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I was awakened some time during the night I had no idea whatever of the hour by the loud rustling of canvas; and upon starting to my feet I found that the wind had strengthened so considerably that the slight amount of weather-helm afforded by the lashed wheel had at length proved insufficient, with the result that the brig had shot into the wind, throwing both topsails aback and her fore and aft canvas a-shiver.
"I don't know a worse with the southwest monsoon in the Bay of Bengal and the pilot brigs gone from the Sand Heads. That's where Heard got pounded with the Emerald drawing nineteen feet, and eighteen on the bar. Shook the reefs out of his topsails, laid her on her beam ends, and with some inches saved scraped in." "Pick up the three Juggernaut Pagodas of Ganjam," Jeremy remarked absently.
But when Stevey Todd offered to admit that it blew "brisk, but when you say hard, I argue it;" and when Uncle Abimelech piped: "She blows aloft, she blows alow, Take in your topsails early;"
Thou shalt see, thou shalt see, how I'll make him lower his topsails."
We were now comparatively safe in a few hours completely so: for, strange to say, immediately after we had weathered the rocks, the gale abated, and before morning we had a reef out of the topsails. A few days afterwards, a cutter joined us from Plymouth with orders for the frigate to proceed forthwith to Gibraltar, where we should learn our destination.
The courses were next brailed up, but it was hard work to stow them. Lord Reginald saw, when too late, that it would have been wiser to shorten sail before the wind struck the ship. All hands were now employed in reefing the topsails, for the masts bent like willow wands. Though the ship was kept before the wind, there was great risk of their being carried away.
On sounding, we found ourselves in thirty fathoms of water. At midnight the wind veered to the eastward, gradually increasing until four o'clock Sunday morning, by which time the brig was under close-reefed topsails and foresail.
Young, going over to look for himself, saw that it was so, and that the Yarmouth, 64, had hauled off to windward, where she lay with her main and mizzen topsails aback. Signals were then made to her, and to the Cornwall, 74, to come to closer engagement, they both being on the weather bow of the flagship.
We were now exposed not only to the fire of the two batteries at the harbour-mouth which we had to pass, but also to that of the battery at the bottom of the bay, which had fired at the frigate. In the meantime, we were very busy in cutting the cable, lowering the topsails, and taking the wounded men on board the privateer, from out of the boats.
It was blowing a heavy gale of wind, with a tremendous sea running, such a sea as one rarely meets with anywhere but off the Cape, when just at nightfall, as we were taking another reef in the topsails, a fine young seaman, a mizen-topman, James Miles by name, fell from the mizen-topsail-yard, and away he went overboard.
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