Wreck of the Kent (Part 6): 'The ship is on fire'

"Ship on Fire" by James Francis Danby, 1875

For previous segments, see: Part 1 (the bottle), Part 2 (the letters), Part 3 (the map), Part 4 (Weather Watching), or Part 5 (The Disaster)

Duncan MacGregor had just stepped outside of his cabin when an officer rushed up to him. "Pale as death, and wringing his hands, [he] said, 'Sir, the ship is on fire in the after-hold." Alarmed, Duncan headed to the hatch, where the streams of smoke and the chain of men carrying seawater in buckets told him the danger was real. When it became clear that the "driblets of water poured down from the buckets were utterly useless", the men tried to fight the flames with damp blankets. This too was ineffective, and so Captain Cobb gave the desperate order to "scuttle the lower ports, and allow the sea to rush in." This would start the process of sinking the ship in order to put out the flames: a dangerous maneuver, but the only chance they had. 

Joanna and Elizabeth were stunned by the news of the Kent's peril, but there was no time for denial. Elizabeth's cabin was becoming a waystation for refugees from the decks below. Lower-class women entered the cabin wailing, their "children hanging round them." Joanna tried to find safe places to stow them all. As she placed yet more toddlers into Elizabeth’s bed, a…[a] sweet little boy (the bandmaster’s son) came to me and asked with such innocent simplicity, ‘Am I to die too? tell me-- must I die?’ I held up his hands and repeated a short prayer after me, commending his little soul into the hands of his Redeemer, and then he seemed quite pleased and happy.

As a Presbyterian, Joanna had, in theory, spent years preparing to die. But was she actually ready for the afterlife? She found herself relentlesslyreviewing the conduct of her life, feeling “deeply conscious of my great deficiency in every point of virtue” (48). But there was no time, now, to correct anything. Joanna decided to focus on the work at hand, and trust in God’s mercy for what would surely follow.

On the lower deck, it was dark, hot, and suffocating. Duncan  encountered one of the mates stumbling through the smoke, who gasped that he had just “fell over three dead bodies." Keenly aware of the danger posed to his family, Duncan pressed onward. With the help of two fellow officers, he wrenched the portholes open and watched in awe and horror as “the sea rushed in with extraordinary force, carrying away, in its resistless progress to the hold, large chests, bulk-heads &c” A few minutes later, they were ordered to close the portholes again, for the ship appeared to be “settling” prior to going down. Captain Cobb ordered the hatches closed, hoping "by the exclusion of the external air to prolong our existence, the speedy termination of which appeared certain.” 

Climbing back to the upper deck, Duncan found it crowded with “six or seven hundred human beings many of whom, from previous sea-sickness, were forced on the first alarm, to flee from below in a state of absolute nakedness." Few sights could have been more shocking to a well-bred gentleman. One of the best-known novels of the late eighteen century, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1788), features a climax in which its virtuous heroine dies in a shipwreck after refusing to take off her clothes for the swim to safety. The inhabitants of the Kent were evidently less scrupulous. Their disarray drove home the danger to the  Kent's  previously ordered shipboard society. 

Illustration to the shipwreck scene in Paul et Virginie (1788), one of the many 18/19th C novels in which it was better to die than to disrobe. 

In Elizabeth’s cabin, the women had developed an organized response to the fire. Margaret Fearon  stood outside the cabin door and “with wonderful self possession watched the progress of the smoke," providing encouraging updates to those inside. Joanna broke “all the windows” as the cabin filled with smoke, and gave “out oranges or anything I could find to quench the thirst of the children.”  When he entered the cabin, Duncan was surprised by the number of people crowded inside, and impressed by Joanna’s coordination of the women and servants, which he thought displayed “the greatness of Joanna's mind." Joanna, however, felt that in fact it was “insensibility”  that allowed her to rise to the occasion. The “suddenness” of the news of the fire, “…prevented my [fully comprehending] all that had happened” (48). It was no wonder, she later wrote, that the fire had made a deeper impression on the refugees filling Elizabeth’s cabin, who “were fully acquainted with their danger, and had long pauses to realize it” (48).

>Duncan gave his family the bad news in the bluntest possible terms. They were about to die by drowning, or by fire, in the Atlantic Ocean, leaving their relatives to guess at their fate.

The family had a hurried conversation about their final plans. Duncan and Elizabeth were “determined to sink in each other's arms." Joanna, however, had heard of a plan to “put the women out into which boats remained, and give us whatever chance there was of safety in such a tempestuous sea”. Dangerous as such a course was, it was one she was apparently prepared to risk. 

Having decided on their respective destinies, Duncan, anxious to spare his father and siblings “terrible years of anxiety”,  scrawled a short letter to his father. He obtained an empty bottle, and “corking it hard up”, threw the message into the waves. The bottle bobbed away from the burning ship, beginning its long, slow trek to Barbados.

As Duncan watched the waves swallow his final message, a sailor perched near the top of the foremast took off his hat and waved it wildly. “A sail on the weather bow!" For the first time since he’d received the news of the fire, Duncan felt a spark of hope. It was a small spark: the other ship was far from them, and the fire had been “making progress for some hours”, creeping ever closer to the gunpowder in the Kent’s magazine. Moreover, “the sea was tremendously high – and as no small vessel and few large ones could be expected… to take on board nearly 700 human beings.”

Captain Cobb gave the order to hoist the Kent’s flag of distress. The waterlogged ship began a slow trek toward the strange sail.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7