All this occupied but a moment.

Just

near the stern. then I saw a bloody face rise out of the foam, close along-side, where the bulwarks and stancheons had all been broken away, and then sink again. It was the mate, and he caught a rope which was hanging overboard, and the captain and two men, who had now recovered themselves, having all been knocked down, drew him on board.

My attention was next drawn to the boy, who stood whimpering, a few feet to the right of me on the other quarter, and pointing out over the stern. I concluded from his manner that somebody else was overboard, and thought I could distinguish, above the roaring of the storm, the name of "Antonio," the Italian sailor. But I saw he was on deck. In his fright, the boy had got the wrong name. It was poor L. I just caught a glimpse of him floating out several rods astern, as he balanced for a moment on the crest of a wave, throwing up his arms, I suppose, with the vain hope that we should thus be drawn to his assistance, when a sea broke over him, and he sunk. The storm still continued to rage as fiercely as ever. The waves, though high and huge masses of water, still did not appear to be quite so high as I saw them two days afterward when there was very little wind. For they were now apparently pressed down and condensed by the mighty power of the wind, which outrunning them, cut off and knocked into spray their crests as soon as they rose above a certain height. Their force and speed were wonderful. That most disastrous one, which we shipped over our stern, crooked, when it struck the deck, a beam which supports the deck over the cabin, of 11 inches by 8 in diameter, clean across its lower face, knocking off and splitting in pieces its casings. How far in the fracture extends, I cannot say, but it is sensibly sprung, and I presume will have to be taken out. And for the wind, it was one steady roar. No one could hear you speak clearly, unless your mouth was close to his ear, and I found it very difficult to look towards it and breathe. There were none of those alternations of rise and fall which we have on land. It did not change a note perceptibly three times during the storm; but continued to roar on, hour after hour, with the same terrible monotony, like the sound of a great waterfall, or a furnace a thousand times magnified.

Our main purpose now was to keep the water out of the brig; and the mate, bruised as he was, as soon as he was fairly on deck, was the first to call out for spare sails to nail over the hatches left by the binacle, skylight, and companion way. When he came to the companion hatch where I stood, I debated with myself a moment, whether to go below and be nailed down, or to stay on deck. But I reflected that I was too weak to do any good there, that I should be soon chilled, (for I was drenched,) and be in great danger of being swept overboard. So, with many misgivings, I went below, and heard them nail down the hatch over my head. I sat under it, however, with my knife, ready to cut my way out, should the cabin begin to fill. The captain now lashed down the helm, for he had been much bruised, and could steer no longer, and let the brig lie in the "trough of the sea," drifting at random. The men were ordered to the pumps, for, on sounding, there was found to be four feet of water in the hold. A little before sunset, the captain, making an opening in the small after-skylight-hatch, came below, looking the picture of despair, intimating that it was all up with us, for the men could not gain on the leak, and there were no signs of abatement in the storm. He appeared rather sullen, or at least not inclined to talk, but directly "turned in," and seemed to be employed in prayer, partly aloud and partly to himself. I now went and sat on the transom under the small after-hatch, where we shipped but little water, and remained there all the earlier part of the night. The mate and men, though nearly worn out, still continued on deck, by turns at the pump. I was disconsolate enough. My feelings were far more uncomfortable than when I was on deck; for now, being no longer able to see our danger, my fears or imagination had it all their own way. Any unusual noise on deck seemed the note of some closing disaster; and every shout from the sailors, as it pierced through the roar of the storm, sunk into my heart like the final cry of despair. And not only this, but I found it very difficult to divest myself of the feeling of personality in the storm. The idea was urging itself upon me continually, that some enormous and malignant power, which I more than once (heathen-like) found myself half deprecating, must be beneath the ocean, heaving up these great masses of 16

VOL. IV. NO. 1.

