University of Virginia Library

39. CHAPTER XXXIX.

Had Clara recognized Thurstane, she would have thrown herself into his
arms, and he would hardly have slept that night for joy.

As it was, he could not sleep for misery; festering at heart because of that
letter of rejection; almost maddened by his supposed discovery that she would
not speak to him, yet declaring to himself that he never would have married
her, because of her money; at the same time worshipping and desiring her with

passion; longing to die, but longing to die for her; half enraged, and altogether
wretched.

Meantime the southeaster, dead ahead and blowing harder every minute, was
sending its seas further and further aft. He left his wet berth on the deck,
reeled, or rather was flung, to the stern of the vessel, lodged himself between
the little wheel-house and the taffrail, and watched a scene in consonance with
his feelings. Innumerable twinklings of stars faintly illuminated a cloudless,
serene heaven, and a foaming, plunging ocean. The slender, dark outlines of
the sailless upper masts were leaning sharply over to leeward, and describing
what seemed like mystic circles and figures against the lighter sky. The crests
of seas showed with ghostly whiteness as they howled themselves to death near
by, or dashed with a jar and a hoarse whistle over the bulwarks, slapping against
the sails and pounding upon the decks. The waves which struck the bows
every few seconds gave forth sounds like the strokes of Thor's hammer, and
made everything tremble from cathead to sternpost.

Every now and then there were hoarse orders from the captain on the quarter-deck,
echoed instantly by sharp yells from the mate in the waist. Now it
was, “Lay aloft and furl the fore royal;” and ten minutes later, “Lay aloft and
furl the main royal.” Scarcely was this work done before the shout came, “Lay
aloft and reef the fore-t'gallant-s'l;” followed almost immediately by “Lay aloft
and reef the main-t'gallant-s'l.” Next came, “Lay out forrard and furl the flying
jib.” Each command was succeeded by a silent, dark darting of men into
the rigging, and presently a trampling on deck and a short, sharp singing out at
the ropes, with cries from aloft of “Haul out to leeward; taut hand; knot
away.”

Under the reduced sail the brig went easier for a while; but the half gale
had made up its mind to be a hurricane. It was blowing more savagely every
second. One after another the topgallant sails were double-reefed, close-reefed,
and at last furled. The watch on deck had its hands full to accomplish this
work, so powerfully did the wind drag on the canvas. Presently, far away forward—it
seemed on board some other craft, so faint was the sound—there came
a bang, bang, bang! on the scuttle of the forecastle, and a hollow shout of “All
hands reef tops'ls ahoy!”

Up tumbled the “starbowlines,” or starboard watch, and joined the “larbowlines”
in the struggle with the elements. No more sleep that night for
man, boy, mate, or master. Reef after reef was taken in the topsails, until
they were two long, narrow shingles of canvas, and still the wind brought the
vessel well down on her beam ends, as if it would squeeze her by main force
under water. The men were scarcely on deck from their last reefing job, when
boom! went the jib, bursting out as if shot from a cannon, and then whipping
itself to tatters.

“Lay out forrard!” screamed the mate. “Lay out and furl it.”

After a desperate struggle, half the time more or less under water, two men
dragged in and fastened the fragments of the jib, while others set the foretopmast
staysail in its place. But the wind was full of mischief; it seemed to be
playing with the ship's company; it furnished one piece of work after another
with dizzying rapidity. Hardly was the jib secured before the great mainsail
ripped open from top to bottom, and in the same puff the close-reefed foretopsail
split in two with a bang, from earing to earing. Now came the orders fast
and loud: “Down yards! Haul out reef tackle! Lay out and furl! Lay out
and reef!”

It was a perfect mess; a score of ropes flying at once; the men rolling

about and holding on; the sails slapping like mad, and ends of rigging streaming
off to leeward. After an exhausting fight the mainsail was furled, the upper
half of the topsail set close-reefed, and everything hauled taut again. Now
came an hour or so without accident, but not without incessant and fatiguing
labor, for the two royal yards were successively sent down to relieve the upper
masts, and the foretopgallant sail, which had begun to blow loose, was frapped
with long pieces of sinnet.

