nce, and then,
following upon six days of excessive dirt, which she had ridden out
under the shelter of the redoubtable Terra del Fuego coast, she had
almost gone ashore during a heavy swell in the dead calm that had
suddenly fallen. For seven weeks she had wrestled with the Cape Horn
graybeards, and in return been buffeted and smashed by them. She was a
wooden ship, and her ceaseless straining had opened her seams, so that
twice a day the watch took its turn at the pumps.

The Mary Rogers was strained, the crew was strained, and big Dan Cullen,
master, was likewise strained. Perhaps he was strained most of all, for
upon him rested the responsibility of that titanic struggle. He slept
most of the time in his clothes, though he rarely slept. He haunted the
deck at night, a great, burly, robust ghost, black with the sunburn
of thirty years of sea and hairy as an orang-outang. He, in turn, was
haunted by one thought of action, a sailing direction for the Horn:
Whatever you do, make westing! make westing! It was an obsession. He
thought of nothing else, except, at times, to blaspheme God for sending
such bitter weather.

Make westing! He hugged the Horn, and a dozen times lay hove to with the
iron Cape bearing east-by-north, or north-north-east, a score of miles
away. And each time the eternal west wind smote him back and he made
easting. He fought gale after gale, south to 64 degrees, inside the
antarctic drift-ice, and pledged his immortal soul to the Powers of
Darkness for a bit of westing, for a slant to take him around. And he
made easting. In despair, he had tried to make the passage through the
Straits of Le Maire. Halfway through, the wind hauled to the north'ard
of north-west, the glass dropped to 28.88, and he turned and ran before
a gale of cyclonic fury, missing, by a hair's-breadth, piling up the
Mary Rogers on the black-toothed rocks. Twice he had made west to the
Diego Ramirez Rocks, one of the times saved between two snow-squalls by
sighting the gravestones of ships a quarter of a mile dead ahead.

Blow! Captain Dan Cullen instanced all his thirty years at sea to prove
that never had it blown so before. The Mary Rogers was hove to at the
time he gave the evidence, and, to clinch it, inside half an hour the
Mary Rogers was hove down to the hatches. Her new maintopsail and brand
new spencer were blown away like tissue paper; and five sails, furled
and fast under double gaskets, were blown loose and stripped