My Danish Sweetheart: A Novel. Volume 1 of 3 Read online

  CHAPTER III.

  IN THE LIFEBOAT.

  Now had come the moment when I should need the utmost exertion of nerveand coolness my nature was equal to. There was a large globular lampalight in the little building--its lustre vaguely touched the boat, andhelped me to see what was going on and who were present. Nevertheless Ishouted:

  'Are all hands aboard?'

  'All hands!' came a hurricane response.

  'All got your belts on?' I next cried.

  'All!' was the answer--that is to say, all excepting myself, who, havingworn a cork-jacket once, vowed never again to embark thus encumbered.

  'Are your sails hooked on ready for hoisting?' I shouted.

  'All ready, sir!'

  'And your haul-off rope?'

  'All ready, sir!'

  'Now then, my lads--look out, all hands!'

  There was a moment's pause:

  'Let her go!' I roared.

  A man stood close under the stern, ready to pass his knife through thelashing which held the chain to the boat.

  'Stand by!' he shouted. 'All gone!'

  I heard the clank of the chain as it fell, an instant after the boat wasin motion--slowly at first, but in a few breaths she had gathered thefull way that her own weight and the incline gave her, and rushed downthe slipway, but almost noiselessly, so thickly greased was the timberstructure, with some hands hoisting the foresail as she sped, and othersgrimly and motionless facing seawards, ready to grasp and drag upon thehaul-off rope the moment the craft should be water-borne amid thesmothering surf.

  The thunderous slatting of the sail as the yard mounted, flinging anoise of rending upon the ear as though the cloths were whipping thehurricane in rags, the furious roaring and seething and crackling andhissing of the mountainous breakers toward which the boat wasdarting--the indescribable yelling of the gale sweeping past our ears asthe fabric fled down the ways--the instant sight of the torn and mangledskies, which seemed dimly revealed somehow by the snowstorms of frothcoursing along the bay--all this combined into an impression which,though it could not have taken longer than a second or two to produceit, dwells upon my mind with so much sharpness that the whole experienceof my life might well have gone to the manufacture of it.

  We touched the wash of the sea, and burst through a cloud of foam; inthe beat of a heart the boat was up to our knees in water; in anothershe was freeing herself and leaping to the height of the next boilingacclivity, with my eight men, rigid as iron statues in their manner ofhauling and in their confrontment of the sea, dragging the craft throughthe surf and into deep water by the haul-off rope attached to an anchorsome considerable distance ahead of the end of the slipway.

  At the moment of the boat smiting the first of the breakers I graspedthe tiller-ropes, and on the men letting go the haul-off line I headedthe craft away on the port tack, my intention being to 'reach' down inthe direction of Hurricane Point, so as to be able to fetch the barqueon a second board.

  One had hardly the wits to notice the scene at the first going off, soheadlong was the tumble upon the beach, so clamorous the rush of thetempest, and so frightfully wild the leapings and launchings of the boatamid the heavily broken surface of froth. But now she had the weight ofthe gale in the close-reefed lug that had been shown to it, and thissteadied her; and high as the sea ran, yet as the water deepened thesurge grew regular, and I was able to settle down to my job of handlingthe boat, the worst being over, at least so far as our outward excursionwent.

  I glanced shorewards and observed the blaze of a portfire, held out by aman near the boat-house to serve as a signal to the barque that help wasgoing to her. The fire was blue, the blaze of it was brilliant, and itlighted up a wide area of the foreshore, throwing out the figures of thecrowd who watched us, and the outline of the boat-house, and flinging aghastly tint upon every tall upheaval of surf. The radiance lay in asort of circle upon the ebony of the night, with what I have namedshowing in it, as though it was a picture cast by a magic-lantern upon ablack curtain. You could see nothing of the lights of the town for it.On either hand of this luminous frame the houses went blending into theland, and each way all was sheer ink.

  Shortly after this signal of portfire they sent up a rocket from thebarque. It was a crimson ball, and it broke like a flash of lightingunder the ragged rush of the sky, and then outleaped afresh the flamesof a flare, or, as you might call it, a bonfire, from the deck of thevessel--a burning tar-barrel, perhaps; and the light of it disclosed thevision of the ship plunging awfully, again and again veiled by storms ofcrystal which the fathom-high flames of the flare flashed into prisms.

  One of our men roared out with an oath: 'She'll have taken the Twinsafore we get to her!' and another bellowed: 'Why did they wait to drag amile afore they signalled?' But no more was said just then.

