Loss of a Smack's Crew by W. Clark Russell

I fell once into conversation with a smack-boy -- a Yorkshire lad -- who told me a story which I privately declined to believe until I saw the printed report of the inquest, and had confirmation of his narrative from other hands. Men who go to sea meet with strange accidents, and perish through causes which landsmen would ridicule as impossibilities in marine novels; but seldom do a vessel's crew encounter such a disaster as that which befell the people of the smack _Apostle_, of Hull. I wish I could tell the story as the fishing apprentice gave it me. No painter could imagine a finer study than the figure of the lad in his blue knitted overall, his big boots, his sou'wester, the hinder thatch of which forked out from the back of his head like the tail of a gull on the wing, his young face as he talked warming up into a kind of passionate awe and fear, as it might in his sleep when the dreadful circumstance stood out in the sharp configuration of a dream; whilst now and again he would pass the back of his rough hand across his forehead to rub off the gouts of sweat which gathered there. However, I can do no more than translate the lad's yarn, and make it complete, in its way, by facts I got from others. The _Apostle_, then, was a smack, belonging to Hull. Will Stevenson was her master, and John Butler her mate. Besides these she carried two other men and a boy -- the lad who told me the story -- making in all five souls. She left Hull, however, with only four men, for the boy did not join her until she had been out cruising a week, when he was sent to her in a steamer.

Life on board a smack is but a dull affair, and such excitements as it has are all against the fisherman. It is tedious work drifting for hours with the trawl overboard; but what is to be made of it when, as sometimes happens, the trawl is got aboard and the net found torn to pieces by a piece of sunken wreck or something of that kind, and all the fish gone? Or take a gale of wind blowing for a week, keeping the fisherman waiting and waiting for a spell of moderate weather to fetch his ground. To be hove-to in a smack in the North Sea is such a dance as you must endure -- not for a day, but for several days together -- to understand. Who that has rolled in a big steamer across the tempestuous stretch of waters which wash our eastern coasts has not watched from the reeling, spray-swept deck the spectacle of some dandy or cutter-rigged boat, jumping as if by magic into the arena of the green, pelting, and foaming amphitheatre, with her storm jib-sheet to windward or well amidships, a slender band of dark, close-reefed mainsail tearing at the quivering gaff, whilst she tosses the high spring of her bows at the rushing snow of the surges, chopping sharply down into the livid vortex and making it flash up in white spume that smothers her like the smoking spray of a great waterfall, vanishing until her gaff is hidden, and nothing shows but the jerking vane at the masthead behind the glittering ridge of the sea that runs at her with the roar of a goods train sweeping through a tunnel; and then springing afresh to the height of the thunderous surge until some fathoms of her keel forward are exposed, and leaning down upon the slope of the mountainous wave, and under the giant pressure of the ringing gale, until her mast seems parallel with the water and her dark shred of canvas a mere black patch upon the snow-storm under her?