Across the gray, shouldering swells of the North Sea rolled the smoke of battle. Stabbing flashes of flame leaped out of the dark mist and black powder smoke; geysers of water, foam-crested, reared skyward as shells splashed beside the fighting ships.
The Indefatigable and the Queen Mary had gone with near 2,300 men; the march to the north was nearly over; the Derfflinger’s decks and turrets were a holocaust; the Lion was in flames; soon Arbuthnot and the Defense and Hood and the Invincible were to die at “Windy Corner” in a huge “pillar of smoke” and tongues of licking flames. Der Tag had come. England and Germany at Jutland; Grand Fleet versus High Sea Fleet; Jellicoe against Scheer!
The Shark, Commander Loftus Jones, R. N., with three others of the 4th Flotilla—Acasta, Ophelia, Christopher—tiny pawns in a titanic struggle, were assigned to Hood’s Third Battle Cruiser Squadron. The great guns of the battle cruisers roared above the destroyers’ mast tips; Invincible, Inflexible, Indomitable were firing at the German light cruisers, Wiesbaden, Pillau, Frankfurt. Bödicker, the German, turned away from Hood’s smothering salvos, fired his torpedoes at the giant British ships, ordered his destroyers to the attack. The white wake of the “tin fish” streaking underwater toward the battle cruisers warned Hood; he too turned away and sent Loftus Jones and his four destroyers dashing madly in the foam-flecked sea to parry the German thrust.
Yellow cordite smoke bellied and eddied between the fighting lines; ripples of fire burst in shining flashes from the mist-hidden ships on the dark horizon. Their propellers lashing a frothy wake, the Shark and the Acasta, the Ophelia and the Christopher raced toward the enemy.
It was a brief Armageddon. “Right ahead and close aboard” of the racing British destroyers were the Regensburg and two columns of “nine or ten” German destroyers—on each hand. Farther off, half hidden in the smoke and mist, were Bödicker’s cruisers, their guns still flashing, but this time at Loftus Jones and his four ships. The British attacked at close range with torpedoes and guns, firing to port and starboard at the destroyers, launching their torpedoes at the cruisers, their crews working at top speed before annihilation.
The spitting flashes of crimson stained the horizon to westward and southward; the little Shark and her sisters, tearing along at 30 knots, careened and shivered as shell splashes geysered high alongside and roaring waters cascaded down upon their decks. It was only a question of time. . . .
The Shark lived for perhaps ten minutes in this—her last mad dash. Loftus Jones on the bridge kept her headed west and slightly southward, where streamers of smoke bannered across the misty sky. Far on the horizon dim shapes began to form out of the haze and gun smoke; the Shark was speeding toward the whole German fleet. But Jones had more modest aims: the Regensburg was his target; he brought the Shark into firing position, launched a torpedo—and turned to go. But the enemy had found his range and salvos were straddling the straining ship. A shell struck her amidships; roaring steam wreathed above her in a pall of white; “the pipes to her oil suction were damaged”; a greasy slick oozed from the tortured steel and spread across the swells. The Shark slowed down. A shell struck the forward 4-inch; the entire crew was killed, the gun dismounted. Flying splinters of steel shredded the bridge structure; Jones was wounded; another shell tore away the steering wheel, smashed the bridge. The Shark stopped . .. so slowly, her lifeblood spilling quietly on the waters, her panting breath steaming above her for all the fleet to see.
Loftus Jones, his blood staining the gold braid of his rank, staggered painfully aft across the broken and littered deck past the bodies of his men, mangled and torn. . . . The after and midships guns were still firing, the flag was still there.
Brief respite. The Canterbury, light cruiser, headed out of the battle smoke into the “No Man’s Land” between the fleets and drew the punishing fire of the Regensburg, the Frankfurt, other enemy light cruisers, and the German destroyers. Quietly, the Shark waited for the coup de grace. Acasta, Lieutenant Commander John 0. Barron, who had been with Loftus Jones during the Scarborough raid, pulled up alongside, wanted to tow. But Jones waved her away; he told Barron “not to get sunk for him.”
“Soon afterwards” a number of enemy destroyers, probably of the 9th and 6th Flotillas, came up and “opened a heavy fire.” The after gun was hit squarely and its entire crew wiped out; Jones, who had been directing its fire, lost a leg at the knee. “But he continued to encourage his men,” and lying there upon the deck among his dead and wounded, the blood swimming out upon the shattered deck plates, he noticed the white ensign, the gaff shot away, drooping down the mast.