  Indeed, a man needed to exert the whole strength of his lungs to makehimself heard. The edge of the wind seemed to clip the loudest shout asit left the lips, as you would sever a rope with a knife.

  Our boat was small for a craft of her character, but a noble, brave,nimble fabric, as had been again and again proved; and every man of us,allowing that good usage was given her, had such confidence in the_Janet_, that we would not have exchanged her for the largest,handsomest, and best-tested boat on the coast of the United Kingdom. Youwould have understood her merits had you been with us on this night. Iwas at the yoke-lines; Pentreath, my second in command, sat with hisfoot against the side, gripping the foresheet, ready to let go in aninstant; the mizzen had been hoisted, and the rest of the men, crouchingdown upon the thwarts, sat staring ahead, with iron countenances, withnever so much as a stoop among them to the hardest wash of the surgethat might sweep with a wild hissing shriek athwart their sea-helmetsand half fill the boat as it came bursting in smoke over theweather-bow, till, for the space of a wink or two, the black gale wasas white as a snowstorm overhead.

  As we 'reached' out the sea grew weightier. Never before had I known agreater sea in that bay. The ridges seemed to stand up to twice theheight of our masts; every peak boiled, and as we rose to the summit ofit, the boat was smothered in the foam of her own churning, and in theheadlong, giddy, dazzling rush into which she soared, with the wholeweight of the gale in her fragment of lug bowing her over and sendingher, as you might have believed, gunwale under down the long, indigoslant of the under-running billow.

  We held on, all as mute as death in the boat. From time to time as werose to the head of a sea I would take a look in the direction of thebarque, and catch a glimpse of the windy spark of her flare, or of themeteoric sailing of a rocket over her mastheads. There should have beena moon, but the planet was without power to strike the faintestillumination into the heaps and rags of vapours which were pouring uplike smoke over the edge of the raging Atlantic horizon. The picture ofthe parlour I had just left would sometimes arise before me: I figuredmy mother peering out at the black and throbbing scene of bay; Iimagined good Mr. Trembath at her side, uttering such words of comfortand of hope as occurred to him; but such fancies as these seemed to bebeaten away by the breath of the hurricane, as rapidly as they wereformed. Should we be in time? If the vessel's cables parted she wasdoomed. Nay; if she should continue to drag another quarter of an hour,she would be on to the Twins, and go to pieces as a child's house ofbricks falls to the touch of a hand!

  'Ready about!' I roared.

  The helm was put down, the foresheet eased off, and round came the boatnobly on the very pinnacle of a surge, pausing a moment as she was therepoised, and then plunging into the hollow to rise again with herforesail full, and heading some points to windward of the vessel we werenow steering for.

  Through it we stormed, sea after sea bursting from the lifeboat's bow inpallid clouds which the wind sent whirling in shrieks--so articulate wasthe sound of the slinging spray--into the blackness landwards. Here andthere a tiny spark of lamp flickering in the thick of the gloom told usthe situation of Tintrenale; but there was nothing more to be seen thatway; the
land and the sky above it met in a deep, impenetrable dye,towards which, to leeward of us, the tall seas went flashing in longyearning coils, throbbing into mere pallidness when a cable's lengthdistant.

  They had kindled another flare aboard the barque, or else had plied theold one with fresh fuel: she was visible by the light of the flames, thewhite of her furled canvas coming and going to the fluctuating fires;and I marked, with a heart that sank in me, the dreadful manner of herlabouring. She was pitching bows under, and rolling too, and by theshining of the signal-fire upon her deck offered a most wonderful sight,rendered terrible also by a view that we could now get of a crowd of menhanging in a lump in her starboard fore-rigging.

  The second coxswain flashed a portfire that they might know the lifeboatwas at hand, and we went plunging and sweeping down to a point somelittle distance ahead of the barque, the crowd of us irradiated by thestream of emerald-green flame.

  'All ready with the anchor, lads?' I shouted.

  'All ready, sir!' was the answer.

  'Down foresail!' and as I gave this order I put the helm down andbrought the boathead to wind about thirty fathoms ahead of the ship.

  'Let go the anchor!'

  'Unstep the foremast!' bawled the second coxswain, and, while this wasdoing, he and another swiftly lifted the mizzenmast out of its bearingsand laid it along.

