“The fire is out, you are sure?” I shouted, because I did not have the nerve of this man, I could not talk as if calm.

Turner did not answer to the insult of a question asked twice.

But for now, the Royal Tar was immobilized, neither sail nor steam were options. We must ride out the storm, pray that the anchor would grip that the chain would hold true, that the boat would not take on water and flounder. From a fiery death we were delivered unharmed. It was the watery one that shrieked threats at us, all astir and whipped to a frenzy by wind and thunder.

From the inner to the outer circles of hell I manhandled myself, clinging to whatever fixed thing I could find. To the passengers I had but useless things to say, “Stay calm, the storm will pass.” More, they wanted more. What should they do? What of the women and children, asked the women? The crewmen and stewards were asking the same. Should they come topside?

"Above deck, no! It is safer here, sheltered." My objectives were elsewhere, but what of the women and children? What of the animals? My mind was askew, my thoughts were bleak, if expressed, corrupt.

“What of the smoke and the flames?”

“The fire is out!” I shouted. At least this one thing I could tell them, and narrow down the imagined terror to just that of drowning. I climbed the steep steps to the starboard deck unafraid of being washed overboard after what I had witnessed.

The captain is a good man, but good men make mistakes. We should have bet our lives on outrunning the storm as others had done. The cove offered no shelter at all, owing to the capricious side-winding tempest. In fact, the opposite. The up-whelming ocean had nowhere else to vent.

In a flash of lightning I saw rocks, in that blink, close, a plume of surf flew heavenward as the mighty swell smote the land. The anchor was dragging, and I cursed the stupid wheel; it seemed to catch the motion of the waves and magnify them. We would be smithereened.

“The fire is out, Sir, the engine is saved. Turner has his fists on it”.

The captain and first mate found no pleasure in the good news since there remained no options until the storm relented or changed direction. We remained in peril. There were two lifeboats, enough to carry the women and children from the Royal Tar to another fate, most likely capsizing, though being dashed on a ledge seemed a good wager. The captain said we must wait. Surely there was an end to this relentless fury. How long can God stay angry at his own creation? And how long would He throw everything at the Royal Tar, alone? Why not other vessels: the pirate ships, men ’o’ war and slave boats? What evil was there in a circus menagerie?

The wind abated and shifted to the Northwest. Our prayers seemed answered. Though the waves were still ferocious and terrible, they came at us now in a methodical way, rhythmic like a shanty, allowing us to anticipate the movement, to move against the wave, balance upon the branch, and at day-break, underway, with the paddle churning and the steamship engine roaring, we made way from the cove into the open ocean and headed south from Machias Bay. A gap in the cloud revealed a forgiving God. Atop the surface of the Ocean were porpoise, whales and sharks knocked off course, and we steamed through the abundant sea.

By afternoon we were at the Fox Islands and our spirits rose, some semblance of order prevailed below decks, the women still fraught, the men pecking. The animals were quiet, mostly exhausted, some dead. The elephant called for mercy, spoiling the moment. There was no easy way of killing a thing so large in such as small space.

At half past one o'clock on the wheelhouse clock, the engine went silent. The water in the boiler had run too low, a new consideration, another cost of conquering last night's fire. I was dispatched again to the engine room, where Turner reassured me that we were safe, the tinder imprisoned. We might lurch to the Coast of Maine.

At two o'clock, flames escaped a hidden place and were licking at the cargo. The fire went up from the boiler upwards where it crept along unseen into the passenger deck, where it fed upon luggage and furniture, and the licks became a lashing, and then the air drawn through open port-holes caused the lashing to gyrate and billow, and the lower and middle decks of the Royal Tar were soon an inferno, the innermost circle of hell. Turner and his men were trapped, but they did not shout or scream, they died with the breath stolen from their lungs by flame, unable to curse or pray.

