'that' - a relative pronoun or a conjunction?

Question

(From The Wrecker by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, Chapter XV, published 1892)

Passage 243

“So we can keep the business to ourselves,” I mused.

“There's one other person that might blab,” said the captain. “Though I don't believe she has anything left to tell.”

“And who is she?” I asked.

“The old girl there,” he answered, pointing to the wreck. “I know there's nothing in her; but somehow I'm afraid of someone else—it's the last thing you'd expect, so it's just the first that'll happen—someone dropping into this God-forgotten island where nobody drops in, waltzing into that wreck that we've grown old with searching, stooping straight down, and picking right up the very thing that tells the story. What's that to me? you may ask, and why am I gone Soft Tommy on this Museum of Crooks? They've smashed up you and Mr. Pinkerton; they've turned my hair grey with conundrums; they've been up to larks, no doubt; and that's all I know of them - you say. . . .”

Is 'that' a conjunction or a relative pronoun there? I don't really understand the structure of this sentence.

Answer 1

It's a subordinating conjunction which creates what is traditionally called a relative clause. The purpose is to specify or qualify the wreck being discussed. Which wreck? The wreck that we've grown old with searching.

The only really outdated-sounding element is "with", which here means "by/through the act of": we have grown old by (the large amount of time we have spent) searching the wreck.

Note that to search X is not to search for X, but to search for something within X. As one reads in the passage, the speaker has searched the wreck for a thing "that tells the story", but he has found that the wreck has "nothing in it". An analogous (and common) use is to "search the premises" or "search the house".

Also, it's worth knowing that "that" is optional in this position in English, because it adds information relative to the structural object of the verb "searching". When it qualifies the subject, it's obligatory. (In English as recent as the quoted passage and newer, anyway.)

Answer 2

... waltzing into that wreck [that ___ we've grown old with searching, stooping straight down, and picking right up the very thing that tells the story.

Relative "that" is a subordinator (your conjunction), not a pronoun.

Briefly, when diagramming a that relative, a gap notation ('___') is inserted to represent the functional position of the covert relativised element.

In the above example, the gap is inserted in subject position, and this gap is linked to the antecedent "wreck".

There are several solid reasons why relative "that" is a subordinator, not a relative pronoun.

For example, it has no genitive form: we can say the woman whose turn it was, but not *the woman that’s turn it was.

And there is no upward percolation: we can say the knife with which he cut it, but not *the knife with that he cut it.