brought the ship to on the
starboard tack. We now, for the first time, had an opportunity of
realising the full strength of the wind, which still blew with such
violence as to careen the ship gunwale-to, even under the small canvas
which remained exposed to the blast. It was still intensely dark
overhead; but the surface of the sea, highly phosphorescent, and
scourged into foam by the wind, gave forth a pale lambent light against
which the hull of the ship and all her rigging up to the level of the
horizon stood out with tolerable distinctness. The swell, meanwhile,
was rapidly rising, but there were as yet no waves, the wind instantly
catching any inequality in the surface of the water and carrying it away
to leeward in the form of spindrift. This lasted until daybreak, when
the strength of the gale had so far moderated that--despite the fact of
the wind having backed to the southward--I ventured to set the
fore-topsail, close-reefed; more, however, for the sake of steadying the
ship than for any other advantage that I expected to get from it.

With sunrise the sky cleared; and when my passengers came on deck before
breakfast, they had the--to them--novel experience of witnessing a hard
gale of wind under a cloudless blue sky, with brilliant sunshine. And,
truly, it was a grand and exhilarating scene that met their gaze; for
the wind, though it still blew with the force of a whole gale, had so
far moderated its fury as to permit the sea to rise; and now the staunch
little ship, heeling to her covering-board, was gallantly breasting the
huge billows of the mid-Atlantic; each wave a deep blue liquid hill,
half as high as our fore-yard, crested with a ridge of snow-white foam
that, caught up and blown into spray by the gale, produced an endless
procession of mimic rainbows past the ship. And, as the crest of each
wave struck our weather-bow and burst into a drenching shower of silvery
spray, a rainbow formed there too, overarching the ship in the wake of
the foremast and causing the whole forepart of her to glow and glitter
with the loveliest prismatic hues.

As the day wore on the gale continued to moderate somewhat, until by
noon its fury had become so far spent that I thought we might venture to
once more get the courses on the ship; and this was accordingly done
when the watch was called. The effect of these large areas of sail upon
the craft was tremendous, causing her to heel like a yacht under a heavy
pres