succeeding rush of air
being of a few seconds' longer duration than the preceding one, and
coming with greater strength and spite, thus enabling us at last to get
steerage way upon the schooner and partially turn her stern toward the
point from which we expected the outfly to come. And when presently it
came roaring and howling and screaming down upon us, with such a medley
of sound as might be expected from a legion of unchained furies, our
port quarter was turned towards it, with the schooner in motion and
paying off before it. Yet, even so, it swooped down upon us with such
appalling violence that the little vessel careened until her lee
sheer-poles were buried and the water was up to the coaming of the main
hatch. But with way on her, her helm hard up, no after canvas set, and
the hurricane dragging at her stout foresail, she could not help paying
off, and after a long minute of heart-racking suspense, during which we
momentarily expected her to keel-up with us, she suddenly righted and
went flying away dead before the wind, with the water boiling under her
bows up to the level of her head-boards.

One of the _Martha Brown's_ good points was that she steered as handily
as a little boat. I therefore had no difficulty in keeping her dead
before the wind without assistance, although Cunningham stood by to lend
me a hand should I chance to need any help. Also the water, apart from
the boiling foam into which its surface was scourged by the hurricane,
was perfectly smooth, the smallest suggestion of a wave crest being
instantly seized by the wind and swept away to leeward in the form of
fine, salt rain; indeed, the air was so full of spindrift and scudwater
that I believed, even had it been daylight, we could not have seen
farther than about two, or at most three, lengths from the ship. As it
was, with the outfly of the hurricane that weird, unnatural, ruddy light
of which I have spoken almost immediately died out from the sky, leaving
the night as pitch-dark as before, save for the ghostly gleam of
phosphorescent light which arose from the storm-swept ocean, and which
gave the water, as far as it could be seen, the appearance as if
moonlight were shining up through it.

When we had been scudding for a full quarter of an hour before that
raving, screaming, howling fury of wind I began momentarily to expect
and look for some indication that the worst was over, and to hope that
the wind would moderate sufficiently t