  'Veer away cable handsomely!' I shouted; and pitching and foaming, nowdropping into a hollow that seemed fifty feet deep, now appearing toscale a surge that lifted the boat's bow almost dead on end over herstern--all in a fashion to make the brain of the stoutest and mostexperienced among us reel again--we dropped alongside.

  In what followed there was so much confusion, so much uproar, suchdistraction of shouts in foreign and unintelligible accents, such aterrible washing of seas, such bewilderment born of the darkness, of thecomplicated demands upon the attention through need of keeping the boatclear of the huge chopping bows of the barque, through bawling to themen in the rigging and receiving answers which we could not understand,that this passage of my singular adventure could scarcely be less vagueto me in memory if, instead of having been an actor in it, I had read itin a book.

  There were six or seven men, as well as I could make out, clustered inthe fore-rigging. I believed I could see others in the mizzen-shrouds.This being my notion, my consuming anxiety was to drop the boat down onthe quarter as quickly as possible, for it was not only that the Twinswere within a cable's range astern, with the fury of the foam theremaking a kind of shining upon the water that might have passed formoonlight: such was the volume and height of the sea roaring betwixt thelabouring ship and our boat, that at every toss of the little fabric, atevery ponderous lean down of the great groaning black hull towering overus, we stood to be staved.

  The fellows in the fore-ringing seemed to be stupefied. We all of usyelled, 'Jump, jump! Watch as she rises, and jump for God's sake!'meanwhile keeping a turn of the cable so as to hold the boat abreast ofthem. It seemed an eternity before they understood, and yet a minute hadnot passed since we dropped down, when a cry broke from them, and firstone jumped, and then another, and then the rest of them sprang, andthere they were lying in a huddle in the bottom of the boat, one or twoof them groaning dreadfully, as though from broken limbs, or worseinjuries still, all of them motionless as they lay when they jumped,like folk nearly dead of terror and cold and pain.

  'Veer out now, my lads! veer out!' I cried; 'handsomely, that we may getsmartly under the mizzen-shrouds.'

  'There's nobody there, sir,' roared one of my men.

  No! I looked and found it had been an illusion of my sight, due to theflame of the flare that was burning fiercely on the main-deck.

  'Are you all here?' I cried, addressing the dusky huddle of men at thebottom of the boat.

  Something was said, but the gale deafened me, and I could catch nomeaning, no syllables indeed, in the answer.

  'They'll all be here, sir,' shouted one of my crew; 'the port-davits areempty, and some'll have left in the boat.'

  A great sea swung us up at that instant flush with the level of thebulwark-rails, with a heel of the barque that disclosed her decks bareto the bright fires of the signal.

  'They must be all here!' I cried; 'but look well. Is there one among youwho can catch any signs of a living man on board?'

  They waited for the next upheaval of sea; then rose a shout: 'They'reall here, sir, you'll find.'

  'Heave ahead then, my lads!' by which I meant that they should haul uponthe cable to drag the boat clear of the dreadful crushing, shearing chopof the overhanging bows of the barque.

  At that instant a head showed over the rail a little abaft thefore-shrouds, and the clear, piercing voice of a boy cried, with as goodan English accent as I myself have, 'My father is ill and helpless inthe cabin. Do not leave us!'

  'No, no, we'll not leave you,' I instantly shouted in return, sending myvoice fair to the lad from the height of a sea that pretty well broughthis and my head on a level. 'How many are there of you?'

  'Two,' was the answer.

  I had to wait for the boat to slide up to the summit of the next surgeere I could call out again. The black yawns betwixt us and the barquemight have passed for valleys looked at from a hillside, so horriblyhollow and deep were they; they were pale and yet dusky too, with sheetsof foam; a soul-confounding noise of thunderous washing and seethingrose up from them. When we were in one of those hollows the great massof the dark fabric of the barque seemed to tower fifty feet above us,and we lay becalmed, hanging, while you might have counted five, inabsolute stagnation, with the yell of the wind sweeping over our headsas though we were in the heart of a pit.

  'Cannot your father help himself _at all_?' I bawled to the boy.

  'He cannot stir; he must be lifted!' he answered in a shriek, for hishigh, clear, piercing cry thus sounded.

  'By Heaven, then, lads,' I bawled to my men, 'there's no time to belost! We must bundle the poor fellow over somehow, and help the lad.Nothing will have been done if we leave them behind us. Watch yourchance and follow me, three of you!'