During this period of comparative quiet Thurstane ventured an attempt to
reach his stateroom. The little gloomy cabin was going hither and thither in a
style which reminded him of the tossings of Gulliver's cage after it had been
dropped into the sea by the Brobdingnag eagle. The steward was seizing up
mutinous trunks and chairs to the table legs with rope-yarns. The lamp was
swinging and the captain's compass see-sawing like monkeys who had gone
crazy in bedlams of tree-tops. From two of the staterooms came sounds which
plainly confessed that the occupants were having a bad night of it.

“How is the lady passenger?” Thurstane could not help whispering.

“Guess she's asleep, sah,” returned the negro. “Fus-rate sailor, sah. But
them greasers is having tough times,” he grinned. “Can't abide the sea, greasers
can't, sah.”

Smiling with a grim satisfaction at this last statement, Thurstane gave the
man a five-dollar piece, muttered, “Call me if anything goes wrong,” and slipped
into his narrow dormitory. Without undressing, he lay down and tried to
sleep; but, although it was past midnight, he stayed broad awake for an hour or
more; he was too full of thoughts and emotions to find easy quiet in a pillow.
Near him—yes, in the very next stateroom—lay the being who had made his
life first a heaven and then a hell. The present and the past struggled in
him, and tossed him with their tormenting contest. After a while, too, as the
plunging of the brig increased, and he heard renewed sounds of disaster on
deck, he began to fear for Clara's safety. It was a strange feeling, and yet a
most natural one. He had not ceased to love; he seemed indeed to love her
more than ever; to think of her struggling in the billows was horrible; he
knew even then that he would willingly die to save her. But after a time the
incessant motion affected him, and he dozed gradually into a sound slumber.

Hours later the jerking and pitching became so furious that it awakened him,
and when he rose on his elbow he was thrown out of his berth by a tremendous
lurch. Sitting up with his feet braced, he listened for a little to the roar of the
tempest, the trampling feet on deck, and the screaming orders. Evidently
things were going hardly above; the storm was little less than a tornado. Seriously
anxious at last for Clara—or, as he tried to call her to himself, Miss
Van Diemen—he stole out of his room, clambered or fell up the companionway,
opened the door after a struggle with a sea which had just come inboard, got
on to the quarter-deck, and, holding by the shrouds, quailed before a spectacle
is sublime and more terrible than the Great Cañon of the Colorado.

It was daylight. The sun was just rising from behind a waste of waters; it
revealed nothing but a waste of waters. All around the brig, as far as the eye
could reach, the Pacific was one vast tumble of huge blue-gray, mottled masses,
breaking incessantly in long, curling ridges, or lofty, tossing steeps of foam.
Each wave was composed of scores of ordinary waves, just as the greater mountains
are composed of ranges and peaks. They seemed moving volcanoes,
changing form with every minute of their agony, and spouting lavas of froth.
All over this immense riot of tormented deeps rolled beaten and terrified armies
of clouds. The wind reigned supreme, driving with a relentless spite, a steady

and obdurate pressure, as if it were a current of water. It pinned the sailors
to the yards, and nearly blew Thurstane from the deck.

The Lolotte was down to close-reefed topsails, close-reefed spencer and
spanker, and storm-jib. Even upon this small and stout spread of canvas the
wind was working destruction, for just as Thurstane reached the deck the jib
parted and went to leeward in ribbons. Sailors were seen now on the bowsprit
fighting at once with sea and air, now buried in water, and now holding on
against the storm, and slowly gathering in the flapping, snapping fragments.
Next a new jib (a third one) was bent on, hoisted half-way, and blown out like a
piece of wet paper. Almost at the same moment the captain saw threatening
mouths grimace in the mainsail, and screamed “Never mind there forrard. Lay
up on the maintawps'l yard. Lay up and furl.”

After half an hour's fight, the sail bagging and slatting furiously, it was lashed
anyway around the yard, and the men crawled slowly down again, jammed and
bruised against the shrouds by the wind. Every jib and forestaysail on board
having now been torn out, the brig remained under close-reefed foretopsail,
spencer, and spanker, and did little but drift to leeward. The gale was at its
height, blowing as if it were shot out of the mouths of cannon, and chasing the
ocean before it in mountains of foam. One thing after another went; the top-gallants
shook loose and had to be sent down; the chain bobstays parted and
the martingale slued out of place; one of the anchors broke its fastenings and
hammered at the side; the galley gave way and went slopping into the lee scuppers.
No food that morning except dry crackers and cold beef; all hands laboring
exhaustingly to repair damages and make things taut. For more than
half an hour three men were out on the guys and backropes endeavoring to reset
the martingale, deluged over and over by seas, and at last driven in beaten.
Others were relashing the galley, hauling the loose anchor and all the anchors
up on the rail, and resetting the loose lee rigging, which threatened at every
lurch to let the masts go by the board.

