A Heap of Wreckage.

This would have handicapped the ship sufficiently in itself, but worse was to follow. After a few days fine weather there arose on June 11 a tremendous sea with scarcely any wind, and this caused the Killochan to labour heavily. At about eight a.m. a fearful lurch snapped the maintopmast at the cap, and the mizzen topgallantmast also broke off short, bringing down a mass of masts, yards, sails and other gear. Some of it fell on the deck, the chief officer (Mr. Smith) and several of the crew narrowly escaping being crushed under it, and the rest fell over the side where the heavy spars were banging into the sides of the ship and threatening every minute to knock a hole in her plates.

Saddest of all was the fact that only a few minutes before the squall struck the ship one of the apprentices, a lad named Lachlan McLean, had gone aloft to attend to some job, and he was carried overboard in the wreckage. Probably he was killed before he reached the water, but in any case it was impossible to launch a boat in the sea that was then running. But the tragedy was momentarily forgotten in the strenuous work that was imperative if the ship and the lives of all on board were to be saved. A strange accompaniment of the disaster, or rather immediately after it, was a remarkable fall of snow. It lasted six hours and at times it was impossible to see the length of the ship. Captain Manson, who commanded the Killochan on this memorable trip, said he had never previously seen anything like it in that part of the world, though he had been knocking about the Cape off and on for thirty years.

Subsequently the wind freshened and though the ship had been left with only shreds of sails, these had to be hung on to, in the hope of steadying her in the stupendous sea that was running. In spite of the fact that she had uncommonly high bulwarks the Killochan would roll her rail under, ship water, then roll back to the other side and repeat the same experience. And some solid seas broke aboard with deafening thunder, two of them smashing a couple of the ship's boats on the skids. For two days after the disastrous squall struck the Killochan the crew had an awful time clearing the wreckage and getting up new gear and devising sails for such stumps and yards as the storm had left them. And all that strenuous work had to be carried out with the ship rolling drunkenly in the heavy sea.