after I had gone to sleep, at two o'clock suddenly
something in the nature of a tropical tornado flew up and struck us
hard. I was awakened by a tremendous crash on the bridge-deck above my
cabin, a heeling over of the ship that nearly dumped me out of my
berth, and what seemed like a solid spout of water pouring in through
my open weather porthole, with the wind howling a devil's death-song
through the rigging and an uninterrupted smash--bang! above my head.

Throwing on a rain coat over my pajamas, I went outside and up the
ladder leading to the bridge-deck; and as head and shoulders rose above
the deck level, a wall of hot, wind-borne rain struck me--rain so hot
it felt almost scalding--that almost swept me off the ladder. If it
had I should probably have become food for the fishes. I got to the
upper deck just in time to see Captain Thomas get a crack on the head
from a fragment of flying spar of the wreckage from the upper
bridge--luckily a glancing blow that did no more damage than leave him
groggy for a moment.

For the next fifteen minutes I was busy hugging a bridge stanchion,
dodging flying wreckage and trying to breathe; for, driven by the
violence of the wind, the rain came horizontally in such suffocatingly
hot dense masses as nearly to stifle one.

It was the watch of Second Mate Isitt. Afterwards he told me that a
few minutes before the storm broke he saw a particularly dense black
cloud coming up upon us out of the southeast, where it had apparently
been lying in ambush for us behind the northernmost headland of the
Gulf of Guinea, an ambush so successful that even the barometer failed
to detect it, for when Mate Isitt ran to the chart-room he found that
the instrument showed no fall. But scarcely was he back on the bridge
before the approaching cloud flashed into a solid mass of sheet
lightning that covered the ship like a fiery canopy; and instantly
thereafter, a wall of wind and rain hit the ship, heeled her over to
the rail, swung her head at right angles to her course, ripped the
heavy canvas awning of the upper bridge to tatters, bent and tore loose
from their sockets the thick iron stanchions supporting it, made
kindling wood of its heavy spars, and strewed the bridge and forward
deck with a pounding tangle of wreckage. How the mate and helmsman,
who were directly beneath it, escaped injury, is a mystery. In twenty
minutes the riot of wind and water had swept past us out to sea in
searc