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Most of our canvass blew from the gaskets, the cloth going in ribands. The foresail and fore-topsail we managed to save, but all our light canvass went. I was still aloft when the brig broached-to. As she came up to the wind, the fore-topmast went over to leeward, being carried away at the cap. All the hamper came down, and began to thresh against the larboard side of the lower rigging.
The sea struck her abaft, and washed clean over her from stern to stem; and had not Snatchblock aided Adair in hauling away on the yoke-line, she must have broached-to. A lifeboat alone could have existed amid those heavy breakers.
And as the frigate broached-to we saw that my surmise was not very far wide of the mark, her mizzen-topgallant-mast and mizzen-topsail yard having been shot away, the latter in the slings. The three vessels now went at it, hammer and tongs, the brigantine being for the moment fairly under the frigate's guns.
This continued until, the brig's fore-topmast having been shot away, she broached-to and ran foul of the brigantine, to which she promptly made herself fast by means of her grappling irons. And the next moment the cessation of the gun fire, the flashing of cutlass blades in the sun, and the popping of pistols told us that the boarders were at work. "Avast there with the long gun!" I cried.
The lieutenant I spoke of had the watch, and his voice was heard through the roaring of the wind swearing at the men to haul down the staysail, that we might bend on the sheet, and set it right again; when, she having, I said, broached-to, a wave ay, a wave as high as the maintop almost, took the frigate right on her broadside, and the bulwarks of the quarter-deck being, as I said, quite rotten, cut them off clean level with the main chains, sweeping them, and guns, and men, all overboard together.
"Lundy!" said Yeo. "The south end! I see the head of the Shutter in the breakers! Hard a-port yet, and get her close-hauled as you can, and the Lord may have mercy on us still! Look at the Spaniard!" Yes, look at the Spaniard! On their left hand, as they broached-to, the wall of granite sloped down from the clouds toward an isolated peak of rock, some two hundred feet in height.
"Good Lord, we're lost!" gulped out Mr Stokes as we all floundered together on the grating forming the floor of the engine-room, where fortunately the flood had washed us, instead of hustling us down the stoke-hold below, where all three of us would most inevitably have been killed by the fall. "A boiler's burst and the ship broached-to!"
The captain fell in the stern-sheets, and the boat instantly broached-to. The water that came on board apprised Spike fully of the state in which he was now placed, and by a desperate effort, he clutched the tiller, and got the yawl again before the wind. This could not last, however.
The launch had in the meantime been once more got before the wind, and was again flying to leeward under jib and fore-sail, the mountain-seas pursuing her and necessitating the utmost watchfulness on the part of the helmsman to prevent her from being broached-to.
The pitching of so much hamper under the bows of the ship, while her after-masts stood, threw the stern round, in spite of the manner in which Marble steered; and the ship broached-to. In doing this, the sea made a fair breach over her, sweeping the deck of even the launch and camboose, and carrying all the lee-bulwarks, in the waist, with them.
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