He asked what was wrong with the flag and appeared greatly upset as he lay on the deck wounded. Twice he spoke of it. Seaman Hope, one of the two men left unwounded, climbed the mast, unbent the ensign, and passed it down to Midshipman Smith, who hoisted it on the yard arm. “Commander Jones seemed then to be less worried when he saw the flag was hoisted again.”
The enemy destroyers were closing down to the kill. The midship gun, manned by a crew of bloodstained, staggering specters, was firing slowly as the Shark settled.
The British destroyer was on fire and dying fast; the flaming flashes of the enemy almost ringed her round. But still the lone gun spoke; its crew of wounded aimed it well; British shells crashed into the German V48.
There came the end. Close by, a speeding enemy launched two torpedoes; one ran true and struck the battered Shark amidships near the funnel. The loud roar of the last explosion; the little destroyer lurching heavily. “She took a heavy list and sank,” the white ensign flying from the mast, the midship gun still firing. “So, maintaining to the last the finest traditions of the service, she came to her end, and it was in the heart of the battle she found it.”
A stoker petty officer had tied a life belt around the exhausted captain, and just before the Shark sank he and some others got Jones onto a Carley float. This was the last command of Commander Loftus Jones, R. N., son of an admiral, scion of a distinguished naval family. Six were his crew—bloodstained, wounded; and there, as the tide of battle roared about them, they floated, awaiting rescue. They saw the dying Wiesbaden, holocaust of smoke and flame and splintered steel; they saw the Defense go forever:
... in one sullen roar
Of flame the furious incandescence tore
Her symphony of steel to molten heat,
And wrapped 900 men in one red sheet. . . .
Floating upon the oily waters, under the wreathing mist and smoke, the six and their dying captain waited as the fleets crashed into headlong conflict, waited as Hood and the Invincible joined Drake and Sir Richard Grenville and generations of British seamen dead and gone. The cold North Sea waters lapped about the float, sloshing over legs and bodies as Der Tag drew to its slow thundering close and the battle steamed raging past them. . . . Waited as the gunfire and the leaping flames died in the twilight, and only the echoing thunders from far away, and bits of wreckage and the captain’s white, drawn face bore witness to this strange reality. . . . That, and the cold and the sullen North Sea waters sloshing over the Carley float, drenching the wounded. . . .
And so died Loftus Jones, Commander, Royal Navy, slowly, like his ship. They hardly knew he was gone—the six numbed survivors—who, hours later, were to be saved from the world of water by the SS. Vidar, flying the Danish flag. For so quiet he had been lying upon the little raft, the salt sea washing over his mangled stump, that in life or death his white face and racked body seemed much the same. He was not conscious at the last; the loss of blood and the numbing cold brought Nirvana. But it may be that before he died he caught a dim vision of his after fame— Commander Loftus Jones, posthumous Victoria Cross.
Herndon of the Central America
All hope had gone. The Central America was dying—dying in the darkness of a wild September night, her seams opened to the sea, her top hamper wrecked and broken, her sails but shredded bits of canvas ripped from the bolt ropes.
Herndon, her captain, clung to a bridge stanchion as the hulk, settling deeper, rolled heavily in the trough of the giant seas. He had seen the sun set—a pale and lusterless glow toward Hatteras, the last sunset he would ever see. He had watched the quick twilight fade as the last boat got away, laboring frightfully in the roar of waters. He had seen the night shut down, the smashing rollers fade into the dark, their white fangs gnashing just beneath him on his canted bridge. The night wore on with dragging weariness toward “the hour when sick men mostly die and sentries on lonely ramparts stand to their arms.” And Herndon knew it was the end. Slowly, he turned toward his cabin. . . .
