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Updated: June 4, 2025
Happily the sail this time produced the desired effect, turning her head from the wind, and then away the canvas flew from the bolt-ropes far off upon the gale. Onward we drove as before, still more tossed and tumbled. Had our friend, Colonel Pinchard, been with us, he would have had some reason to complain of the mal de mer.
Our foresail had burst from the bolt-ropes. We rushed on close to the boat. John, Arthur, and I sprang to the side. Several persons were clinging to the ropes which had been thrown over to them. We assisted in hauling them up. A sea struck us at that moment, and two were washed away.
It strengthened him at once. He ordered the captain to cut the halyard by which the cook's body was towing, and also to go forward and cut loose the jib-halyard and sheet. When he had done so, the jib fluttered a couple of moments like a handkerchief, then tore out of the bolt-ropes and vanished. The Sophie Sutherland was running under bare poles.
In a short time, however, the wind shifted and caught the sail aback. The schooner seemed about to make a stern-board. Before the order could be given to let go the sheets, a loud thundering noise was heard like the report of a piece of ordnance, and the sail, blown from the bolt-ropes, flew away before the blast.
With the sound of a faint explosion it vanished into the thick weather bodily, leaving behind of its stout substance not so much as one solitary strip big enough to be picked into a handful of lint for, say, a wounded elephant. Torn out of its bolt-ropes, it faded like a whiff of smoke in the smoky drift of clouds shattered and torn by the shift of wind. For the shift of wind had come.
So tremendous was the force, that although the closely-reefed fore-topsail was the only sail that the Wild Wave was showing aloft for the jib blew from the bolt-ropes the instant the squall struck her the vessel heeled over and over until her lee-rail was under water.
"I should think so, my boy," would be his reply, and I hope he would say something in my favour. We had a quick run to the southward till we were somewhere off the latitude of Lisbon, when a gale sprung up from the eastward which drove us off the land, and not only carried every stitch of canvas clear of the bolt-ropes, but very nearly took the masts out of the vessel.
In a few minutes the hurricane struck us. We had bared the brig down to the close-reefed main-topsail; yet, though we were dead before the outfly, its first blow rent the fragment of sail as if it were formed of smoke, and in an instant it disappeared, flashing over the bows like a scattering of torn paper, leaving nothing but the bolt-ropes behind.
He had beheld the vessel within the surf, but a few yards distant from the outer rocks, thrown on her beam-ends, with both foresail and mainsail blown clear out of their bolt-ropes. The cry for succour was raised in vain; the wail of despair was not heard; the struggles for life were not beheld, as the elements in their wrath roared and howled over their victim.
With a yell of indescribable fury the blast struck us, and as the storm-wave boiled in over our taffrail and swept along the deck, filling it to the level of the rail and taking with it in its rush for'ard every movable thing in its way, I saw the storm trysail fill, with a terrific jerk of the doubled sheets, and then go flying away out of the bolt-ropes like a sheet of tissue paper.
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