The ship lurched to starboard and amazingly he found himself washed backwards onto the ship’s deck. He got up and struggled back toward the wheelhouse, his hands grabbing ropes to pull himself up the slanted deck. He fell again as another wave of water swept over the ship, He would have slid overboard, but someone grabbed him and helped him up. Just as he reached the poop deck, he felt something give beneath him around the sternpost. The next thing he heard was a shout from below that water was coming in. It wasn’t just the normal weeping. Water was actually coming through the timbers. Leaks had sprung up everywhere, and streams of water shot into the lower cargo hold, overflowing the bilge of the ship.
With the wind screeching through the bare rigging and much confusion on deck, Morgan yelled at the first mate to start jettisoning some of the cargo to lighten the ship aft. It was important to find out where the ship was leaking. He ordered all of the remaining canvas taken down. The ship was now scudding along under bare poles carried along by fifty knot winds and a huge following sea. All this time the ship was taking in more and more water.
Morgan shouted, “All hands! Man the pumps on deck! Buckets below!”
Through it all, Icelander remained at the wheel, his knees forced in between the spokes, his feet braced in the wheel box, his thin lips twitching. Morgan went down below to warn the passengers about the leak, many of whom were lying in their staterooms, nauseated in their rolling berths and moaning in misery. He went looking for Eliza. He could hear the water splashing. The force of the wall of water had poured through the companionway into the main saloon. Everything inside had tumbled from one end of the cabin to the other. Lowery and Scuttles were huddled in a heap on the cabin sole in the galley clutching one of the fastened legs of the tables, their teeth chattering. The two Irish priests were now shaking convulsively and down on their knees praying for merciful forgiveness.
“Your men should pray with us, Captain.”
Morgan ignored their entreaties and walked by quickly.
“Join us as we ask the Lord for mercy, Captain.”
Morgan turned back to the two men of the cloth, and uncharacteristically addressed them in a curt manner.
“You pray, Fathers. The rest of us will pump.”
Just then he spotted Eliza. She was lying on the wet cabin floor in the Ladies Cabin, her hands holding onto the legs of the piano fastened to the floor. Like the other passengers, she was sick and barely seemed to see him. Morgan helped her up to a dry spot as the cry ran through the cabin that the ship was sinking. Much of the crew had already started handing up the cargo and throwing it overboard. The expensive American clock cases were on top so they had to be thrown out first. Two hundred cases of these finely made and expensive mahogany clocks from Connecticut went to the bottom before the cheese boxes eventually followed them overboard. That allowed the sailors to access and jettison some of the heavy cargo where the real weight was. Morgan told Whipple to get rid of all the furniture in the saloon. He then gave the order to toss the piano as well. He watched as Whipple took an ax to the finely tapered legs of the five-by-three-foot piano, allowing the sailors to carry the cherrywood case up through the companionway onto the deck. Eliza only managed a hoarse whisper of protest. She lay on the wet cabin sole, the fantasy of a romantic life at sea draining out of her as fast as the seawater was seeping into the ship’s cabin.
Most of the weary cabin passengers were now standing in ankle-deep water as a hastily organized bucket brigade got underway. He rushed topside to find two men already working hard at the pumping station just forward of the main mast, their hands moving the two wooden handles in unison, pumping back and forth frantically, up and down like a seesaw. Torrents of water were being sucked up from the bilge in the bottom of the ship’s hull and spewed forth on the deck, seething and gurgling, as the flow of water escaped through the freeing ports into the ocean. Hours passed, and the ship was now emptied of all the cargo in the upper hold. Morgan noticed with satisfaction that the Philadelphia was riding higher than it was before. The pumping continued nonstop at a rate of three thousand gallons per hour. The men worked in shifts, their stringy hair matted with sea salt, black pouches under their swollen, red eyes. Knowing how tired his men were, Morgan drafted some of the more stalwart male passengers, warning them that they “had to pump or drown.”
All this time, the gale and the towering, rolling waves were driving the ship southward toward the African coastline, hundreds of miles off course. Fortunately, the jettisoning of the cargo helped the ship even its trim and ride the waves better. Morgan estimated they had lightened the ship by nearly one hundred tons after a full day of pumping. Whipple was the one who found the leaking area after crawling inside the dark, rank bilge area. Most of the water was gushing in from a small hole, which they quickly packed with old sails and the passengers’ blankets and then plugged the seams in the planking with oakum. Morgan thought one of the ship’s ribs had cracked as well, but he hoped the emergency measures would hold until they could reach England.