Burning boy, p.59
Burning Boy, page 59
An instantaneous attraction, yes, but not quite as mutual as McCready would have it. Cora fell fast and hard, and almost from the instant she saw him she was prepared to jump into a lifetime of shared intimacy with a man she would playfully call her “mouse” and, in dead earnest, her “guiding star.” Crane, however, tiptoed into the romance with extreme caution. He had been rejected in love by Lily Brandon Munroe, had failed in his antic pursuit of Nellie Crouse, and now he was struggling to sort out the disaster he had brought upon himself with Amy Leslie. With the New York scandal just behind him and the uncertainties of Cuba just ahead, it was hardly the moment to be making decisions about love or anything else.
Nevertheless, Crane had finally met his match, his spiritual double, the living embodiment of a female version of himself. Cora was a woman who spurned the conventions and moral hypocrisies of their world just as thoroughly as he did, a woman who had no fear of sex and understood that erotic desire was an essential fact of the human condition, a woman who loved books—among them his books—and, as her history showed, a woman who could be just as reckless as he was.
She was frank with him about that history, even when they were just getting to know each other, and barely a day or two after they met, Crane presented her with three books. One was a collection of poems by Kipling in which Cora later noted: “The first thing my mouse ever gave me was this book.” The second contained an inscription that began “To C.E.S.” (Cora Ethel Stewart), an irrefutable sign that she had opened up to him about her second marriage, and if she had done that, she had probably talked about her first marriage and many other details about her life as well. Under the initials Crane wrote: “Brevity is an element / that enters importantly / into all pleasures of / life and this is / what makes pleasure sad / and so there is no / pleasure but only sad- / ness.” Not the words of a man who had much hope in their future together—or even in the idea that there could have been a future for them.
The third book was George’s Mother, and in that one he simply wrote: “To an unnamed sweetheart.” Eventually, he would give her a name—his own name—but only after he had gone off on his journey into the waters between Florida and Cuba and come back from the dead.
3
These are the facts. Seventy-one filibuster boats set out from Florida to Cuba between 1895 and 1898, and more than half of them were stopped by the American or Spanish navies. Although the policies of the two countries were identical, America’s actions stemmed from legal obligation (to enforce the neutrality laws), whereas Spain’s were political (to thwart the rebellion). By the end of 1896, the steamship Commodore had attempted to reach Cuba four times but had managed to get there only twice. Still, there were loopholes that sometimes came into play, and they could be exploited to gain clearance from the authorities, which seems to have happened with the Commodore’s fifth expedition on New Year’s Eve when the U.S. secretary of the treasury signed off on the venture. A pro-rebel Cuban lawyer had argued that where a ship was going and what it happened to be carrying were two distinct issues. In other words, once approval had been granted by the American government, it should not matter if the ship was carrying “arms or sausages.” Approval was required from the Spanish government as well, and in this case greed turned out to be the motivating factor that led Pedro Solis, the Spanish consul in Florida, to put his name on the document, even after it was pointed out to him that the Commodore would be carrying more than two hundred thousand cartridges, one thousand pounds of giant powder, forty bundles of rifles, two electric batteries, and three hundred machetes. When asked if he would clear the ship for departure, Solis replied, “Certainly I will … just the same as if the cargo were potatoes for the Spanish army.” Then he reminded them that among the benefits of his job as consul, he was paid a fee for all transports to Cuba. The heavier the load, the greater the sum that went into his pocket.
It was an open secret, then. The Commodore was engaged in a filibuster operation to provide arms to the Cuban rebels, and when it set sail at eight o’clock in the evening on December thirty-first, a large crowd of rebel supporters gathered on the dock to cheer the ship as it left the port. One hundred and twenty-two feet long, twenty-one feet wide, and weighing one hundred and seventy-eight tons, it carried a human cargo of Cuban nationalists, American officers and deckhands, and one journalist—twenty-seven men in all. Crane had signed on as a working member of the crew, but no one from the local press was taken in by the decoy. The Florida Times-Union announced that S.C. was aboard the vessel “as the representative of a syndicate of Northern newspapers. He will not be employed in the capacity of a newsgatherer, but will write Sunday letters to the newspapers of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Boston. He was asked how long he expected to stay in the island, and replied that he could not tell. He shipped as a seaman at a salary of $20 a month.”