  At the instant of saying this I made a spring from off the height of thegratings on which I stood, and got into the fore-chains, the boat thenbeing on the level of that platform; and as actively as a cat, for fewyoung fellows had nimbler limbs, I scrambled over the bulwark on to thedeck, just in time to escape a huge fold of rushing water that foamedsheer through the chains with a spite and weight that must instantlyhave settled my business for me.

  I was in the act of running along the deck to where the lad stood--thatis to say, a little forward of the gangway, not doubting that the othersof my crew whom I had called upon were following with as much alertnessas I had exhibited, when I felt a shock as of a thump pass through thebarque.

  'She has struck!' thought I.

  But hardly was I sensible of this tremor through the vessel, when therearose a wild and dreadful cry from alongside--heavenly God! how am I todescribe that shocking noise of human distress? I fled to the rail andlooked over; it was all boiling water under me, with just a sight of theblack line of the gunwale or of the keel of the lifeboat; but there wassuch a raging of foam, such a thickness of seething yeast smoking intothe hurricane as though some volcanic eruption had happened right underthe barque, filling the air with steam, that there was nothing whateverto be seen saving just that dark glance of keel or gunwale, as I havesaid, which, however, vanished as I looked in the depth of the hissingspumy smother. I knew by this that the lifeboat must have been stavedand filled by a sudden fling of her against the massive sides of thebarque; for she was a self-righting craft, and, though she might havethrown every soul in her out as she rolled over, yet she would have rosebuoyant again, emptying herself as she leapt to the surge, and there shewould have been alongside, without a living creature in her if you will,but a good boat, and riding stoutly to her cable. But she had beenstove, and now she was gone!

  The blazing tar-barrel on the main-deck enabled me to see
my way to rushaft. I cried to the lad as I sped: 'The boat is staved; all hands of herare overboard and drowning! Heave ropes' ends over the side! flinglife-buoys!' And thus shouting, scarcely knowing, indeed, what I calledout, so confounded was I, so shocked, so horrified, so heartbroken, Imay say, by the suddenness and the fearfulness of this disaster, Ireached the quarter of the barque and overhung it; but I could seenothing. The cloudy boiling rose and fell, and with every mighty drop ofthe great square counter of the barque, the sea swept in a roar fromeither hand of her with a cataractal fury that would rush whatever wasafloat in it dozens of fathoms distant at every _scend_. Here and there_now_ I believe I could distinguish some small black object, but thenearer pallid waters dimmed into a blackness at a little distance, and,if those dark points which I observed were the heads of swimmers, thensuch was the headlong race of the surge they were swept into thethrobbing dusk ere I could make sure of them.

  I stood as one paralyzed from head to foot. My inability to be of theleast service to my poor comrades and the unhappy Danes caused me tofeel as though the very heart in me had ceased to beat. The young fellowcame to my side.

  'What is to be done?' he cried.

  'Nothing!' I answered in a passion of grief. 'What can be done? Godgrant that many of them will reach the shore! The hurl of the sea islandwards, and their life-belts will float them. But your people aredoomed.'

  'And so are we!' he exclaimed shrilly, yet without perceptible terror,with nothing worse than wild excitement in his accents. 'There are rocksdirectly under our stern. Are you a sailor?'

  'No!'

  'O, du gode Gud! what is to be done?' cried the lad.

  I cast my eyes despairingly around. The tar-barrel was still burningbravely upon the deck, defying the ceaseless sweeping of spray from overthe bows; the windy unearthly light tinctured the ship with its sicklysallow hue to the height of her lower yards, and the whole ghastly bodyof her was to be seen as she rolled and plunged under a sky that was theblacker for the light of the distress-flare, and upon a sea whose vastspreads of creaming brows would again and again come charging along tothe very height of the bulwark rail.

  In the midst of this pause on my part, and while every instinct ofself-preservation in me was blindly flinging itself, so to speak,against the black and horrible situation that imprisoned me, and while Iwas hopelessly endeavouring to consider what was to be done to save theyoung fellow alongside of me from destruction--for, as to his father, itwas impossible to extend my sympathies at such a moment to one whom Ihad not seen, who did not appeal to me, as it were, in form and voicefor succour--I say, in the midst of this pause of hopeless deliberation,the roar of the hurricane ceased on a sudden. Nothing more, I was sure,was signified by this than a lull, to be followed by some fierce chopround, or by the continuance of the westerly tempest with a bittererspite in the renewed rush of it. The lull may have lasted ten or fifteenseconds. In that time I do not know that there was a breath of air to befelt outside the violent eddyings and draughts occasioned by thesickening motions of the barque. I looked up at the sky, and spied theleanest phantom of a star that glimmered for the space of a single swingof a pendulum, and then vanished behind a rushing roll of vapour of amidnight hue, winging with incredible velocity _from_ the land.

