cean was in the mellow sweetness of the wind
and in the gentle undulations of the silver-laced swell; but scarce had
we passed the height of forty-nine degrees when the weather grew sullen
and dark, a heavy bank of clouds of a livid hue rose in the north-east,
and the wind came and went in small guns, the gusts venting themselves
in dreary moans, insomuch that our oldest hands confessed they had never
heard blasts more portentous.

The gale came on with some lightning and several claps of thunder and
heavy rain. Though it was but two o'clock in the afternoon, the air was
so dusky that the men had to feel for the ropes; and when the first of
the tempest stormed down upon us the appearance of the sea was
uncommonly terrible, being swept and mangled into boiling froth in the
north-east quarter, whilst all about us and in the south-west it lay in
a sort of swollen huddle of shadows, glooming into the darkness of the
sky without offering the smallest glimpse of the horizon.

In a few minutes the hurricane struck us. We had bared the brig down to
the close-reefed main-topsail; yet, though we were dead before the
outfly, its first blow rent the fragment of sail as if it were formed of
smoke, and in an instant it disappeared, flashing over the bows like a
scattering of torn paper, leaving nothing but the bolt-ropes behind. The
bursting of the topsail was like the explosion of a large cannon. In a
breath the brig was smothered with froth torn up in huge clouds, and
hurled over and ahead of her in vast quivering bodies that filled the
wind with a dismal twilight of their own, in which nothing was visible
but their terrific speeding. Through these slinging, soft, and singing
masses of spume drove the rain in horizontal steel-like lines, which
gleamed in the lightning stroke as though indeed they were barbed
weapons of bright metal, darted by armies of invisible spirits raving
out their war cries as they chased us.

The storm made a loud thunder in the sky, and this tremendous utterance
dominated without subduing the many screaming, hissing, shrieking, and
hooting noises raised in the rigging and about the decks, and the wild,
seething, weltering sound of the sea, maddened by the gale and
struggling in its enormous passion under the first choking and iron grip
of the hurricane's hand.

I had used the ocean for above ten years, but never had I encountered
anything suddener or fiercer in the form of weather than this. Though
the