The Matutina's wreck and sinking

The Matutina’s wreck and sinking turn a storm-battered voyage into a drawn-out catastrophe: first the hurricane dismantles the ship and sweeps away its skipper, then an unseen leak and a dead calm make the vessel descend slowly into the sea. The hull’s soundness delays the end but cannot prevent it. As the crew disappear beneath the water, the doctor’s tarred flask is left to drift into the darkness, the sole object explicitly shown surviving the wreck.

The hurricane dismantles the ship

The crew follow the skipper’s orders, furling the sails, securing the rigging and battening down the ports and bulls’-eyes. Their work is described as clumsy but effective: the Matutina is stripped to bare poles. Yet becoming less exposed to the wind does not make the ship safer. The seas rise, and the hurricane begins to break the vessel apart. The top-sails tear from their bolt-ropes, the chess-trees split, the deck is swept clear, the shrouds part, and the mast goes overboard. Snowstorm-associated magnetic currents further disrupt the rigging and chain gear, while repeated blows make the bow and quarters shudder.

The damage continues in successive waves. The compass and binnacle go overboard, followed by the boat lashed to the bowsprit; then the spritsail yard, figurehead and signal light are carried away. Only the rudder remains. To replace the bow lantern, the sailors set alight a large block of wood covered with oakum and tar and hang it at the ship’s stem. This makeshift light does not reverse the ship’s condition: it marks how far its ordinary equipment and means of control have been stripped away.

The skipper is lost and the Matutina becomes a wreck

A mass of foam covers the poop, and, when the stern rises into view again, the skipper and the helm have vanished. Both have been swept away. At the chief of the band’s command, the remaining sailors rush to the capstan and let go the anchor in an effort to save him. The Matutina carries only one anchor. It reaches the bottom, but the hard rock gives it no hold; the cable snaps, leaving only its end protruding from the hawse-hole.

From then on, the ship is described as irrevocably disabled. Once swift and under sail, it becomes a helpless wreck, moving at the waves’ discretion rather than sailing by any reliable course. The hull, however, remains watertight. Not a plank below the waterline has started, and no water has entered the hold. That apparent protection is precarious: the pump is out of order, and the damaged vessel pitches and groans while the crew cling to the standing rigging, transoms, broken planks and stumps of the masts. Splintered wood and protruding nails tear at their hands.

The sea bell’s sound grows fainter until it becomes an intermittent rattle and then falls silent. Its earlier toll had frightened the sailors; its disappearance frightens them more, leaving them uncertain how far they have drifted from the buoy or where the wind is carrying them. The wreck is driven forward through darkness, with the men unable to see the course ahead. The narrative sets the sudden violence of the hurricane against this blind, uncontrolled passage: the ship is no longer navigating so much as being carried toward danger.

The leak and the slow descent

The decisive breach is discovered only later. A hole has opened in the keel, and water has entered the hold. No one can say when it happened. The ship may have struck rock at the Caskets, off Ortach Rock, or while being swept around the shallows west of Aurigny; the account presents contact with some hidden underwater obstruction as the most probable explanation. The sailors could not feel the impact amid the storm’s convulsions. When Ave Maria, the southern Basque sailor, comes up from the hold, he reports that the water there is two varas deep.

The storm gives way to a calm, and with it the nature of the danger changes. Wind and waves, however violent, offer something against which a ship can struggle; the stillness provides no such contest. Water rises steadily in the hold, and the Matutina sinks by degrees. The scene stresses the slow certainty of the process: there is no sudden blow, only the shrinking distance between ship and sea. Those aboard can calculate the moment of disappearance as the water draws them down. The watertight hull had preserved them through the hurricane, but once the keel is breached and the water accumulates, that protection is spent.

The crew’s final moments and the floating flask

At the end, the men are seen with their heads beneath the water, drowned on their knees. The doctor takes the flask he had placed on the companion and raises it above his head as the wreck goes down. His shoulders remain above the surface for an instant, then his head; finally only his raised arm and the flask are visible. The arm disappears without leaving a greater disturbance on the sea than a fold on a smooth surface.

The flask, tarred and kept afloat by its osier covering, is carried away by the waves. Its small survival contrasts with the complete loss of the ship and the people aboard it. The wreck’s ending therefore comes not as a rescue or a final struggle against the elements, but as a quiet disappearance: first the crew are submerged, then the last human sign vanishes, while the flask continues alone into the darkness.