Part 7 (1/2)
”All ready, Captain, we only wait for you.”
”Good!” I e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, and rammed down the b.u.t.ton. A tremendous jolt that all but flung me off the bridge, accompanied by a not very loud explosion, followed, the s.h.i.+p trembled as though she had been a sentient thing, and the sound of water, as though pouring through a sluice, reached my ears. Down the ladder I rushed, on to the main deck, seized one of the davit tackles and slid down into the boat; and as the men replied to my question that all were present, the bowman thrust the boat away from the sinking steamer's side, and the oars churned up the water as we pulled away.
”Give way, lively, lads,” I cried, as I seized the tiller; ”we'll get close insh.o.r.e, where n.o.body can see us, and save our skins in that way.
We have happily escaped thus far; and it would be a pity for any of us to get hit now. There goes the old _Chiyo_! she hasn't taken long to sink, bless her! She is worth a lot more where she is, at the bottom of Port Arthur harbour, than she was when afloat.”
CHAPTER SEVEN.
THE KORYU MARU.
Meanwhile the _f.u.kui Maru_ had also reached her destination, and as we pushed off in the boat from the side of our own sinking s.h.i.+p, we heard, through the din of firing and the explosions of bursting sh.e.l.ls, the roar of her cable as her crew let go her anchor. I was sitting with my back turned toward her, intent upon getting our boat as close insh.o.r.e as possible, when the engineer, who was sitting beside me, touched my arm and pointed.
I turned and looked, to see Hirose's s.h.i.+p brought up right in mid-channel--the berth a.s.signed to her; and, bearing down upon her, a Russian destroyer, her funnels and guns spouting flame and smoke as she tore furiously through the water. Another instant, and the destroyer swerved, just clearing the stern of the _f.u.kui_; there was the flash of a torpedo from her deck tube, a terrific explosion, and the _f.u.kui_ seemed to be hove up out of the water on the top of a great cone of leaping sea intermingled with smoke and flame. The s.h.i.+p had been torpedoed, quite uselessly, indeed worse than uselessly, for the Russians had simply saved our people the trouble of sinking her.
The destroyer pa.s.sed on, and we temporarily lost sight of her in the darkness and wreathing smoke. We saw the _f.u.kui's_ boat lowered, and the crew get into her; but she remained alongside so long that she only got away barely in time to avoid being dragged down with the s.h.i.+p.
Meanwhile, sh.e.l.ls were falling not only all round but also aboard the _f.u.kui_, and we presently saw that she was on fire, as well as sinking.
Nearly or quite a dozen sh.e.l.ls must have struck her before she finally foundered; but it was not until the next day that we learned the full extent of the tragedy. It then appeared that the explosion of the torpedo had either disconnected or shattered the wires connected with the explosives in the _f.u.kui's_ bottom, and a petty officer named Sugino had gone below to explode the charges. It chanced that this man was a blood-brother of Hirose, and, not returning to the deck as he was expected to do, Hirose went in search of him, after ordering the boat to leave the s.h.i.+p. A few seconds later a sh.e.l.l was seen to strike Hirose on the head, of course killing him instantly. Later on, we heard that his floating body had been picked up in the harbour by the Russians, who, to do them justice, buried it with military honours.
A small air of wind at this time came breathing down the harbour, momentarily dispersing the thick veil of smoke that overhung the water, and we were thus enabled to see that our third s.h.i.+p, the _Yahiko Maru_, had also succeeded in reaching the berth a.s.signed to her, and was at that moment in the very act of sinking, close to the Pinnacle Rock, a great monolith which rose high out of the water on the western side of the harbour's mouth. Thus far, therefore, everything had gone well with the expedition; and now all that remained was for the fourth s.h.i.+p, the _Yoneyama Maru_, to close up the gap that still remained.
I looked round to see if I could see anything of her, and presently the s.h.i.+fting of the searchlight beam from the _Yahiko_ revealed her coming along in fine style, and heading straight for her appointed berth.
Hitherto, the Russian batteries had been too busy, attending to us others, to take much notice of her, and she appeared to be all ataunto and quite uninjured. I felt curious to see what was going to happen to her, and gave my crew the order to ”Easy all, and lay on your oars!”
As I did so, a Russian destroyer--I could not tell whether it was the craft that had torpedoed the _f.u.kui_, or another--emerged from the darkness, heading straight for the _Yahiko_, as though to run her down!