The trouble began almost at once. Two miles from Jacksonville, as the pilot steered the Commodore through heavy fog down the St. Johns River toward the open sea, the ship jammed into a sandbar and was stuck there until dawn. Help was sought from the revenue cutter George S. Boutwell, which normally was in the business of trying to impede filibuster craft from slipping through the blockade, but this time the captain chose to ignore official policy and towed the Commodore back into the water, then continued to pull her in the direction of the sea. He, too, was clearly in on the open secret of the Commodore’s mission, and because he was less neutral in his sympathies than the American government, he kept the Boutwell close to the Commodore after the towline was detached. Not long after, the Commodore struck land again at Mayport, but this time the ship managed to free herself when the engines were thrown into reverse. As Captain Kilgore of the Boutwell looked on, he called to the other ship, “Are you fellows going out to sea today?” Captain Murphy of the Commodore called back, “Yes, sir.” The Commodore whistled a friendly salute, and as Kilgore took off his cap and waved it at Murphy, he shouted, “Well, gentlemen, I hope you have a pleasant cruise.”
Captain Edward Murphy had been on other filibuster missions in the past and was an experienced commander, with sailing master’s licenses from both England and America, but this was his first voyage with the Commodore, as it was for the two engineers on board, and because they were unfamiliar with the ship, or simply because it didn’t occur to them, not one of them thought to inspect the hull for damage after the first grounding in the St. Johns River, and so, damaged or not, the Commodore headed for the open sea.
The water was rough that day, a stiff wind was blowing, and as Crane described it in his four-thousand-word account of the catastrophe, the Commodore pitched and rolled over the waves “and on deck amidships lay five or six Cubans, limp, forlorn, and infinitely depressed … and presently even some American seamen were made ill by the long wallowing motion.” Captain Murphy told the New York Press (January 4) that “even old sailors got seasick when we struck the open sea after leaving the bar, but Crane behaved like a born sailor. He and I were about the only ones not affected by the big seas which tossed us about. As we went south he sat in the pilot-house with me, smoking and telling yarns. When the leak was discovered, he was the first man to volunteer aid.”
The pumps had stopped working, water was rushing in through a rent in the hull, and at ten o’clock that night the chief engineer entered the pilothouse to inform the captain that there was trouble in the engine room. Minutes later, Crane was down there in the bowels of the ship with a line of other men, bailing water as they passed the buckets back and forth between them, working in the insufferable heat while “soapish sea water swirl[ed] and swish[ed] among machinery that roared and banged and clattered and steamed.” Captain Murphy ordered the men to feed the furnace with wood, oil, and alcohol—anything that would burn—in the hope of keeping the engines alive long enough to carry them to Mosquito Inlet, which was about eighteen miles to the west, but, as he told the New York Herald (January 5), “the water gained upon us slowly and surely, and we had not proceeded three miles when the fires were quenched. There was no hope of saving the ship.”
Meanwhile, up on deck, men were beginning to panic. A coal heaver emerged from the hold carrying a package of dynamite and asked the captain to get it over with and blow them up before they drowned. “The dynamite was carefully taken from him, and then Captain Murphy’s fist did the rest. ‘Lie there, you cowardly dog!’ shouted Captain Murphy. ‘Obey orders, and we’ll all get off’” (the World, January 4). The same article reports that one of the sailors lost his mind, scrambled up the rigging all the way to the yard, and then tried to stand on his head. A Cuban about to jump into the water was pulled back by the second mate, and “another was so thoroughly demoralized that he knelt down at the Captain’s feet and prayed to be thrown overboard.”
