later the buoyancy of his life vest shot him to the surface, though, and he washed up on an island and lived to write about his experiences in the
All afternoon the hammering of the big seas on the doomed vessel went on, whilst night came only to add darkness to our other horrors. Shortly before ten o’clock three tremendous seas found their way down the stokehole, putting out the fires, and our situation was desperate. The end came shortly before midnight, when there was a heavy crash on the reef, and the vessel was lying at the bottom of the Straits of Formosa in under a minute.
With scarcely time to think I pulled down the life-belts and, throwing two to my companions, tied the third on myself and bolted for the companionway. There was no time to spare for studying humanity at this juncture, but I can never forget the apparent want of initiative in all I passed. All the passengers seemed paralyzed—even my companions, some of them able military men. The stewards of the ship, uttering cries of despair and last farewells, blocked the entrance to the deck, and it was only by sheer force I was able to squeeze past them. Getting out on deck, a perfect mountain of water seemed to come from overhead, as well as from below, and dashed me against the bridge companionway. The ship was going down rapidly, and I was pulled down with her, struggling to extricate myself.
I got clear under water and immediately struck out to reach the surface, only to go farther down. This exertion was a serious waste of breath, and after ten or fifteen seconds the effort of inspiration could no longer be restrained. It seemed as if I was in a vice which was gradually being screwed up tight until it felt as if the sternum and spinal column must break. Many years ago my old teacher used to describe how painless and easy a death by drowning was—“like falling about in a green field in early summer”—and this flashed across my brain at the time. The “gulping” efforts became less frequent, and the pressure seemed unbearable, but gradually the pain seemed to ease up. I appeared to be in a pleasant dream, although I had enough will power to think of friends at home and the sight of the Grampians, familiar to me as a boy, that was brought into my view. Before losing consciousness the chest pain had completely disappeared and the sensation was actually pleasant.
When consciousness returned, I found myself at the surface, and managed to get a dozen good inspirations. Land was about four hundred yards distant, and I used a bale of silk and then a long wooden plank to assist me to shore. On landing, and getting behind a sheltering rock, no effort was required to produce copius emesis. After the excitement, sound sleep set in, and this sleep lasted three hours, when a profuse diarrhea came on, evidently brought on by the sea water ingested. Until morning broke all my muscles were in a constant tremor which could not be controlled. (Several weeks later) I was sleeping in a comfortable bed and, late in the evening, a nightmare led to my having a severe struggle with the bedroom furniture, finally taking a “header” out of the bed and coming to grief on the floor.
Lowson guesses that laryngospasm prevented water from entering his lungs when he was unconscious. The crew of the
The central nervous system does not know what has happened to the body; all it knows is that not enough oxygen is getting to the brain. Orders are still being issued—
He could be given cardiopulmonary resuscitation, put on a respirator, and coaxed back to life. Still, the body is doing everything it can to delay the inevitable. When cold water touches the face, an impulse travels along the trigeminal and vagus nerves to the central nervous system and lowers the metabolic rate. The pulse slows down and the blood pools where it’s needed most, in the heart and skull. It’s a sort of temporary hibernation that drastically reduces the body’s need for oxygen. Nurses will splash ice water on the face of a person with a racing heart to trigger the same reaction.
The diving reflex, as this is called, is compounded by the general effect of cold temperature on tissue—it preserves it. All chemical reactions, and metabolic processes, become honey-slow, and the brain can get by on less than half the oxygen it normally requires. There are cases of people spending forty or fifty minutes under lake ice and surviving. The colder the water, the stronger the diving reflex, the slower the metabolic processes, and the longer the survival time. The crew of the
The body could be likened to a crew that resorts to increasingly desperate measures to keep their vessel afloat. Eventually the last wire has shorted out, the last bit of decking has settled under the water. Tyne, Pierre, Sullivan, Moran, Murphy, and Shatford are dead.
THE WORLD OF THE LIVING
The sea had kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and his shipmates called him mad.
Johnston jogs into the wind and seas until night falls and then turns around and goes with it. He doesn’t want to take the chance of running into a rogue wave in the dark and blowing his windows out. Throughout the early hours of October 29th, he surfs downwind on the backs of the huge seas, following a finger of cold Labrador Current, and when dawn breaks he turns around and fights his way northward again. He wants to gain enough sea room so that he won’t hit the Gulf Stream when he runs south again the following night. On the second day the crew fight their way onto the deck to check the fish-hold and lazarette hatches and tighten the anchor fastenings. The sun has come out, glancing dully off the green ocean, and the wind screams out of the east, setting the cables to moaning and sending long streaks of foam scudding through the air. Radio waves become so bogged down in the saturated air that the radar stops working; at one point an unidentified Japanese sword boat appears out of nowhere, searchlight prying into the gloom, and passes within a few hundred yards of the