Below deck and sheltered! Safe from the Storm! The misguided poor women and children were trapped and engulfed by the inferno. I believe they alone went to heaven by way of hell, dispatched by my words.

Drowning is fearful in an abstract way, it is not something that can be nearly experienced or experimented with, not in the course of everyday life. But to be burnt alive is something that we all can imagine, because fire is our constant companion, and it is the intimacy that makes it is the most terrifying way to die because we know exactly what to expect, so the terror starts early and stays with you to the end.

We abandoned ship. Captain Reed did with his able-bodied crew what he could, but it was not enough. There were only two lifeboats, owing to the strange manifest, the omnibus and the African zoo. I believe the ship owners and the circus promoters were to blame for this woeful inadequacy. For these businessmen in Boston the storm was the pitter-patter of rain on a windowpane.

I jumped overboard, and doing so, I bade my mother farewell, and to God I committed my soul, seeking forgiveness for the false promise I'd given the innocent. Flailing in the tumultuous ocean, I was dragged down by my wool jacket into the frigid gloam, where there was no purchase. Sam Proctor, able seaman, lost at sea. If only I’d learned to swim. If only I’d learned how to eat fire. If only this and that and foremost the passengers. And then I was drowning in the inky dark ocean, in the osmotic place where the sea meets the sky, and thrashes at it. The air was soaked by water, the water was bubbling with air, and I was drowning one way or another. My lungs burned, my heart became a painful knot of muscle, and I died, and my lifeless body slipped into the deep where I think there was stillness, and I felt my mother’s love.

Strange to tell, but I died and was reborn, or I am still dead but find death is a merely a continuation. Not heaven, nor hell, but one thing, both. This gave me comfort, that the soul existed in a single experiential continuum that transcended birth and death, but then I thought of the women and children that burned aboard the Royal Tar, and I might have wept had I been able. Can souls burn in heaven?

The waves crashed against the rocks, throwing burnt lumber and timber shards and flopping bodies up onto the hard. A dray horse staggered up in the surf, got knocked sideways, and was thrown up the beach, where it tumbled and scrambled awkwardly, lame in one foot. When the horse saw the low-slung monster, it reared and staggered into the cliff wall, stumbled and charged, stumbled and charged again, and the lamed horse fell dead. The low-slung monster with the giant white fangs floated and banged about like a sack of coffee.

This is what I saw when I was flung at the island shore, where I landed on sharp black granite, when my lungs were purged of brine, and my bony breast fell and cracked upon hard rock, which knocked undone the knot that was my heart. I could not move, my limbs were heavy, my head stove-in by diamond-sharp stone. Blood dimmed my vision, blood soothed my sore mouth, I fed upon my own self.

It was day, I was found, floundering and bleeding so, by a leathery fisherman. He brought me to his hovel on Fling Island, where his crabby wife wrapped my cracked skull in rough cheese cloth and fed me fish-head broth, and in time I could feel my hands and feet.

Did I know anything of these devilish creatures? Had the gates of hell been opened? Where should the islanders go, what should they do? Was the island now cursed? I faced such an inquisition from the simple folk on that small, isolated knuckle of land. They had never seen such things as were washed up that day. A tusked whale, a long-necked square-toothed seal, a barrel of savages, thick with fur. These dead things exceeded their imaginings and the Fling Islanders feared the end of days was nigh because it too was beyond comprehension, such was the scrambling of their unbridled minds.

"It was a circus and travelling show, there's nought to fear", I said, now Captain of this crew by virtue of being informed, but they would not understand, and I dare not insist given I had no authority when it came to future and fate. My words were like those of a talking goat, and I was soon left alone to gaze on the island archipelago, and the distant shimmer of the placid Atlantic Ocean. The sun flared gold and crimson at the underside of high-flying tendrils of cloud, which I took to be the forgiveness of God, or He had gone elsewhere, perhaps to Boston. The storm was gone, and so was the Royal Tar, one to the South and ever on, one to the innermost circle of hell.