In his own article, Crane avoids dwelling on his conduct during the crisis, but the men around him were all struck by how calmly he acted under pressure and the clear-headed, unflagging bravery he showed in trying to maintain order on the ship. The steward, Charles Montgomery, told the New York Press (January 4) that “one of the Cubans got rattled and tried to run out one of the boats before time, and Crane let him have it right from the shoulder, and the man rolled down the leeway, stunned for the moment.” Captain Murphy commented in the same article: “That man Crane is the spunkiest man out.… His shoes, new ones, were slippery on the deck, and he took them off and tossed them overboard, saying with a laugh: ‘Well, Captain, I guess I won’t need them if we have to swim.’ He stood on the deck by me all the while, smoking his cigarette, and aiding me greatly while the boats were getting off.… He’s a thorough-bred, and a brave man, too, with plenty of grit.” Montgomery shared the captain’s opinion:
“That newspaper feller was a nervy man. He didn’t seem to know what fear was.… He insisted upon doing a seaman’s work, and he did it well, too. When aroused Saturday morning he never quailed when he came on deck and saw the foaming and raging billows and knew that the vessel was sinking.… He stood on the bridge with glasses in hand, sweeping the horizon in an effort to get a glimpse of land.… I thought sure that he would be swept off as the vessel rolled from side to side, her yards almost touching the water as she rolled.”
The Commodore’s rescue equipment included three lifeboats, a ten-foot dinghy, and however many life jackets the ship was carrying. In his piece, Crane remarks that when a stoker was seen “prowling around, done up in life preservers until he looked like a featherbed,” the captain cursed him out, which would suggest that the supply of jackets was limited, and indeed, when Crane wound up in the dinghy with the captain, steward Montgomery, and an oiler named Billy Higgins, there were only two life jackets in the boat, not four. To make matters worse for the captain (and finally for all of them), a wave had smashed into the deckhouse and broken his arm, which was now in a sling, immobilized and useless.
As the first lifeboat was being lowered into the water, Crane happened to observe another instance of raw, terror-driven panic: “A certain man was the first person in the first boat, and they were handing him in a valise about as large as a hotel. I had not entirely recovered from my astonishment and pleasure in witnessing this noble deed, when I saw another valise go to him.” The noble deed was in fact the escape of a coward, and the certain man was Paul Rojo, the person in charge of the Cubans on board and the representative of the ship’s owners. Eleven more Cubans followed him into the boat, and when they reached shore at ten o’clock in the morning (January 2), Rojo hired a sailboat, but instead of using it to return to the Commodore, he sailed on to the town of New Smyrna, where at last he wired Jacksonville about the trouble at sea. He asked them to send help, but no help ever came. As S.C. later told Horatio S. Rubens, general counsel of the Cuban Junta: “He reminded me of George Washington. First in war, first in peace—and first in the lifeboat.”
The second lifeboat could not be yanked from its moorings, at least not without a mighty effort from Crane, Higgins, two stokers, and the first mate:
We wrestled with that boat, which I am willing to swear weighed as much as a Broadway cable car. She might have been spiked to the deck. We could have pushed a little brick schoolhouse along a corduroy road as easily as we could have moved this boat. But the first mate got a tackle to her from a leaward davit, and on the deck below the captain corralled enough men to make an impression upon the boat.
It finally went down into the water, and the remaining Cubans were sent off. Traveling through the predawn darkness, they reached shore by the time the sun was directly above them.
The American crew was next, eleven men including Crane, and now that four of them had decided to chance it with the dinghy, the other seven would take the sturdier lifeboat. Everything was going according to plan, and if the third lifeboat had been the solid, seaworthy craft they all assumed it was, the plan would have worked. The seven would have been saved, but because the third boat was defective, they were not saved, and what should have been the story of a brilliant, last-minute rescue was turned into a tragedy of horror and meaningless death.
After the third boat set off toward the coast, the captain instructed Crane to prepare the dinghy for boarding. One by one, the four men climbed into the little rowboat and steered it several hundred yards from the sinking ship, where they intended to stay until the Commodore went under. By the time they settled into position, however, they saw that the seven men from the lifeboat had returned to the ship. “The men on board were a mystery to us,” Crane writes, “as we had seen all the boats leave the ship. We rowed back to the ship, but did not approach too near, because we were four men in a ten-foot boat, and we knew that the touch of a hand on our gunwale would assuredly swamp us.