water for our special destruction. And then again, when I remembered looking off to sea, the waves seemed an interminable pack of great giant hell-hounds, hallooed on by the winds, bounding and howling on towards us, with the bitter, fixed, remorseless purpose of tearing us in pieces. This was one of my disagreeable thoughts as I sat cooped up in the cabin. And there was another thing troubled me. I must confess, at the risk of losing your good opinion, that the praying of the captain afforded me anything but consolation. It looked so like giving up the ship, and was such a plain intimation, that all hope of being saved by earthly aid was at an end, that I could not but feel discouraged by it. Like Bonaparte on his return from Russia, (to compare small things to large,) he seemed to have a dread of hearing details, and apparently wished to abstract his mind from what was going on around him, and, taking it for granted that we should be all lost, set very zealously about what he considered the necessary process for saving his own soul. I do not intend to sneer at him for praying. To pray in times of great danger is as natural as to breathe. At such times all men, whether Christians, atheists, or reprobates, pray instinctively, though for the most part by snatches and in silence. I only mean to say that the master of a vessel should be the last man aboard to show, by any change of manner, a falling off in confidence. But our captain was an old man, of a gloomy temperament, and, though not cowardly, was weighed down by a perfect night-mare of superstition, and I found afterwards had a presentiment that this would be his last voyage. At about ten or eleven o'clock at night, one of the men came to the hatch and asked for bread. They had had nothing to eat all day. I groped about below, for our lamps were lost, till I found some bread, and having handed it up, before the hatch was closed, took a look out on deck. The moon, at that moment (for it was for the most part a dry storm) was shining full and clear. The same sea was raging, and the same wind roaring, just as they were seven hours previous, and our forlorn, shattered brig was still battling it out with them alone upon the ocean. I do remember it now, for a scene of awful beauty and sublimity, but so far as I recollect, I only felt at the time that it was awful. I have heard of men who could forget imminent danger in

their admiration of the sublime; and of a painter,* who lashed himself to the mast that he might draw the sea in a terrible storm. I take this to be chiefly babble; at any rate, for myself, I was sick and weak. It was cold, my clothes were wet. I was collapsed, and doubled up with inanition, the fear of death was pressing heavily upon me, and I confess the artist-feeling did not so prevail over the man. I went below, and for the purpose of getting warm, for sleep was out of the question, I took to my berth.. I first piled into it all the wet clothes I could find, (for we had no other,) and then tried to pull off my coat. But it was so wet, and the brig rolled so much, that after slitting it down the back, and tearing one sleeve nearly out, I gave it up and got in with all my clothes on, between the straw bed and the mattress, both of which were thoroughly saturated, and in less than an hour, I found myself in a sort of steam bath of very comfortable temperature. About every quarter of an hour during the night I heard the man on the watch give a cry of warning to those at the pumps, followed by the tumbling of a heavy sea on deck, and then a lurch of the vessel, which it took all my holding on to keep from throwing me out of my berth. Then the water streamed down through the hatches to increase the quantity in the hold, bearing with it mollusca or some phosphoric matter, which left ghastly streaks of light on the planks, or rather looked like pale, liquid fire, trickling down the bulk-head. Our great danger was that in lurching, on account of these heavy seas, the brig would throw her masts out, or as the mate afterwards expressed it, "shake the sticks out of herself," and I was dreading all night to hear them fall, every time we shipped a sea. My mind, however, was not exclusively occupied by these fearful details, nor, as I have remarked before, by the dreaded catastrophe. At times some scrap or other, such as,

"Backward and forward half her length,

With a short uneasy motion,"

would suddenly come into my head, and in a moment I was striving, like a boy reciting at school, to recal the succeeding lines. That ode of Horace, containing,

*

"Illi robur et æs triplex,"

Joseph Vernet, the French painter of Sea-scenes.

of which I could remember at first only this one line, haunted me thus for a long time. My memory seemed to take it up on her own account, with the obstinate determination to conquer it, and was succeeding better than I am able to do at this moment, when another great sea and a lurch of the brig put it to flight. At another time I found myself very busy with the ballad, of which the following is a stanza;

"Three merry men and three merry men

And three merry men are we,

I on the sea, and thou on the land,
And Jack on the gallows tree."

It soon struck me, that it was very ridiculous and inappropriate to be thinking of old ballads, situated as I was; but a moment after, there it was again, buzzing through my mind to a merry tune,

"I on the sea, and thou on the land," &c.

1

and I felt somewhat like poor Christian who, do what he would, could not but listen to the horrid whisperings of the devils, as he was going through the valley of the shadow of death, though I confess his was the more aggravated case.

You must not consider what I have just written as altogether trivial. It appears to me that these and similar phantasies, varying no doubt according to our various habits of mind, are the kindly devices of nature to draw away our thoughts from the one terrible question, the sword hanging by the hair, which, fall or not, it is useless and intolerable to contemplate. The captain and I interchanged but few words during the night, for as I said before, he seemed testy when disturbed. I once suggested the closing of one of the hatches more securely, in order to keep out the water; but he, seeming quite indifferent whether it was done or not, said I might call the men if I chose; and then, after a pause, added, "what is the use in fretting? I can't save your life." The men suffered much from exposure, and incessant exertion, having all been on deck the greater part of the time, since three o'clock in the morning; and they were also without water all night; for that which we had brought on deck was lost, and the casks stowed in the run (the part of the hold