that twirled the little craft about like a teetotum
for a minute or two as it howled and raved around us, lashing the whole
surface of the sea into one unbroken sheet of foam and spray, and then
it settled down and began to blow great guns from the northward,
whipping up a nasty short, choppy sea into which, within ten minutes,
the little schooner was plunging to the height of her hawse-holes.

This however, as it turned out, was only the beginning of it; for when
once the gale had fairly broken loose it steadily grew more furious,
with the result that in about half-an-hour we were plunging bows under,
while, to add to our difficulties, the violent motion strained the
little vessel and opened her seams to such an extent that, so far from
getting the pumps to suck, it needed the utmost exertions of all hands,
working in quick relays, to keep the leak from gaining upon us.

Clearly, it would never do to permit such a state of things as that to
continue, for the only partially rested men would soon become exhausted
by the laborious toil of the pumps; and then what would become of us?
I, therefore, summoned a council of war, consisting of the gunner, the
carpenter, and the boatswain, to whom I explained my view of the
situation, and asked their advice. It was my opinion--founded upon our
experiences during the recent fight--that if the pirate schooner was to
be tackled successfully, it would have to be by a bigger craft than the
_Wasp_, or, at all events, that if the _Wasp_ was to be again employed
against the pirates, she would certainly have to be equipped with a very
much heavier armament; her insignificant little array of six 9-pounders
could never be expected to cope successfully with the other craft's
fourteen 12-pounders and her long 32. Therefore, I argued, since our
present armament could never be of further use to us, so far as the
pirates were concerned, while at the present moment they were doing much
to make the schooner strain herself to pieces, and were indeed actually
imperilling her safety and that of all on board her, why not throw them
overboard, and so relieve the little vessel of their weight and give her
the best possible chance to weather the gale? Henderson and the
boatswain were rather opposed to this plan, the gunner suggesting, as an
alternative, that we should cut adrift from the wreckage that was
holding us head to wind, and endeavour to get before the wind and scud;
and to this view they st