“The first mate cried out from the ship that the third boat had foundered.”
In the meantime, the men had hastily constructed three makeshift rafts, which had been thrown into the water and were floating beside the ship. When they called out to the captain and asked if he would be willing to tow the rafts behind the dinghy, he agreed to give it a try and then told them to “jump in.” As Crane recounts: “Four men, I remember, clambered over the railing and stood there watching the cold, steely sheen of the sweeping waves.” Four men, but the three others inexplicably held back. The old chief engineer jumped in first, followed by a stoker, and after that a seaman named Tom Smith, who earlier had told Crane that this would be his last filibustering job, that he had had enough and was planning to enter a new line of work. They all managed to catch hold of the rafts, but the last of the four, the first mate, whom Crane had already described as “losing his grip” during a temper tantrum over the stuck second boat, suddenly “threw his hands over his head and plunged into the sea. He had no life belt, and for my part, even when he did this horrible thing, I somehow felt that I could see in the expression of his hands, and in the very toss of his head, as he leaped thus to his death, that it was rage, rage, rage unspeakable that was in his heart at the time.”
Rage against the circumstances that had trapped him in this hopeless situation, but rage against the captain for having abandoned the ship as well, and the sight of Murphy sitting securely in his little boat must have been too much for the first mate, and rather than try to save himself, he ended his life in an act of savage protest.
Crane continues:
On board the Commodore three men strode, still in silence and with their faces turned toward us. One man had his arms folded and was leaning against the deckhouse. His feet were crossed, so that the toe of his left foot pointed downward. There they stood gazing at us.…
The colored stoker on the first raft threw a line and we began to tow. Of course, we perfectly understood the absolute impossibility of any such thing; our dingy was within six inches of the water’s edge, there was an enormous sea running, and I knew that under the circumstances a tugboat would have no light task in moving these rafts. But we tried it, and would have continued to try it indefinitely, but that something critical came to pass. I was at an oar and so faced the rafts. The cook controlled the line. Suddenly the boat began to go backward, and then we saw this negro on the first raft pulling on the line hand over hand and drawing us to him.
He had turned into a demon. He was wild, wild as a tiger. He was crouched on this raft and ready to spring. Every muscle of him seemed to be turned into an elastic spring. His eyes were almost white. His face was the face of a lost man reaching upward, and we knew that the weight of his hand on our gunwale doomed us. The cook let go of the line.
We rowed around to see if we could not get a line from the chief engineer, and all this time, mind you, there were no shrieks, no groans, but silence, silence, and silence, and then the Commodore sank. She lurched to windward, then swung afar back, righted and dove into the sea, and the rafts were suddenly swallowed by this frightful maw of the ocean. And then by the men on the ten-foot dingy were words said that were still not words, something far beyond words.
For the next thirty hours, the men in the dinghy struggled to reach the shore, but the frail boat was not equipped to handle such rough waters, and threatened by the drift and the undertow and the presence of sharks, they had to row and bail with all their strength just to prevent themselves from being pushed farther out to sea. The captain had only one usable arm, the cook could not swim, and with Crane and Higgins doing most of the work, they fought for an entire day and all through a long winter night before hazarding a last run at the beach the following morning. Before they could land, however, the boat capsized, throwing them into the water, and they had to swim the rest of the way.* In his article, Crane skips over all that. “The history of life in an open boat for thirty hours would no doubt be very instructive for the young,” he writes, “but none of that is to be told here.” He told it some weeks later, in what is probably the greatest and most perfect of his short stories, but for now—just two days after his rescue—the exhausted, emotionally ravaged Crane concluded his article by underscoring “the splendid manhood of Captain Edward Murphy and of William Higgins, the oiler” and praising the man on the beach (“John Kitchell of Daytona”) who shed his clothes and ran into the surf when he saw them floundering among the waves after they had been tossed from the boat. He was the one who hauled them onto dry land, but even then, the tragedy of the Commodore had not yet drawn to a close:
