John Holdsworth, Chief Mate. William Clark Russell
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dim outlines melted, and some dark figures went up into the gloom and vanished.
The captain returned to his cabin, and Holdsworth strolled the deck. At two bells (one o’clock) the haze went out of the sky and the stars shone fiercely. Holdsworth, standing on the starboard side of the poop, felt a light air creeping about his face, and the sound of the flapping sails ceased.
“How’s her head?”
“North-a-quarter-west, sir.”
He sang out an order, and a crowd of figures came tumbling out of the forecastle and manned the port braces. The air died away, but presently came a quick puff which made the water bubble around the ship.
Holdsworth’s eyes were upon the weather-horizon. The stars burned purely, but away upon the water-line was a thick shadow.
Again the wind died out and there was a breathless stillness, amid which you might hear a sound—vague, murmurous, indescribable—a distant echo it might seem of something infinitely distant.
“Stand by the topgallant halliards!”
A sense of expectation seemed to pervade the very ship herself as she stood upright with her dim canvas flapping in the darkness above.
The distant murmur grew more defined, and took such a tone as you may hear in small sharp rain falling at a distance upon leaves. Then, out of the murky horizon some clouds came rolling—long, attenuated shadows, resembling visionary arms clutching at the stars. The murmur approached; the clouds, swinging along the sky, formed into compact groups. Hark to the quick hissing of the water lashed by the wind!
In a moment the sails were round and hard, the ship with her port-chains under water, and the wind screeching fiercely over the ebony surface of the sea, and whitening it with foam.
The captain was on the poop, holding on to the main-topgallant backstay, and shrieking orders like one possessed. It was indeed briefly a case of “Let go everything!” Under full topsail, foresail, staysails, and jibs, the ship was too heavily weighted for the surprising violence of the wind, and was powerless to right herself. But every order given was the right one. And now you heard the deep tones of Holdsworth’s powerful voice mingling with the agitated commands of the skipper, while yards came rushing down upon the caps, and sails banged and roared aloft, and men shouted lustily about the decks, and the sea fled in cataracts of foam under the vessel’s bows.
A time of deep excitement, but scarcely of suspense—there was too much hurrying for that.
There would have been something incredible to an inexperienced landsman in the sight of the dark figures swarming up the shrouds to give battle to the wild array of canvas which groaned and bellowed like a dozen thunderstorms in the sky—a spectacle of human pluck not to be realised, or in the faintest degree appreciated, by those who have not beheld it. The night black—the yards slanting so that the extremity of the main-yard touched the water; the footing upon those yards a thin line which must be felt for by the feet; the canvas, loosened by the lowering of the yard, bellied by the force of the wind many feet above the heads of the reefers, and presenting to their hands a surface of iron; and the three masts quivering under the shocks and convulsions of the sails!
All hands were at work now, and there were men enough to reef both big topsails at once, whilst others over their heads furled the topgallant sails. Holdsworth had been one of the first to spring up the main rigging; he knew the value of every pair of hands in that moment of danger; and away—active, daring, his hands and arms like steel—he clambered for the weather-earing. But the boatswain was before him, so he made for the lee yard-arm.
Figure a smooth spar, fifty-five feet long, sloping at a height of as many feet to the water’s surface, the said surface not being a mill pond, but a sheet of foam; figure a pitch dark night, a line stretched along the yard, down which you must slide to the extremity, a sail weighing half a dozen tons banging at your head and your feet, and doing its utmost to throw you; then, having reached the extremity of the yard, figure your legs thrown across it as you might bestride a horse, beneath you the foaming sea, almost at right angles the inclined deck of the ship, a long stone’s throw distant—a deep darkness everywhere, save where a wave, breaking massively, flings out a phosphorescent light and deepens the blackness of its own chasm—whilst the gale yells about your ears, and blinds you with spray that stings like hail!
Figure this, and you will then very faintly realise what “taking the lee-earing” in a gale at sea means.
The cries of the men aloft, and the beating of the canvas, sounded like an unearthly contest in mid-air; but they ceased presently, and then the hands came hurrying down the rigging and fell to the halliards. Holdsworth sprang on to the poop, his cap gone, his hair blown about his eyes, and roared out orders, while the captain, more easy in his mind about his spars, went aft and hung about the binnacle, watching the compass often.
The ship was now under double-reefed topsails, and reeling through the darkness almost bare of sail. The wind was increasing in violence every five minutes, and an ugly Atlantic sea was running right athwart the ship’s course, hurling great waves against her starboard beam, which ran in waterspouts of foam as high as the main-top, and was blown in big hissing flakes through the rigging to leeward. It was soon deemed expedient to close-reef the topsails; but even under these mere streaks of canvas the “Meteor” lay over to the gale down to her water-ways, and the water bubbling in her lee scuppers. But luckily the gale was right abeam, and the vessel could hold her course; but her speed was comparatively small, and she laboured heavily.
So passed the darkest hours of the night. At four o’clock the gale was at its worst. They had rigged up a hurricane-house in the mizzen rigging—a square of tarpaulin, which the wind flattened hard against the shrouds—and under this shelter sat Holdsworth and the captain, scarce able to hear their own voices, pitched in the loudest key, amid the howling of the tempest. Once Holdsworth went below to look at the glass, and came back saying it was steady. The skipper roared that he never before remembered so sudden a gale, and Holdsworth owned that only once was he so caught—in the Pacific, when they lost their fore-topmast.
There was nothing more to be done, unless they hove the ship to; but this was not needful. The dawn broke at five, and the pale cheerless light illuminated a wild and dreary scene of tumbling desolate waters billowing in mountains to the horizon. The “Meteor,” almost under bare poles, her yards pointed to the gale, her ropes and lines blown in semicircles to leeward, laboured heavily, caught now by a sea that threw her on her beam-ends, and now swooping into a chasm walled with boiling green water, making the gale screech like a million steam-whistles through her rigging, as she drove up against it, while coiling tongues of water ran in cataracts up her glistening sides and fell in dead weights upon her decks. The sky, from horizon to horizon, was a dark lead colour, along which under-clouds, in appearance resembling volumes of smoke, were swept along, torn and rent, and discharging at intervals quick, biting showers of rain.
Some of the passengers came on deck—the General, Mr. Holland, and Mr. St. Aubyn. The General turned about when he had advanced a few feet, and disappeared; Mr. Holland in a very short time followed his example; but the actor, with manifest looks of terror in his pallid face, pushed onwards with outstretched hands for the hurricane-house. The captain advised him to go below; but at that moment the ship, rolling suddenly to windward, shipped a shower of spray, which soaked the poor actor through and through; a moment after, the vessel heeled heavily over to leeward; away rolled the actor, impelled both by the wind and the unerring law of gravitation, and was flung against the lee mizzen rigging, to which he was pinned by the violence of the gale as effectually as if he had been lashed to the shrouds. He screamed for help, on which Holdsworth went over to him, took him by the arm, and dragged him against the wind to the companion-hatchway. As Mr. St. Aubyn staggered below, clinging like a kitten to whatever he could lay hands on, he was heard to implore Holdsworth to tell him if there was any danger; but, before the words were out of his mouth, Holdsworth was clinging to the weather-rigging and calling the captain’s attention to a brig, which had risen out of the sea like an apparition, and was tearing before the gale with full topsails and topgallant-sails set.
“A Yankee, by her build!” said the captain.