HE WAS a seaman through and through, and doubtless thought he had witnessed all a raging sea could muster.

Captain Thomas Davis had endured heavy gales in the Gulf of Mexico, storms in the China seas and survived the roaring forties at their meanest but he had encountered nothing like the tempest that struck – and sank – his ship, the SS Sultan, in mid-Atlantic.

Yet, miraculously, the Southampton skipper and his crew of eight survived.

It was late winter, 1874, and the Sultan was sailing from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Falmouth with 550 tons of wheat. Gradually conditions worsened, the crew little knowing they were about to embrace a hurricane and mountainous waves.

At it most intense, it struck the ship on her broadside and threw her on her beam ends, carrying away bulwarks and stanchions.

Realising there was no hope of the Sultan righting, Davis ordered the fore and topmasts to be cut away but the boat was still continuing down, with the raging sea breaching over her.

In desperation, they cut away the foremast, which temporarily eased her plight, but water soon covered the deck and the valiant crew had the utmost difficulty in climbing about.

Until then, the hold had remarkably remained water tight but then the sea plunged in and as it began to ominously fill, all the hands feverishly worked the pumps. Their position seemed hopeless but then the weather suddenly moderated, allowing them precious time to pump much of the water.

So exhausted the crew had become that watches were divided into three to enable them to have what little rest they could snatch.

But nature once more turned against them, with the wind shifting to the south, and the Sultan’s deck was now fully exposed to the elements and it seemed that any moment she would founder.

Davis realised the boat’s only hope of survival was to turn her into the wind but that became unmanageable and as the hold once more began to take in copious amounts of water, there was no recourse to abandoning ship and taking to the fragile lifeboat.

“I realised it was impossible to save the ship,” Davis was later to recall. “I reluctantly agreed to leave her, although to remain on board was certain death, while to leave her in the only small boat we had left in such a frightful sea nothing but God’s mercy and our own management could save us.”

But such was his seamanship that he conjured an ingenious plan – the fittest would man the boat, with the remainder lying on the bottom as ballast and supplied with a bucket to bail out water.

For two hours and two miles it drifted, the crew perpetually swamped by the massive waves as the boat clambered over the top of the mountainous rollers.

Then, in answer to their prayers, a Dutch bark, the Herzog Ernst, appeared as though out of nowhere. She too had been damaged, leaky and her bulwarks, stanchions and lifeboat all swept away.

Yet the sea could not beat them.

Davis and the eight hands were plucked to safety and their united strength enabled them to keep the bark, laden with tobacco, to remain afloat and as the hurricane blew itself out, they eventually reached Falmouth. Ultimately the Sultan’s crew were landed at Southampton where Davis recounted how they had cheated death.

Paying tribute to their rescuers’ bravery and kindness, he told the local press: “I have never seen a more terrible hurricane or a more confused sea than when the Sultan’s masts were cut, one at a time, and all went over the side without touching or damaging the rails.”