  So insupportable was the movement of the deck that I was forced tosupport myself by a belaying-pin, or I must have been thrown. Mycompanion clung to a similar pin close beside me. The thunder of runningand colliding waters rose into that magical hush of tempest; I couldhear the booming of the surf as far as Hurricane Point and thecaldron-like noises of the waters round about the rocks astern of us.

  'Has the storm ceased?' cried my companion. 'Oh, beloved father, we maybe spared yet!' he added, extending his disengaged hand towards thedeck-house, as he apostrophized the helpless man who lay there.

  Amazed as I was by this instant cessation of the gale, I could yet findmind enough to be struck by my companion's manner, by his words, andnow, I may say, by his voice also. I was about to address him; but, asmy lips parted, there was a vivid flash of lightning that threw out thewhole scene of bay, cliff, foreshore, and town, with the line of thehorizon seawards, in a dazzle of violet; a crash of thunder followed;but, before its ear-splitting reverberation had ceased, the echoes ofit were drowned in the bellowing of the gale coming directly off theland.

  What is there in words to express the fury of this outfly? It met theheave of the landward-running seas, and swept them into smoke, and theair grew as white and thick with spume as though a heavy snowstorm wereblowing horizontally along. It took the barque and swung her; herlabouring was so prodigious as she was thrust by this fresh hurricanebroadside round to the surge, that I imagined every second she wouldfounder under my feet. I felt a shock: my companion cried, 'One of thecables has parted!' A moment later I felt the same indescribable tremblerunning through the planks on which we stood.

  'Is that the other cable gone, do you think?' I shouted.

  'There is a lead-line over the side,' he cried; 'it will tell us if weare adrift.'

  I followed him to near the mizzen rigging; neither of us durst let gowith one hand until we had a grip of something else with the other; itwas _now_ not only the weight of the wind that would have laid us proneand pinned us to the deck--a pyramidal sea had sprung up as though byenchantment, and each apex as it soared about the bows and sides wasblown inboards in very avalanches of water, which with each violent rollof the vessel poured in a solid body to the rail, one side or the other,again and again, to the height of our waist.

  My companion extended his hand over the bulwarks, and cried out: 'Hereis the lead-line. It stretches towards the bows. Oh, sir, we are adrift!we are blowing out to sea!'

  I put my hand over and grasped the line, and instantly knew by the angleof it that the lad was right. By no other means would he have been ableto get at the truth. The weight of lead, by resting on the bottom,immediately told if the barque was dragging. All around was white water;the blackness of the night drooped to the very spit of the brine; not alight was to be perceived, not the vaguest outline of the cliff; and thewhole scene of darkness was the more bewildering for the throb of thenear yeast upon the eyesight.

  'Is your binnacle-light burning?' I cried.

  The lad answered, 'Yes.'

  'Then,' I shouted, 'we must find out the quarter the gale has shiftedinto and get her stern on to it, and clear Hurricane Point, if AlmightyGod will permit. There may be safety in the open; there is none here.'

  With the utmost labour and distress we made our way aft. The flare hadbeen extinguished by the heavy falls of water, and it was worse thanwalking blindfolded. The binnacle-light was burning--this was, indeed,to be expected. The barque was plunging directly head to wind, and aglance at the card enabled me to know that the gale was blowing almostdue east, having shifted, as these cyclonic ragings often do, right intothe quarter opposite whence it had come.

  'We must endeavour to get her before it,' I cried; 'but I am no sailor.There may come another shift, and we ought to clear the land while thehurricane holds as it does. What is to be done?'

  'Will she pay off if the helm is put hard over?' he answered. 'Let ustry it!'

  He seized the spokes on one side; I put my shoulder to the wheel on theother, and thus we jammed and secured the helm into the posture calledby sailors 'hard a-starboard.' She fell off, indeed--into the trough,and there she lay, amid such a diabolical play of water, such lashingsof seas on both sides, as it is not in mortal pen to portray!