Thurstane presently learned that the wind had changed during the night, at
first dropping away for a couple of hours, then reopening with fresh rage from the
west, and finally hauling around into the northwest, whence it now came in a
steady tempest. The vessel too had altered her course; she was no longer
beating in long tacks toward the southeast; she was heading westward and
struggling to get away from the land. Thurstane asked few questions; he was
a soldier and had learned to meet fate in silence; he knew too that men
weighted with responsibilities do not like to be catechised. But he guessed
from the frequent anxious looks of the captain eastward that the California coast
was perilously near, and that the brig was more likely to be drifting toward it
than making headway from it. Surveying through his closed hands the stormy
windward horizon, he gave up all thoughts of getting away from Clara by reaching
San Diego, and turned toward the idea of saving her from shipwreck.

None of the other passengers came on deck this morning. Garcia, horribly
seasick and frightened, held on desperately to his berth, and passed the time in
screaming for the “stewrt,” cursing his evil surroundings, calling everybody he
could think of pigs, dogs, etc., and praying to saints and angels. Coronado, not
less sick and blasphemous, had more command over his fears, and kept his
prayers for the last pinch. Clara, a much better sailor, and indeed an uncommonly
good one, was so far beaten by the motion that she did not get up, but
lay as quiet as the brig would let her, patiently awaiting results, now and then
smiling at Garcia's shouts, but more frequently thinking of Thurstane, and
sometimes praying that she might find him alive at Fort Yuma.

The steward carried cold beef, hard bread, brandy, coffee, and gruel (made in
his pantry) from stateroom to stateroom. The girl ate heartily, inquired about
the storm, and asked, “When shall we get there?” Garcia and Coronado tried
a little of the gruel and a good deal of the brandy and water, and found, as people
usually do under such circumstances, that nothing did them any good. The
old man wanted to ask the steward a hundred questions, and yelled for his
nephew to come and translate for him. Coronado, lying on his back, made no
answer to these cries of despair, except in muttered curses and sniffs of angry
laughter. So passed the morning in the cabin.

Thurstane remained on deck, eating in soldierly fashion, his pockets full of
cold beef and crackers, and his canteen (for every infantry officer learns to carry
one) charged with hot coffee. He was pretty wet, inasmuch as the spray showered
incessantly athwart ships, while every few minutes heavy seas came over
the quarter bulwarks, slamming upon the deck like the tail of a shark in his
agonies. During the morning several great combers had surmounted the port
bow and rushed aft, carrying along everything loose or that could be loosened,
and banging against the companion door with the force of a runaway horse.
And these deluges grew more frequent, for the gale was steadily increasing in
violence, howling and shrieking out of the gilded eastern horizon as if Lucifer
and his angels had been hurled anew from heaven.

About noon the close-reefed foretopsail burst open from earing to earing, and
then ripped up to the yard, the corners stretching out before the wind and cracking
like musket shots. To set it again was impossible; the orders came, “Down
yard—haul out reef tackle;” then half a dozen men laid out on the spar and began
furling. Scarcely was this terrible job well under way when a whack of the
slatting sail struck a Kanaka boy from his hold, and he was carried to leeward
by the gale as if he had been a bag of old clothes, dropping forty feet from the
side into the face of a monstrous billow. He swam for a moment, but the next
wave combed over him and he disappeared. Then he was seen further astern,
still swimming and with his face toward the brig; then another vast breaker
rushed upon him with a lion-like roar, and he was gone. Nothing could be
done; no boat might live in such a sea; it would have been perilous to change
course. The captain glanced at the unfortunate, clenched his fists desperately,
and turned to his rigging. Another man took the vacant place on the yard, and
the hard, dizzy, frightful labor there went on unflaggingly, with the usual cries
of “Haul out, knot away,” etc. It was one of the forms of a sailor's funeral.