Would they dare? I wondered. Surely not. But if they did not, there was no reason why the _Yahiko_ should not; she was a stout-built, merchant steamer, and, old as she was, would shear through the destroyer's thin plating as though it were brown paper. If I had been in charge of the _Yahiko_, I would not have hesitated an instant, indeed I would have jumped at the chance, and in my excitement I leaped to my feet and, making a funnel of my hands, yelled frantically:
”_Yahiko_ ahoy! Give her the stem, man; give her the stem!”
But at that precise moment the Russian guns opened again, this time directing their fire upon the _Yahiko_, and my hail was effectually drowned by the crash of the explosions.
I am of opinion that, a moment later, the commander of the _Yahiko_ saw his chance, just too late to fully avail himself of it, at all events the bows of the steamer suddenly swept round, and although the destroyer instantly s.h.i.+fted her helm, she was too late to entirely avoid a collision; the rounding of the _Yahiko's_ bow struck her and roughly shouldered her aside, both craft reeling under the impact; and at that instant the destroyer let fly every gun that would bear, the fire from them actually scorching the j.a.panese crew, who were at that moment preparing to lower their boat. The _Yahiko_ pa.s.sed on, and so did the destroyer, the latter vanis.h.i.+ng in the darkness to seaward, while the _Yahiko_, the centre of a very galaxy of bursting sh.e.l.ls, staggered on in a sinking condition, and went down at the very moment when, with astounding skill and coolness, her skipper had brought her to the exact spot for which she was intended.
Then it was seen that, either through some miscalculation or, more probably, because the Russians had widened the channel, there still remained an unfilled gap, wide enough for a single s.h.i.+p to pa.s.s through!
It was a most vexatious thing, after all the trouble that we had taken and the ordeal which we had pa.s.sed through; but it could not be helped; it was the fortune of war.
Stay, though! Why should it not be helped? All that was needed was another steamer--or perhaps two steamers--to fill the gap, and the thing was done. And, hang it all! I was game to do the job myself to-morrow night, when the Russians would least expect me.
But, to do the job effectually, it was highly necessary to know the exact width of the gap, and the depth of water in it; and now was the time to ascertain those particulars, while we were on the spot. I would do it!
Then came the very practical question: How? What means had we to take soundings, or to measure the gap between the sunken _f.u.kui_ and the _Yoneyama_? I looked about me, and found that all we had with us was the boat's painter, a piece of rope some seven or eight fathoms long, which might serve as a sounding-line, if only we had a sinker of some sort, which, unhappily, we had not. Then one of the men in the boat, realising what I wanted, informed me that, while preparing the boat for lowering, he had chanced to glance into the locker in the stern-sheets, and had noticed a fis.h.i.+ng-line there. Would that be of any use? Of course it would; the very thing for sounding, at all events. We had that line out in double-quick time, cut away the hooks, and then proceeded to knot it at exact intervals corresponding with the length of the boat's after-thwart. Precisely what that length might be, we could ascertain afterward.
But, how to measure the width of the gap? There seemed to me to be but one way to do it, and that was by taking the length of our boat herself as a unit of measurement; not a very satisfactory method, I admitted, yet better than nothing. So thereupon we set to work.
Starting at the _f.u.kui's_ mainmast, we dropped the sinker of the fis.h.i.+ng-line over the stern and paid out until it reached her deck.
Then, giving way with the oars, we felt our way along her deck to her taffrail, lifted the sinker, and dropped it again, clear of the wreck, until it touched bottom. Then, noting the depth as so many knots and fractions of a knot, I jotted the result in my notebook while, the oarsmen keeping the boat in position, another cast was made at the bow end of the boat. Proceeding in this manner, and taking the utmost care to obtain accurate results, we accomplished our task in about half an hour, under a heavy fire from the Russians on the heights, which, strange to say, injured none of us.
This done, we pulled out to sea, and were soon afterward sighted and joined by the _Tsubame_ and _Aotaka_, j.a.panese torpedo-boats, which took us aboard, and exultingly informed us that, a quarter of an hour or so earlier, they had engaged and driven ash.o.r.e a Russian destroyer, which afterward proved to be the _Silny_, the craft which had torpedoed the _f.u.kui_, and had narrowly escaped being run down and sunk by the _Yahiko_.