at a speed of some five knots.

That first terrible flash of lightning and crash of thunder was,
however, only the beginning of the most awful electric storm that it has
ever been my fate to witness, the sky, now black as night, being rent in
half a dozen different directions at once by fierce, baleful flashes,
green, blue, crimson, and sun-bright, while the bombarding of the
thunder was absolutely terrifying, even to us who were by this time
growing quite accustomed to tropical storms. With it there came
frequent short, sharp, intermittent bursts of rain that swept across our
decks, stinging the exposed skin like shot, and enshrouding everything
beyond a couple of fathoms away in impenetrable obscurity. Now, too,
there came, at irregular but quickly recurring intervals, savage gusts
of wind that smote the ship as though she had been but a child's toy,
heeling her down until her lee rail was awash, and holding her thus for
two or three minutes at a time, then easing up for a short space, the
"easing up" intervals, however, steadily growing more abbreviated, while
the gusts that invariably followed them rapidly grew in intensity and
fury, until after the passage of one that had pinned us down for three
or four minutes, with our lee sheer-poles buried in the smother, I
thought that the time had arrived to heave-to, and gave the order to do
so. Nor was I any too soon; for the sea was rapidly rising, and a
quarter of an hour later we probably could not have accomplished the
feat without having had our decks swept. The gale now rapidly increased
in intensity, the gusts of wind ever growing stronger and more furious,
and succeeding each other more rapidly, until at length the intervals
between them became so brief as to be practically imperceptible, the
strength of the wind now being equal to that of a heavy gale, and
momentarily growing stronger as gust after gust swooped down upon us.
The blinding, drenching showers that occasionally swept us were no
longer composed of fresh water only, for there was a strong mingling of
salt-water in them that was none other than the tops of the waves, torn
off by the terrific blasts of wind and hurled along horizontally in the
form of vast sheets of spray. The sea, meanwhile, was rising with
astounding rapidity, taking into consideration the fact that, as just
stated, the height of the combers was greatly reduced by the enormous
volumes of water that were scooped up from the ocean's s