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We were cruising off the Gulf of Lyons, where sometimes it blows hard enought to blew the devil's horns off, though the gales never last very long. We were under close reefed fore- and main-top sails, storm stay-sail and trysail, when there was a fresh hand at the bellows, and the captain desired the officers of the watch, just before dinner to take in the fore-top sail.
"It may be well to make certain of that fact. You are right," he continued, after taking a look himself at the approaching cloud of canvas; "you are very right. As yet we are not seen. Forward there! haul down that head stay-sail; we will steady the ship by her yards. Now let him look with all his eyes; they must be good to see these naked spars at such a distance."
I remember seeing a marine, of more than usual activity, and who had before been served this trick, catch hold of the end of the weather middle stay-sail sheet, hanging from the booms, and, before Jacko knew what he was about, succeed in giving him such a cut across his sconce as the animal never forgot or forgave.
Joe Cross had incidentally said that he believed it was a brig, and that night as Rodd lay half asleep, half wakeful, in his cot, kept from finding the customary repose of a tired lad by the heat of the narrow cabin below, the word brig brought to mind the vessel that had so nearly run upon them in Havre-de-Grace, and in a drowsy stupid way he had pictured her tall tapering spars, the flapping of her stay-sail, and the rush of the storm.
The wind increased in a violence tipped with stinging rain. "Give her the jib and stay-sail." She heeled slightly and gathered steerage way. Roger Brevard involuntarily waved a parting salutation. An extraordinary emotion swept over him: a ship bound to the East always stirred his imagination and sense of beauty, but the departure of the Nautilus had a special significance.
The Dawn still carried her fore-topmast stay-sail, a small triangular piece of stout canvass, and which was particularly useful, as leading from the end of the bowsprit towards the head of the fore-top-mast, in preventing her from broaching-to, or pressing up with her bows so near the wind, as to produce the danger of seas breaking over the mass of the hull, and sweeping the decks.
Leach succeeded in getting up an awkward lower studding-sail, and a sort of a stay-sail forward, and with these additions to their canvas, the ship was brought to head south, with the wind light at the westward.
He ran down to where the little boat lay on the shelving sand, with the ripples of the incoming tide just washing the rudder, which was still shipped. He unshipped the rudder and came back. Under a tree, covered with the stay-sail they had brought from the Shenandoah, lay most of their treasures: old clothes and boots, and all the other odds and ends.
The canvas was stowed, down to the lower fore and main topsail and the fore-topmast stay-sail, and the men were about to hurry down from aloft when Captain Staunton stopped them. "Clew up and stow the lower topsails as well," he shouted; adding in an undertone to Mr Bowles, "I don't know what to expect; but it threatens to be something terrible; and the less canvas we show to it the better.
This precaution observed, the people went to work to reduce the sail, and in the course of twenty minutes they had got in the studding-sails, and all the standing canvas to the topsails, the fore-course, and a forward stay-sail. The three topsails were then reefed, with sundry urgent commands to the crew to be active, for, "The Englishman was coming up like a horse, all this time, no doubt."
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