He had commanded her for almost two years—this ship that now was sinking beneath his feet. Originally named the George Law, a Pacific Mail steamer, she was rechristened the Central America, and like all Pacific Mail ships, she was skippered by a naval officer. Herndon went to her with the rank of commander from the old Potomac of the Home Squadron. For almost two years he had taken her back and forth on the run from New York via Havana to the fever-ridden hole at Aspin- wall. He had brought many of the “Fortyniners” back, with their bulging sacks of bullion and of gold; he had taken giddy trollops and scores of adventurous young blades, eager for fame and fortune, down the long seaway to the isthmus—gateway to California’s gold. Two years—and the Central America had helped to make history. And now it was all over—the romance and the glamour and the zest—and the stout side-wheeler, with her lofty masts and reaching yards, was so soon to sink into the limbo of the past, like all those countless men and women she had carried in her time, whose fever-racked bodies formed the stepping-stones to empire.
She had stood out of Havana past the old Morro on September 8, 1857, with her crew of 101, a full passenger list of 474— men, women, and children—“most of them returning from California, and about $2,000,000 in gold.” Out of Havana in fair weather and high spirits—with Cuba behind them on the horizon like a purple cloud, and ahead of them the well-traveled sea lane to Sandy Hook. Out of Havana, with the northeast trades tautening her canvas, and with her paddle wheels chunk-chunking on the sea lane to New York.
Midnight of the ninth the wind had freshened; in the mid watch the barometer dropped rapidly, and by dawn a gale was roaring out of the nor’nor’east.
Two days of wind and weather—great seas rolling southward from the pole, spindrift pattering like hail on the storm sails, the paddles churning slowly as the ship labored. The sea made up; the Central America strained and groaned. On the forenoon of the eleventh her seams opened; the sea had won. But Herndon did not know defeat. Red-eyed and tired he ordered his men to the pumps. The wind shrieked at whole-gale force; the sea lipping eagerly about the opened seams gurgled into the hold, gave her a starboard list. Huge seas broke aboard; green water fumed about the decks. By two bells of the afternoon watch—despite the pumps—the strakes had worked so far apart with the straining of the vessel that the inrushing water had extinguished the port side fires and the engine had soughed to a stop for lack of steam.
Herndon routed out the passengers—all hands to save ship. He organized bailing gangs; buckets, barrels, scoops, pots, and wheezing pumps sucked and dipped at the ocean in the hold. The passengers tailed onto whips, hoisted high the barrels, dumped them overside, dropped them again into the gaining water below decks. Herndon put some of them to shifting freight—from starboard to larboard— while he tried to keep his ship headed up with some wisps of canvas. All passengers not working on the whips were ordered to the windward side; the ship was trimmed; once more but briefly she rode the combers on an even keel.
But the Central America's seams were wide open to the eager sea. Passengers— men and women and even the older children—worked side by side with the exhausted crew at the buckets and the barrels and the pumps. It was no good. The water gained; tired muscles wearied in the endless struggle. Slowly the ship settled. The water crept up into the ash pits, up toward the glowing coals on the white hot grate bars. The paddle wheels stopped their chunking in the angry sea; the storm spencer blew out of its bolt ropes; the ship’s head fell off; she wallowed in the mighty troughs. The night came down as the storm shrieked on and the ship settled. The pumps wheezed; the barrels came up out of the flooded hold at a run—men and women tailing onto the whips, urged on to new exertions by Herndon’s encouragement. A sailor started an old chantey:
Whisky is the life of man.
O Whisky Johnny!
I’ll drink whisky while I can.
O Whisky Johnny!
During the night Herndon had the foreyard sent down; he tried time and again to get the Central America before the wind, but there was no canvas strong enough to hold in the ravening gale. The head sails were blown to tatters; Herndon ordered the clews of the foresail lashed to the deck,
. . . thinking he might hoist the yard, if only a few feet, show canvas, and get her off, but scarcely was the yard well clear of the bulwarks when the pitiless fury of the wind seized and took it entirely out of the bolt ropes.
Toward dawn axes bit into the foremast; the mast fell crashing to leeward; out of the foreyard and bits of timber and canvas was fashioned a rough sea anchor. Aft tattered scraps of canvas were spread in the rigging—but the Central America, the water rising toward her main deck, would not answer; she rolled heavily in the troughs. Dawn of the twelfth came on a drifting hulk, battered and sinking. But Herndon would not despair. They were in the shipping lanes; “Rally all,” he said. He kept them at the pumps, hoisted the ensign upside down, had minute guns fired.