  Had we been in the open ocean, a better attitude than the barque herselfhad taken up we could not have wished for. She was, indeed, 'hove-to,'as the sea-expression is, giving something of her bow to the wind, andwas in that posture which the shipmaster will put his vessel into insuch a tempest as was now blowing. But, unhappily, the land was oneither hand of us, and though our drift might be straight out to sea, Icould not be sure that it was. The tide would be making to the west andnorth; the coils and pyramids and leap
ings of surge had also a sort ofyearning and leaning towards north-west, as if in sympathy with thetide; the deadly terrace of Hurricane Point lay that way; and so theleaving of the barque in the trough of the sea might come, indeed, tocost us our lives, which had only just been spared by the shift in thestorm of wind.

  'She does not answer the helm,' I cried to my young companion.

  'Her head will pay off,' he answered, 'if we can manage to hoist afragment of sail forward. It _must_ be done, sir. Will you help me?'

  'God knows I will do anything!' I cried. 'Show me what is to be done. Wemust save our lives if we can. There may be a chance out on the oceanfor us.'

  Without another word he went forward, and I followed him. We had topause often to preserve ourselves from being floated off our feet. Theflood, which washed white betwixt the rails, lifted the rigging off thepins, and sent the ropes snaking about the decks, and our movements wereas much hampered as though we fought our way through a jungle. The foamall about us, outside and inboards, put a wild, cold glimmer into theair, which enabled us to distinguish outlines. In fact, at moments thewhole shape of the barque, from her bulwarks to some distance up hermasts, would show like a sketch in ink upon white paper as she leanedoff the slant of the sea and painted her figure upon the hill of froththundering away from her on the lee-side.

  My companion paused for a moment or two under the shelter of the cabooseor galley, to tell me what he meant to do. We then crawled on to theforecastle, and he bade me hold by a rope which he put into my hand, andawait his return. I watched him creep into the 'eyes' of the vessel andget upon the bowsprit, but after that I lost sight of him, for the seassmoked so fiercely all about the ship's head--to every plunge of herbows there rose so shrouding a thickness of foam--that the air was a fogof crystals where the lad was, and had he gone overboard he could nothave vanished more utterly from my sight. Indeed, I could not tellwhether he was gone or not, and a feeling of horror possessed me when Ithought of being left alone in the vessel with a sick and useless manlying somewhere aft, and with the rage and darkness of the dreadfulstorm around me, the chance of striking upon Hurricane Point, and nobetter hope at the best than what was to be got out of thinking of themidnight breast of the storming Atlantic.

  After a few minutes there was the noise of the rattling of canvasresembling a volley of small shot fired off the bows. The figure of thelad came from the bowsprit out of a burst of spray that soared in steaminto the wind.

  'Only a fragment must be hoisted!' he exclaimed with his mouth at myear. 'Pull with me!'

  I put my weight upon the rope, and together we rose a few feet of thesail upon the stay--it was the foretopmast staysail, as I afterwardsdiscovered.

  'Enough!' cried my companion in his clear, penetrating voice; 'if itwill but hold till the vessel pays off, all will be well. We dare notask for more.'

  He secured the rope we had dragged upon to a pin, and I followed himaft, finding leisure even in that time of distress and horror to wonderat the coolness, the intrepidity of soul, that was expressed in hisclear unfaltering speech, in the keen judgment and instant resolution ofa lad whose age, as I might gather from his voice, could scarcely exceedfifteen or sixteen years. Between us we seized the wheel afresh, one oneither side of it, and waited. But we were not to be kept long insuspense. Indeed, even before we had grasped the helm, the barque waspaying off. The rag of canvas held nobly, and to the impulse of it thebig bows of the vessel rounded away from the gale, and in a few minutesshe was dead before it, pitching furiously, with the sea snapping andfoaming to her taffrail and quarters.

  But the thickness of her yards, with the canvas rolled up on them, thethickness of the masts, too, the spread of the tops, the complicatedgear of shroud, backstay, and running rigging--all offered resistanceenough to the dark and living gale that was bellowing right over thestern to put something of the speed of an arrow into the keel of thefabric. Through it she madly raced, with pallid clouds blowing about herbows, and white peaks hissing along her sides, and a wake of snow underher counter heaving to half the height of the mizzenmast with the hurlof the seas, and a ceaseless blowing of froth over our heads as the ladand I stood together grasping the wheel, steering the vessel into thedarkness of the great Atlantic Ocean, with our eyes upon thecompass-card, whose illuminated disc showed the course on which we werebeing flashed forwards by the storm to be a trifle south of west.