wind blew from the tropics it was as cruel in bitterness as frost.
Yet there was neither snow nor hail, only rain that seemed to pass like
a knife through the head if you showed your face to it for a second. It
was necessary to bring the brig to the wind before the sea rose. The
helm was put down, and without a rag of canvas on her she came round;
but when she brought the hurricane fair abeam, I thought it was all over
with us. She lay down to it until her bulwarks were under water, and the
sheer-poles in the rigging above the rail hidden.

In this posture she hung so long that Captain Rosy, the master, bawled
to me to tell the carpenter to stand by to cut away the topmast rigging.
But the _Laughing Mary_, as the brig was called, was a buoyant ship and
lightly sparred, and presently bringing the sea on the bow, through our
seizing a small tarpaulin in the weather main shrouds, she erected her
masts afresh, like some sentient creature pricking its ears for the
affray, and with that showed herself game and made indifferently good
weather of it.

But though the first rage of the storm was terrible enough, its
fierceness did not come to its height till about one o'clock in the
middle watch. Long before then the sea had grown mountainous, and the
dance of our eggshell of a brig upon it was sickening and affrighting.
The heads of the Andean peaks of black water looked tall enough to
brush the lowering soot of the heavens with the blue and yellow
phosphoric fires which sparkled ghastly amid the bursting froth. Bodies
of foam flew like the flashings of pale sheet-lightning through our
rigging and over us, and a dreadful roaring of mighty surges in mad
career, and battling as they ran, rose out of the sea to deepen yet the
thunderous bellowing of the hurricane on high.

No man could show himself on deck and preserve his life. Between the
rails it was waist high, and this water, converted by the motions of the
brig into a wild torrent, had its volume perpetually maintained by
ton-loads of sea falling in dull and pounding crashes over the bows on
to the forecastle. There was nothing to be done but secure the helm and
await the issue below, for, if we were to be drowned, it would make a
more easy foundering to go down dry and warm in the cabin, than to
perish half-frozen and already nearly strangled by the bitter cold and
flooded tempest on deck.

There was Captain Rosy; there was myself, by name Paul Rodney, mate of
the brig;