About noon the wind commenced to abate, but the gale had done its work; the Central America was doomed. In early afternoon a ship was sighted; hope rose— but the ship held her course. Later, more yards against the clouded sky, a few wisps of canvas on a vessel scudding fast. “A sail! A sail!” The gun boomed; the ship —the brig Marine, out of Boston, Captain Burt—hove to, though she herself had been damaged by the storm. Herndon had the boats manned and lowered; the women and children climbed in; the boats commenced their perilous pull to leeward. Flung skyward, then dropped into the troughs, they rode the combers, reached the brig, pulled back a long pull to the foundering vessel. A second time they made the perilous passage with their gunnels awash—100 saved. As the last boat was pulling away, the sky darkening in the east, Herndon knew it was the end. He who had stuck to his bridge, encouraged his crew, fought the old fight against great waters; Herndon halted a passenger about to embark in a lifeboat, and handed him his watch. The captain choked up; there was everything to live for—(he was only 44) his wife; his sister, the wife of Commander Matthew Fontaine Maury; his daughter Ellen, who later after he was dead was to marry Chester A. Arthur, twenty-first President of the United States; his service, and his friends. He thrust the watch at the passenger; spoke of his wife: “Give it to her—and tell her— tell her—tell her—from me. . . .”
He could not go on; he shook his head and turned away. The boat pulled off; in a moment Herndon was back on the bridge, composed and awaiting the end.
It was not to be long in coming. The brig had drifted several miles to leeward; the Central America's boats were battered, leaking, and half-filled with water; the steamer was settling lower, listing to starboard, her main deck almost awash. But there was no panic; those hundreds left aboard saw their commander on the bridge, cool and quiet, looking out at the faint glow in the West—the last sunset he was ever to see.
The Central America foundered that night, carrying down with her the bags of California gold, her commander, and 423 of her passengers and crew. In addition to the 100 taken to the Marine in boats, 49 passengers were picked out of the water next morning by the Norwegian bark Ellen, after clinging for hours to bits of wreckage. Three others were saved, days later, by the English brig Mary, after having drifted with the Gulf Stream more than 450 miles from the scene of the sinking. Herndon’s last hours were all spent in vain attempts to save more lives. Rockets were sent up every fifteen minutes; life preservers were distributed as the Central America settled to her doom, and the commander set the passengers and crew to work chopping away part of the hurricane deck to make an impromptu raft.
Toward the last, through the night, above the waves and wind, a boat’s oars could be heard. But it was too late; the ship was going; Herndon warned the boat off to keep her from being sucked down with the sinking ship. “Keep off! Keep off!”
Everything had been done that could be done; it was only a question of time; Herndon called his first officer, Van Rennselaer, and told him he was going below for his uniform. The commander went to his stateroom and in a few minutes he returned to the bridge. He had put on his full dress uniform and taken off the oil skin cover that concealed his naval cap insignia. Herndon took his stand on the wheelhouse, bracing himself against the ship’s list, by clinging with his left hand to the railing.
A rocket went up—a fiery meteor illuminating briefly the dismasted foundering ship, the wrecked hopes of those who had gone West for gold. The waves seethed against the opened strakes; scud and spume and salt rind whitened the top hamper; green water lapped the decks. The Central America gave a final lurch. Herndon, clinging to the wheelhouse rail, uncovered and waved his hand. The side- wheel steamer, out of Aspinwall for New York, turned on her side and sank.
WENIGER, KAPITÄN-ZUR-SEE OF THE König
November 4, 1918. It was the end of an era. The Red Flag flew over Kiel; the “simmerings of revolt” were bubbling in a hundred cities. The line of steel along the Western Front was crumpling, the German Fleet in revolt.
In Kiel, Squadron III, still loyal to the Imperial Eagle, had put to sea, leaving the König behind, immured high out of water in a floating dry dock. The Schlesien, “an old pre-dreadnought manned by intensely patriotic cadets,” cleared her guns for action at 8:15, stood out of port without firing a shot, drawing in her wake the blasphemous curses and shaken fists of the new Sailors’ and Workers’ Soviet.
All over Kiel, from ships, auxiliaries, dockyards, the Red Flag floated. But not on the König. At eight o’clock she had hoisted the ancient colors of the Hohenzollerns, the Imperial flag with its black Prussian cross and eagle. Alone and helpless in a circling ring of guns, but unafraid. She had been the leading ship of the main body of the High Sea Fleet at Jutland; Kapitän-zur-See Weniger was an officer of the old school. He had held flag parade at eight o’clock, and he and his officers had beaten off the first rush aft toward the colors. Ashore murder and revolution stalked—a nation in agony. But on the König, for minute after minute, the old flag still flew.
