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Updated: May 3, 2025
We were obliged, however, to go on shore here; and waiting till the people on the beach had made preparations, by placing a row of logs from the water's edge on which to pull up our boats, we rowed as quickly as we could straight on to them, after watching till the heaviest surfs had passed.
The boats employed on this business were manned by the Sirius's crew; so that every possible attention to prevent danger or accident was used: but, notwithstanding which, on the 17th of August, in what was considered as good landing, one of the boats, in coming into the passage, was overtaken by a succession of heavy surfs, which threw her on one of the reefs, where she parted in less than two minutes, and seven people were drowned.
It is clear to me that the surfs as above described are peculiar to those climates which lie within the remoter limits of the trade-winds, though in higher latitudes large swells and irregular breakings of the sea are to be met with after boisterous weather. Possibly the following causes may be judged to conspire, with that I have already specified, towards occasioning this distinction.
The lifeboats of the Institution now number 132, and some of them were the means of saving no fewer than 417 lives during the past year; nearly the whole of them in dangerous circumstances, amidst high surfs, when no other description of boats could have been launched with safety. They also took into port, or materially assisted, 17 vessels, which might otherwise have been lost.
While I thus went on, filled with the thoughts of freedom, and resisting oppression as well as I was able, my life hung daily in suspense, particularly in the surfs I have formerly mentioned, as I could not swim. These are extremely violent throughout the West Indies, and I was ever exposed to their howling rage and devouring fury in all the islands.
At many places, where the kwallas, or mouths of the rivers, are tolerably practicable, the pepper is sent out at once in the tambangans over the bar; but this, owing to the common shallowness of the water and violence of the surfs, is attended with considerable risk. Thus the pepper is conveyed either to the warehouses at the head-settlement or to the ship from Europe lying there to receive it.
This would seem to indicate, that although the ordinary heavy surf may be due to the swell of the great Southern Ocean confined in a narrow channel, combined with a peculiar form of bottom near the shore, yet the sudden heavy surfs and high tides that occur occasionally in perfectly calm weather, may be due to slight upheavals of the ocean-bed in this eminently volcanic region.
In some places the surfs are usually greater at high, and in others at low, water; but I believe they are uniformly more violent during the spring-tides. I shall proceed to inquire into the efficient cause of the surfs. The winds have doubtless a strong relation to them.
But land to a castaway! His first thought and most anxious desire is to set foot on it. So in the case of our shipwrecked party: risking all reefs and surfs, they at once set the gig's head shoreward.
On the fourth of February, which was soon after we had got into our new course, I dreamt the ship was wrecked amidst the surfs and rocks, and that I was the means of saving every one on board; and on the night following I dreamed the very same dream.
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