Читать книгу Round the Galley Fire онлайн

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It was at this time that the gale increased in fury, and the sea grew terrible. The weather was enough to blow the masts out of the vessel, and all hands were turned up to stow both topsails and bring the brig to the wind under a small storm staysail. How is the aspect of that Cape Horn ocean to be described?—the rage of its headlong acclivities; the long sweep of olive-green heights, piebald with hissing and seething tracks of foam, blown along their gleaming sides; the hard iron-grey of the heavens, out of which the storm of wind was rushing, bearing upon its wings masses of vapour, which it tore to pieces in its fury; and the cold—the piercing, poignant cold—of the gale, with its lashing burden of sleet and spray and hail?

The men had come off the yards after having struggled, each watch of them, for hard upon three-quarters of an hour with the frozen topsails, when the brig shipped a sea just abaft the weather fore rigging. It was a whole mountain of green water, and it fell in a dead weight of scores of tons upon the deck, beating for awhile the whole life out of the devoted vessel, and making her pause, trembling and stunned, in the roaring hollow in which it had found her, whilst above the thunder of the dreadful stroke could be heard the crash of breaking wood, of splintered glass, and the rending noise of deck furniture torn from its strong fastenings. A heavy upward send drove the water off the decks, and all hands were found to be alive, holding on like grim death to whatever was next them; and then it was seen that a long range of the weather-bulwarks had been torn down flush with the deck, the cabin skylight broken into shivers, the long boat amidships stove, and nothing left of the port-quarter boat but the frame of its keel and stem, dangling at the davits. The loss of the two boats was a bad job, but still worse was the terrible straining the deeply freighted vessel had undergone, and the destruction of the skylight that left the cabin open for the floods of water that rolled along the deck. The benumbed and half-frozen crew turned to to secure what remained of the skylight and to cover it with tarpaulins; but whilst they were in the midst of this work the brig gave a heavy lurch, which made the men believe it was all over with her; and before a single cry could have been raised, a portion of the weather fore rigging carried away, and in a trice the fore-topmast broke off at the cap, and fell over the side—a horrible muddle—with all its raffle of sail, yards, and gear.