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But I had long ago taken in everything except the boom-foresail, to save the sails from beating themselves to pieces, so I was pretty well prepared for any eventuality. It was close upon midnight when the change came, and then it was nothing at all alarming, being merely a sudden but by no means violent squall out from about due west, followed by a heavy downpour of rain.

His crew could scarcely hear him through the uproar the thundering canvas made, and the screaming of the wind, but the orders were given, and from habit and the custom of their calling they knew what they must be. They hauled a jib down, backed the fore-staysail, and got the boom-foresail sheeted in, but they let the rent mainsail bang, for it could do no more damage than it had already done.

They hauled a jib down, backed the fore-staysail, and got the boom-foresail sheeted in, but they let the rent mainsail bang, for it could do no more damage than it had already done. A man sprang up on the rail with a blue light in his hand, and as the weird radiance flared in a long streak to leeward a cry rose from the water.

Within the next half-hour the wind had increased so greatly in strength that I began to think there really might be something in Saunders's theory after all, and I was inwardly debating whether I should haul the fore-sheet to windward and heave the schooner to, or whether it would be better to up helm and run before it until the weather should moderate a bit, when a third corposant suddenly appeared, this time on the boom-foresail gaff-end.

Up to his knees in water, Wyllard staggered after him and made out by the mad banging that some one had already cast the peak of the boom-foresail loose. He reached the windlass, and clutched it, as a sea that took him to the waist frothed in over the weather rail.

"We were rather late that season, and out of our usual beat when the gale broke upon us in the gateway of the Pole, between Alaska and Asia. We ran before it with a strip of the boom-foresail on one vessel and a jib that blew to ribands every now and then.

We found that, in the strong breeze then blowing, even this small amount of canvas was sufficient to place the frigate under command; we therefore cast off from the Dolphin, and that craft thereupon shortened sail to her boom-foresail and fore- staysail, so that she might not run away from us. But even under that short canvas she was able to sail round and round us.

This meant that the Selache's course was all to windward, and though they drove her at it unmercifully under reefed boom-foresail, main trysail, and a streaming jib or two, with the brine going over her solid forward, she had made little when each arduous day was done. They were drenched to the skin continuously, and lashed by stinging spray.

I stayed on board the seventy-four for a couple of hours, gathering what news the inmates of the ward-room could give me; during which the Wasp, under boom-foresail and fore-staysail only, easily kept company with the ponderous two-decker, looking in comparison with her "no bigger as my thumb," as the negroes would say.

Meanwhile, as we found time to notice, the schooner had followed our example and, long before our preparations were complete, had been stripped of everything except her boom-foresail.