Early in the forenoon the mutineers sent aft an elected Soviet to Captain Weniger’s office. Flourishing revolvers, smoking cigarettes, impudent in word and manner, the delegation entered the office. Weniger, sitting at a table, his back to the door, turned and looked briefly at these— who had once been his men—and “returned to his work.” At last he stopped and rose and faced them: “What do you want?”
The men hummed and hawed; their spokesman finally pronounced the ultimatum: the flag must be hauled down, the Red Flag hoisted, before noon.
Weniger strode calmly up to the delegation and refused their demand. He was threatened with force. “As long as I am alive, my ship shall fly the German ensign!” The “single ensign fluttered defiantly over Kiel.”
Ashore the red trail of revolution streaked ominously across the streets and dockyards. Officers barricaded the doors of their homes; seamen with pilfered clothing, stolen swords, directed traffic; mobs roamed the city, singing the marching song of revolt:
. . . the International Soviet will save the human race. . . .
At the König’s halyards on the after deck paced Lieutenant Zenker, volunteer of the age that was passing, stationed there by Captain Weniger. For two hours he strode back and forth—back and forth, port to starboard, starboard to port— while crowds gathered on the dock near by, and the Konig’s mutineers stoked their courage with talk of the brotherhood of man. It was nearing noon.
Kapitän-zur-See Weniger came up on deck and took his stand by the halyards, followed by his executive officer, Commander Heinemann, two lieutenant commanders and several lieutenants. As the group of officers ringed around the halyards the sun broke through the gray clouds and thin mist over Kiel and shone down upon the Imperial ensign, still waving above a city in revolt. Another cloud, wind-driven from the North Sea, passed across the sun; from the dock a shot rang out.
Instantly a staccato volley of rifle and pistol fire broke out from ashore and aboard. The officers, exposed to every shot, a handful against a multitude, faced their Thermopylae unflinchingly. Slowly and carefully they answered the ragged volleys; ashore, two seamen, wounded, were spilling their blood on the grayed stones. Bullets rang, hissing, against the steel of the turrets, kicked the paint from the bitts, gouged little furrows from the teak decks. The König’s mutineers, creeping aft from forward under cover of the superstructure, were coming closer now; the bullets could not miss.
Zenker threw up his arms; his blood ran across the deck seams. Weniger bent over him; muttered a farewell. Astride Zenker’s body the captain stood to face his crew. He was struck, but remained standing. A bullet smashed into Heinemann; he was “almost lifted off his feet” by the impact. A lieutenant commander stepped into the vacant place in the circle, while the wounded officer was carried below. The creeping mobs were coming aft; from both sides of the deck and from the dock rifle bullets were whining toward the dwindling circle.
Captain Weniger was struck again and again, but stood, weaving unsteadily, his smoking pistol in his hand, above Zenker’s corpse. His officers were mowed down about him, like grain before the reaper, but over his head the Imperial Eagle still fluttered above a world gone mad.
A “dark wave” rushed toward the halyards. The captain stood alone; “a seaman fell before his fire.”
Ashore in Kiel, disguised and in civilian clothes, dozens of officers crept from the city, fleeing the reign of terror.
Aboard the König, Kapitän-zur-See Weniger pressed his pistol against the chest of a seaman who had grasped the halyards, fired. . . .
Black grew the world about him—that world gone mad; Weniger of the König fell with four bullets in his body. Across the bleeding bodies roared the “dark blue wave”; the flaunting symbol of a day that was gone was snatched down; in place of the Prussian cross and Imperial Eagle floated a “banner red as blood.”
The issue of the fight at Spion Kop was the result of the complete moral and physical exhaustion of the troops on both sides. The greater endurance and energy of his direction, and the pre-eminent will power of a single man had grasped a victory for the Boers—a proof of the power in war of a leader’s personality. It was simply and solely due to the qualities for command possessed by Botha that the thanks of the Boers were due for the fortunate result of the Spion Kop fight— From the Comment of the German General Staff on the Battle of Spion Kop.