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The boat, which all through answered the helm beautifully, fell off the moment Lucy ported the helm, and thus they escaped the impending and terrible danger of her making sternway. "Helm amidships!" and all drew again: the black water was in sight. But will they ever reach it? She tosses like a cork. Bang! A breaker caught her bows, and drenched David and Jack to the very bone.
By carrying a heavy press of canvass, however, we succeeded in forcing through the ice, but the Fury was twice turned completely round by eddies, and her sails brought aback against the helm; in consequence of which she gathered such fresh sternway against several heavy floe-pieces, that I apprehended some serious injury to the stern-post and rudder, if not to the whole frame of the ship.
Her men were so busy attending to this that they did not observe the Chih' Yuen gathering sternway until it was too late, and they only awoke to their danger as the cruiser's stern crashed into them, rolled them over, and sent them headlong to the bottom in a wreck of bursting steam-pipes, spilling furnaces, and crumpling machinery.
Then the ship would become unmanageable and drift away, with the possibility of getting excessive sternway on her and so damaging rudder or propeller, the Achilles' heel of a ship in pack-ice. While we were waiting for the weather to moderate and the ice to open, I had the Lucas sounding-machine rigged over the rudder-trunk and found the depth to be 2810 fathoms.
"The Blessed Virgin aise you, poor Mouse!" he mumbled huskily and slouched out through the door. At midday the San Gardo's captain got a shot at the sun. Though his vessel had been headed steadily northeast for more than thirty hours, the observation showed that she had made twenty-eight miles sternway to the southwest.
It appeared that both vessels had taken shelter in the Humber from stress of weather, nearly at the same time that the Durham, which preceded the Prussian vessel, “clewed up her top-sails, and dropped her anchor rather suddenly; and the Aurora being in the rear, the vessels came in collision.” The question, therefore, was, whether the Durham came to anchor too precipitately, and in an unseamanlike manner; or, in other words, whether, when the “Durham clewed up top-sails and let go her anchor, the Aurora should not have luffed up, or got sternway on her,” &c.
Suddenly, glancing up at the dim cloud of sails above, I saw that we were aback and making sternway. We might have tossed a biscuit aboard the big Serapis as she glided ahead of us. The broadsides thundered, and great ragged scantlings brake from our bulwarks and flew as high as the mizzen-top; and the shrieks and groans redoubled.
Deacon could easily see the Shelburne crew now big men all, ideal oarsmen to look at. Their faces were set and grim, their eyes straight ahead. So far as they gave indication, their shell might have been alone on the river. Now the Baliol shell had made sternway sufficient for the man in the skiff to seize the rudder. The Shelburne boat was already secured.
But before sternway could be got on the boat, the infuriated monster made a sudden turn, dashed upon and stove it into fragments. The famous old whale-killer had hurled his last lance, had killed his last whale. The dying monster, in making a last struggle with his enemies, had struck the captain with his fluke, and he sunk never to rise again.
He had read about leeway, and headway, and sternway; and now that he had an opportunity of examining the practical working of these theories, he hoped to master the subject thoroughly, so as never to forget it, and to be able, when called on, to make it of use.
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