Surviving the storm: The Tale of HMS Eurydice
Benjamin Cuddiford was one of only two survivors onboard HMS Eurydice (the other was Sydney Fletcher) when it capsized with more than 300 people onboard in March 1878. Here we have used some of his accounts from the time to imagine his diary entry about the disaster.
Of all the days to die, it was a bright Sunday afternoon when we should have been safe.
We were sailing from Bermuda, home almost within reach, standing in towards Spithead under full sail. The Eurydice moved proudly through the water at near nine knots, every man aboard thinking of Portsmouth and the end of our long voyage. The sea was calm, the sky pale, yet there was a strange stillness in the air, the sort that makes a sailor uneasy. To the north-west a dark wall of cloud crept lower and lower, and the barometer had begun to fall.
I was on deck tending the tack of a lower studding-sail when the squall struck. It came without warning, a roaring blast of wind mixed with blinding snow, sweeping down from the land at Luccombe Chine. In a moment the ship was knocked off her course. Orders rang out to shorten sail, but there was no time. Water poured over and the deck vanished beneath a rush of white foam.
I clung to the rigging with all my strength as the ship heeled violently to starboard. For a heartbeat she seemed to struggle upright again - I remember seeing the mizzen-topsail ring out of the water - and then she rolled slowly, terribly, over. Men were flung from the deck as if they were toys, I saw them swept away in a mass as the sea closed over the ship. The noise of wind and canvas drowned every cry. I was thrown into the water and dragged under, then burst back to the surface among wreckage and struggling bodies. I saw the captain standing near the quarter-boat just before she went down, still giving his orders as calmly as if on parade. That sight is burned into me forever.
As it was being dragged under I seized a lifebuoy from the floating wreckage and forced it over my head. The cold struck like knives. Snow fell thick as night, hiding ship and shore alike. Around me men clung to broken planks, calling out to one another, trying to keep their courage. I passed a piece of wreck to those near me and told them to hold fast.
I came upon a small copper punt with five men clinging to it, but the sea overturned it and they were left hanging to its bottom. They asked if help was coming. I could only tell them to keep up their spirits, though my own heart was sinking fast. For a time I saw the boatswain with his cork belt on, and then a young seaman, Sydney Fletcher of Bristol, also wearing a cork belt. The snow blinded us again and I lost sight of him. I thought him gone. When the snow lifted, he was still there. We kept together as best we could, drifting among wreckage, our limbs growing numb, our voices weaker with every minute. We saw land to the east, but the sea was too heavy to make for it, and we turned away, trusting to chance.
At last - when I believed my strength was spent - a schooner loomed through the haze. She lowered a boat and took two officers from the water. Then a rope’s end was thrown to me. I seized it with what little power remained and was hauled aboard. I had been in that freezing sea for more than an hour. Sydney Fletcher was saved with me. No one else came up alive.
More than three hundred of my shipmates went down within sight of England, their voyage ended in a moment of snow, wind and darkness. The Eurydice vanished beneath the sea, and with her nearly every soul on board. I live because chance and a rope found me in the storm. I remember them because the sea did not.
