THE COLOSSAL SAVAGE, THE STORM.
In the meantime the skipper had caught up his speaking-trumpet.
“Strike every sail, my lads; let go the sheets, man the down-hauls,
lower ties and brails. Let us steer to the west, let us regain the high
sea; head for the buoy, steer for the bell--there’s an offing down
there. We’ve yet a chance.”
“Try,” said the doctor.
Let us remark here, by the way, that this ringing buoy, a kind of bell
tower on the deep, was removed in 1802. There are yet alive very old
mariners who remember hearing it. It forewarned, but rather too late.
The orders of the skipper were obeyed. The Languedocian made a third
sailor. All bore a hand. Not satisfied with brailing up, they furled the
sails, lashed the earrings, secured the clew-lines, bunt-lines, and
leech-lines, and clapped preventer-shrouds on the block straps, which
thus might serve as back-stays. They fished the mast. They battened down
the ports and bulls’-eyes, which is a method of walling up a ship. These
evolutions, though executed in a lubberly fashion, were, nevertheless,
thoroughly effective. The hooker was stripped to bare poles. But in
proportion as the vessel, stowing every stitch of canvas, became more
helpless, the havoc of both winds and waves increased. The seas ran
mountains high. The hurricane, like an executioner hastening to his
victim, began to dismember the craft. There came, in the twinkling of an
eye, a dreadful crash: the top-sails were blown from the bolt-ropes, the
chess-trees were hewn asunder, the deck was swept clear, the shrouds
were carried away, the mast went by the board, all the lumber of the
wreck was flying in shivers. The main shrouds gave out although they
were turned in, and stoppered to four fathoms.
The magnetic currents common to snowstorms hastened the destruction of
the rigging. It broke as much from the effect of effluvium as the
violence of the wind. Most of the chain gear, fouled in the blocks,
ceased to work. Forward the bows, aft the quarters, quivered under the
terrific shocks. One wave washed overboard the compass and its binnacle.
A second carried away the boat, which, like a box slung under a
carriage, had been, in accordance with the quaint Asturian custom,
lashed to the bowsprit. A third breaker wrenched off the spritsail yard.
A fourth swept away the figurehead and signal light. The rudder only was
left.
To replace the ship’s bow lantern they set fire to, and suspended at the
stem, a large block of wood covered with oakum and tar.
The mast, broken in two, all bristling with quivering splinters, ropes,
blocks, and yards, cumbered the deck. In falling it had stove in a plank
of the starboard gunwale. The skipper, still firm at the helm,
shouted,--
“While we can steer we have yet a chance. The lower planks hold good.
Axes, axes! Overboard with the mast! Clear the decks!”
Both crew and passengers worked with the excitement of despair. A few
strokes of the hatchets, and it was done. They pushed the mast over the
side. The deck was cleared.
“Now,” continued the skipper, “take a rope’s end and lash me to the
helm.” To the tiller they bound him.
While they were fastening him he laughed, and shouted,--
“Blow, old hurdy-gurdy, bellow. I’ve seen your equal off Cape
Machichaco.”
And when secured he clutched the helm with that strange hilarity which
danger awakens.
“All goes well, my lads. Long live our Lady of Buglose! Let us steer
west.”
An enormous wave came down abeam, and fell on the vessel’s quarter.
There is always in storms a tiger-like wave, a billow fierce and
decisive, which, attaining a certain height, creeps horizontally over
the surface of the waters for a time, then rises, roars, rages, and
falling on the distressed vessel tears it limb from limb.
A cloud of foam covered the entire poop of the _Matutina_.
There was heard above the confusion of darkness and waters a crash.
When the spray cleared off, when the stern again rose in view, the
skipper and the helm had disappeared. Both had been swept away.
The helm and the man they had but just secured to it had passed with the
wave into the hissing turmoil of the hurricane.
The chief of the band, gazing intently into the darkness, shouted,--
“_Te burlas de nosotros?_”
To this defiant exclamation there followed another cry,--
“Let go the anchor. Save the skipper.”
They rushed to the capstan and let go the anchor.
Hookers carry but one. In this case the anchor reached the bottom, but
only to be lost. The bottom was of the hardest rock. The billows were
raging with resistless force. The cable snapped like a thread.
The anchor lay at the bottom of the sea. At the cutwater there remained
but the cable end protruding from the hawse-hole.
From this moment the hooker became a wreck. The _Matutina_ was
irrevocably disabled. The vessel, just before in full sail, and almost
formidable in her speed, was now helpless. All her evolutions were
uncertain and executed at random. She yielded passively and like a log
to the capricious fury of the waves. That in a few minutes there should
be in place of an eagle a useless cripple, such a transformation is to
be witnessed only at sea.
The howling of the wind became more and more frightful. A hurricane has
terrible lungs; it makes unceasingly mournful additions to darkness,
which cannot be intensified. The bell on the sea rang despairingly, as
if tolled by a weird hand.
The _Matutina_ drifted like a cork at the mercy of the waves. She sailed
no longer--she merely floated. Every moment she seemed about to turn
over on her back, like a dead fish. The good condition and perfectly
water-tight state of the hull alone saved her from this disaster. Below
the water-line not a plank had started. There was not a cranny, chink,
nor crack; and she had not made a single drop of water in the hold. This
was lucky, as the pump, being out of order, was useless.
The hooker pitched and roared frightfully in the seething billows. The
vessel had throes as of sickness, and seemed to be trying to belch forth
the unhappy crew.
Helpless they clung to the standing rigging, to the transoms, to the
shank painters, to the gaskets, to the broken planks, the protruding
nails of which tore their hands, to the warped riders, and to all the
rugged projections of the stumps of the masts. From time to time they
listened. The toll of the bell came over the waters fainter and fainter;
one would have thought that it also was in distress. Its ringing was no
more than an intermittent rattle. Then this rattle died away. Where were
they? At what distance from the buoy? The sound of the bell had
frightened them; its silence terrified them. The north-wester drove them
forward in perhaps a fatal course. They felt themselves wafted on by
maddened and ever-recurring gusts of wind. The wreck sped forward in the
darkness. There is nothing more fearful than being hurried forward
blindfold. They felt the abyss before them, over them, under them. It
was no longer a run, it was a rush.
Suddenly, through the appalling density of the snowstorm, there loomed a
red light.
“A lighthouse!” cried the crew.