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Updated: June 2, 2025
We did the run across in the quickest time on record, up to that date, making the Sombrero in a fortnight, almost to the hour, from the moment of leaving Sierra Leone, without starting tack, sheet, or halliard so far as the Dolphin was concerned during the entire passage.
The rope by which I had hauled myself alongside the spar proved to be the end of the peak-halliards, and I thought that if I made this fast, and so prevented the peak from sagging, I should secure still further the stability of the wreckage; I accordingly did so, knotting the bight round one arm of the crosstrees, and then firmly lashing myself to the same arm with the loose end of the halliard.
Columbus was himself again always more himself at sea than anywhere else; he was following a now familiar road that had no difficulties or dangers for him; and there is no record of the voyage out except that it was quick and prosperous, with the trade wind blowing so steadily that from the time they left the Canaries until they made land twenty days later they had hardly to touch a sheet or a halliard.
"Come on," Eben commanded. "Follow me." This, however, was no easy thing to do, for the two men found it most difficult to make their way across the blocks of stone. The lightning blinded and dazed them so much that they often stumbled and fell, so by the time they reached their guide who was standing by the halliard, their bodies were bruised in a number of places.
She was travelling very fast, to the eastwards, under boom-foresail and one little jib, with her mainmast broken short off where the bolts of the halliard blocks had traversed it, and Dampier realised that because of that every knot she made then could not by any means be recovered that season. He wondered, with a little uneasiness, what Wyllard would say when he came to himself again.
But when it was over, his wife, who sat at the halliard, said in a voice that cut him to the heart: "Good God! Elias, that wave took Martha and Nils with it!" these were their youngest children, the former nine, the latter seven years old, who had been sitting in the bow, near Bernt. To this Elias only answered: "Don't let go the rope, Karen, or you will lose more!"
They did not answer me; but after a little more, when my expostulations had become more positive, Handy Solomon dropped the halliard, and drew me to one side. "Look here, you," he snarled, "you'd better just stow your gab. Do you know why you ain't with them carrion?" He jerked his thumb toward the beach. "It's because Solomon Anderson's your friend.
The latter was in reality the mode by which the sailor-lad had succeeded in lowering the sail. As Ben had conjectured, the belaying loop had proved too much for the strength of William's fingers; and, after several fruitless efforts to untie the knot, he had at length given it up, and, seizing the axe, had severed the halliard by cutting it through and through.
The boat was laid with her stem in a slanting direction to it, and with as much sail as she could carry, in order to give her sufficient speed to cleave it and sail right through it. In it rushed with the roar of a waterfall; again the boat half heeled over, and when the wave was past his wife no longer sat at the halliard, and Anton no longer stood holding the yard they had both gone overboard.
He walked straight to his little boat, lying dead on the sands of the harbour, launched it alive on the smooth water within the piers, rove his halliard, stepped his mast, hoisted a few inches of sail, pulled beyond the sheltering sea walls, and was tossing amidst the torn waters whose jagged edges were twisted in the loose flying threads of the northern gale.
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