T. Boyle: When the Killing's Done

Captain Simon F. Blunt was a man of experience and decision. He was familiar with the waters of the channel, having been a key member of the team that had surveyed the California coast two years earlier, shortly after the territory was admitted to the union. Coming out of San Francisco the previous day, he’d encountered heavy seas and a stiff headwind, which not only put the ship off schedule but kept the majority of the passengers close to their bunks and out of the drawing room and dining salon. In order to make up time, he elected to enter the Santa Barbara Channel and take the Anacapa Passage between Santa Cruz and Anacapa, rather than steaming to the seaward of the islands, a considerably greater distance. Normally, this would have been an admirable — and expeditious — choice. Unfortunately, however, while dinner was being served that evening, fog began to set in, a frequent occurrence in the channel, resulting from the collision of the California current, which runs north to south, with the warmer waters of the southern California countercurrent, a condition that helps make the channel such a productive fishery but also disproportionately hazardous to shipping. As a result, Captain Blunt was forced to proceed by dead reckoning — in which distance is calculated according to speed in given intervals of time — rather than by taking sightings. Still, he was confident, nothing out of the routine and nothing he couldn’t handle — had handled a dozen times and more — and by ten-thirty he was certain he’d passed the islands and ordered the ship to bear to the southeast, paralleling the coast.

Half an hour later, running at her full speed of ten knots, the Winfield Scott struck an outcropping of rock off the north shore of middle Anacapa, tearing a hole in the hull and igniting an instantaneous panic amongst the passengers. People were flung from their berths, baggage cascaded across the decks, lanterns flickered, shattered, died, and the unknowable darkness of the night and the fog took hold. No one could see a thing, but everyone could feel and hear what was happening to them, the water rushing in somewhere below and the ship exhaling in a series of long ratcheting groans to make room for it. As they struggled to their feet and made their way out into the mobbed corridors, terrified of being overtaken and trapped belowdecks — water sloshing underfoot, the hands of strangers grasping and clutching at them while they staggered forward over unseen legs and boots and the sprawl of luggage, spinning, falling, rising again, and always that grim hydraulic roar to spur them — there was an immense deep grinding and a protracted shudder as the hull settled against the rock. Curses and screams echoed in the darkness. A child shrieked for its mother. Somewhere a dog was barking.

The officer of the watch, his face a pale blanched bulb hanging in the intermediate distance, sent up the alarm, and the captain, badly shaken, ordered the ship astern in an attempt to back away from the obstruction and avoid further damage. The engines strained, an evil tarry smoke fanning out over the deck till it was all but impossible to breathe, the great paddle wheel churning in the murk as if it were trying to drain the ocean bucket by bucket, everything held in suspension — the captain riveted, the officers mouthing silent prayers, the mob thundering below — until finally the ship broke loose with a long bruising sigh of splintering wood. She was free. Trembling down the length of her, lurching backward, but free and afloat. It must have been a revivifying moment for passengers and crew alike, but it was short-lived, because in the next instant the ship’s stern struck ground, shearing off the rudder and leaving her helpless. Almost immediately she began to list, everything that wasn’t secured careening down-slope toward the invisible rocks and the dim white creaming of the breakers four decks below.

Captain Blunt, at war with himself — lives at stake, his career ruined, his hands quaking and his throat gone dry — gave the order to abandon ship. By the light of the remaining lanterns he mustered his officers and crew to see to an orderly evacuation, but this was complicated by the gangs of desperate men — prospectors who’d suffered months and in some cases years of thirst, hunger, exhaustion, lack of female company and the comforts of civilization to accumulate their hoards over the backs of sweat-stinking mules — swarming the upper deck, dragging their worn swollen bottom-heavy satchels behind them and fighting for the lifeboats without a thought for anything but getting their gold to ground. At this point, the captain was forced to draw his pistol to enforce order even as the stern plunged beneath the waves and ever more passengers emerged from belowdecks in a mad scrum, slashing figures in the dark propelled by their shouting mouths and grasping hands. He fired his pistol in the air. “Remain calm!” he roared over and over again till his voice went hoarse. “Women and children first. There’s room for all. Don’t panic!”

The boats were lowered and the people on deck could see, if dimly, that they were out of immediate danger, and that went a long way toward pacifying them. It was a matter of ferrying people to that jagged dark pinnacle of rock the boat had struck in the dark, a matter of patience, that was all. No one was going to drown. No one was going to lose his belongings. Stay clam. Be calm. Wait your turn. And so it went, the boats pushing off and returning over the space of the next two hours till everyone but the crew had been evacuated — and then the crew, and lastly the captain, came too. What they didn’t realize, through the duration of a very damp and chilled night with the sea rising and the fog settling in to erase all proportion, was that the rock on which they’d landed was some two hundred yards offshore of the main island and that in the morning they’d have to be ferried through the breakers a second time.

It was a week before they were rescued. Provisions were salvaged from the ship before she went down, but they weren’t nearly enough to go round. Fights broke out over the allotment of rations and over the gold too, so that finally Captain Blunt — in full view of the assembled passengers — was forced to pinion two of the malefactors, gold thieves, on the abrasive dark shingle and horsewhip them to the satisfaction of all and even a scattering of applause. A number of the men took it upon themselves to fish from shore in the hope of augmenting their provisions. Others gathered mussels and abalone, another shot a seal and roasted it over an open fire. When finally news of the wreck reached San Francisco, and three ships, the Goliah , the Republic and the California , steamed down the coast to evacuate the passengers, no one was sorry to see the black cliffs of Anacapa fade back into the mist. The ship was lost. The passengers had endured a night of terror and a week of boredom, sunburn and enforced dieting. But no one had died and the gold, or the greater share of it, had been preserved.

As for the rats, they are capable swimmers with deep reserves of endurance and a fierce will to survive. Experiments have shown that the average rat can tread water for some forty-eight hours before succumbing, can grip and climb vertical wires, ropes, cables and smooth-boled trees with the facility of a squirrel and is capable of compressing its body to fit through a hole no wider around than the circumference of a quarter. And too, rats have a superb sense of balance and most often come to shore adrift on floating debris, whether that debris consists of loose cushions, odd bits of wood planking, whiskey bottles, portmanteaux and other flotsam or rafts of vegetation washed down out of canyons during heavy rains. Certainly some of the rats aboard the Winfield Scott , trapped in the hold when the baggage shifted or inundated before they could scramble up onto the deck, were lost, but it’s likely that the majority made it to shore. Of course, all it would have taken was a pair of them. Or even a single pregnant female.