d
disappeared, with what seemed a supernatural celerity from the heavens,
letting the clear blue sky be seen again and the bright twinkling stars
peep down to see what all the fuss was about, all being calm and easy up
there!

Thanks to the skipper's precautions, the outburst of the gale did not
take the _Esmeralda_ aback, as would most probably have been the case if
the first mate had been in charge of the deck, when we should have most
likely lost our spars, if the vessel had not foundered, as frequently
happens when a ship is caught unprepared; as it was, she only winced
slightly, with a shiver through her frame, as the wind struck her on the
quarter, the masts and yards creaking and the topsails expanding with a
sound like that of an explosion as they were blown out to their fullest
extent, almost jumping from the bolt-ropes, and then her hull lay over
to leeward while she began to push through the water, driven along
before the blast at racehorse speed.

"Ease off those starboard braces there, and haul in to leeward?" cried
out Captain Billings, directing the man at the wheel by a wave of his
hand to put the helm down slightly, so as to bring her head more up to
the wind; but this was more than the steersman could do unaided, the
vessel--carrying out the analogy I recently used--resembling a vicious
charger that had taken the bit between his teeth--so, Mr Macdougall at
once sprang to help the steersman, when the two together managed, by
exerting all their united strength, to jam the spokes round so that the
ship's head was brought over to the south-west, bearing off then with
the wind before the beam.

The north-west gale was then blowing with tremendous force and
increasing to the power of a hurricane each instant as it whistled
through the cordage, wailing and shrieking like the lost souls in
Dante's "Inferno." The momentarily quiet sea, too, had got up again,
and was now covered with huge broken waves--raised aloft in pyramids one
moment, and the next scooped out into yawning valleys, into which the
vessel plunged, with a shock that made her timbers vibrate with the
sledge-hammer thud of the bows meeting the billows full butt, the
concussion causing columns of spray to be thrown up that came in over
the cathead, drenching the fo'c's'le and pouring in a cascade into the
waist, whence the broken water, washing aft along the deck, forming a
lake on the lee-side, where the scuppers were level with the sea, from