A bicycle tour in England and Wales by Alfred Dupont Chandler

Author:Alfred Dupont Chandler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: A. Williams & Co.

The Lizard lights were not seen, nor was the fog-horn heard. The only mention in the London " Times" of our extraordinary escape was in very small type, in the shipping column, as follows : —

"The Baltic, St., from New York, arrived at Liverpool July 29. The master reports at 10 P. M. on Monday night, during a fog, she touched the South Stack and slightly damaged her stem."

"Touched," indeed! On that voyage the "Baltic" left Queenstown at about eight o'clock in the morning, and, a fog setting in, the run up St. George's Channel was made partly at half speed. About four o'clock in the afternoon the steamer just escaped cutting a large sailing vessel in two; at ten o'clock in the evening the crash came, and it being the last night at sea, most of the passengers were up and very social. There was a rush for the deck; ladies fainted; all felt apprehension. The sight from the deck was terribly grand. Two hundred feet above us, glimmering through the fog, was the revolving light of the South Stack; rising from three hundred to five hundred feet from the water where the steamer struck were dark, almost perpendicular rocks; an alarm bell and guns were heard from off the shore. The steamer, having struck head on in deep water, was backed off; she at once listed heavily to starboard. The blow had crushed the bow; no one knew how soon she would go down. The boats stuck; it was a quarter of an hour and more before some were loosened. A small boat forward was launched by sailors and ordered back. The steamer listed heavily again, and passengers moved to the port side. The water was not rough; we were near enough at first to swim to shore, but we did not then know that the current there was too strong for any swimmer, and we did not know that the rocks were too steep to climb, with a tide rising sixteen feet to wash off any, perhaps, who got a footing. It is a horrible place; many a vessel has been lost on this shore. When the "Arizona," of the Guion line, struck an iceberg that fall, the ice crumbled down by the ton; when the "Baltic" struck at South Stack, the solid rock was unyielding: true, speed had been slackened, because, a moment before the steamer struck, the danger was seen, and the engines reversed, but altogether too late to stop the vessel. The strength of modern steamers is thus shown:1 their division into compartments is a great safeguard; this saved the "Baltic." The forward compartment filled with water;

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