No time for comments or emotions; the gale filled every mind every minute.
It was soon found that the spanker, a pretty large sail, well aft and not balanced
by any canvas at the bow, drew too heavily on the stern and made steering almost
impossible. A couple of Kanakas were ordered to reef it, but could do
nothing with it; the skipper cursed them for “sojers” (our infantryman smiling
at the epithet) and sent two first-class hands to replace them; but these also
were completely beaten by the hurricane. It was not till a whole watch was put
at the job that the big, bellying sheet could be hauled in and made fast in the
reef knots. The brig now had not a rag out but her spencer and reduced spanker,
both strong, small, and low sails, eased a good deal by their slant, shielded
by the elevated port-rail, and thus likely to hold. But it was not sailing; it was
simply lying to. The vessel rose and fell on the monstrous waves, but made
scarcely more headway than would a tub, and drifted fast toward the still unseen
California coast.

All might still have gone well had the northwester continued as it was. But
about noon this tempest, which already seemed as furious as it could possibly

be, suddenly increased to an absolute hurricane, the wind fairly shoving the brig
sidelong over the water. Bang went the spanker, and then bang the spencer,
both sails at once flying out to leeward in streamers, and flapping to tatters before
the men could spring on the booms to secure them. The destruction was
almost as instant and complete as if it had been effected by the broadside of a
seventy-four fired at short range.

“Bend on the new spencer,” shouted the captain. “Out with it and up with
it before she rolls the sticks out of her.”

But the rolling commenced instantly, giving the sailors no time for their
work. No longer steadied by the wind, the vessel was entirely at the mercy of
the sea, and went twice on her beam ends for every billow, first to lee and then
to windward. Presently a great, white, hissing comber rose above her larboard
bulwark, hung there for a moment as if gloating on its prey, and fell with the
force of an avalanche, shaking every spar and timber into an ague, deluging the
main deck breast high, and swashing knee-deep over the quarter-deck. The
galley, with the cook in it, was torn from its lashings and slung overboard as if
it had been a hencoop. The companion doors were stove in as if by a battering
ram, and the cabin was flooded in an instant with two feet of water, slopping and
lapping among the baggage, and stealing under the doors of the staterooms.
The sailors in the waist only saved themselves by rushing into the rigging
during the moment in which the breaker hung suspended.

Nothing could be done; the vessel must lift herself from this state of submergence;
and so she did, slowly and tremulously, like a sick man rising from
his bed. But while the ocean within was still running out of her scuppers, the
ocean without assaulted her anew. Successive billows rolled under her, careening
her dead weight this way and that, and keeping her constantly wallowing.
No rigging could bear such jerking long, and presently the dreaded catastrophe
came.

The larboard stays of the foremast snapped first; then the shrouds on the
same side doubled in a great bight and parted; next the mast, with a loud,
shrieking crash, splintered and went by the board. It fell slowly and with an
air of dignified, solemn resignation, like Cæsar under the daggers of the conspirators.
The cross stays flew apart like cobwebs, but the lee shrouds unfortunately
held good; and scarcely was the stick overboard before there was an ominous
thumping at the sides, the drum-beat of death. It was like guns turned
on their own columns; like Pyrrhus's elephants breaking the phalanx of Pyrrhus.

“Axes!” roared the captain at the first crack. “Axes!” yelled the mate as
the spar reeled into the water. “Lay forward and clear the wreck,” were the
next orders; “cut away with your knives.”

Two axes were got up from below; the sailors worked like beavers, waist-deep
in water; one, who had lost his knife, tore at the ropes with his teeth.
After some minutes of reeling, splashing, chopping, and cutting, the fallen mast,
the friend who had become an enemy, the angel who had become a demon, was
sent drifting through the creamy foam to leeward. Meantime the mate had
sounded the pumps, and brought out of them a clear stream of water, the fresh
invasion of ocean.

Directly on this cruel discovery, and as if to heighten its horror to the utmost,
the captain, clinging high up the mainmast shrouds, shouted, “Landalee!
Get ready the boats.”

Without a word Thurstane hurried down into the cabin to save Clara from
this twofold threatening of death.