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Updated: June 16, 2025
On the starboard tack, its centre has passed to the west of us. Ordered the donkey engine to be got ready for use last night, in case the ship should make more water than the small bilge pumps could throw out. Carried away the flying jibboom at 7.30 A.M. saved the sail.
They had got their mainsail down, and some eight or ten hands were stretched along the length of the boom, tightly rolling up the great folds of canvas, while four more were laid out on the jibboom furling the jibs, when the storm seemed to reach its height, and a great vivid flash of lightning, like a sword of blue-green fire, lighting up the whole scene with its ghastly glare, fell, as it appeared to us, full upon the little craft, and the next instant, as the accompanying peal of thunder crashed and boomed in our ears, we all distinctly saw a flash, as of fire, leap up aboard her, accompanied by a great puff of whitish smoke.
She was thus rendered unmanageable, though for some time her crew endeavoured to keep her on her course by trimming sails; but our shot soon cutting away her braces, she played round off, and came stem on towards us, her jibboom passing between our fore and main masts, pressing so hard against the already wounded mainmast that I expected every instant to see it fall, especially as we had lost the main and spring stays.
The hardy crew, wearied with the unremitting exertions of the night, looked at each other in despair, as the sea literally washed up the decks to leeward. A loud crash was heard, and the fore-topmast went over the side, carrying away the jibboom. It was the last expiring effort of the gale.
Here are we, regularly boxin' the compass, our jibboom pointin' first this way, then that, and then t'other, while that ship haven't veered nothin' to speak of all the time that I've been on deck; she've pointed steady to the south'ard ever since I first set eyes on her, and it seems to me that she've altered her bearin's a bit.
Here we were compelled to remain for a week; for after the gale blew itself out, the wind still hung in the same quarter, refusing to allow us to get back again to our cruising station. But on the second day of our enforced detention a ship poked her jibboom round the west end of the little bay.
It might be an admirable thing for the Empire that the jibboom spanker should be spliced at that particular juncture, but the crew would naturally decline to move in the matter until the order came from the commander of the ship. So in my case. If you will go to Mr. Outwood, explain to him how matters stand, and come back and say to me, 'Psmith, Mr.
Very good indeed of you to say so, but am always anxious to do my duty to my Queen and Country. Not bad! But, I say, I do know something of yachting, and that isn't the way to brace up the marling-spike to the fokesell yard with the main jibboom three points in a wind with some East in it! If I may venture a suggestion hope Artist will paint out the gondola. Ta-ta! Pres.
But far more terrible is it to behold, when fathoms down in the sea, you see some sulky whale, floating there suspended, with his prodigious jaw, some fifteen feet long, hanging straight down at right-angles with his body; for all the world like a ship's jibboom.
Upon working out my meridian altitude I found the ship's latitude to be 38 degrees 43 minutes south and we were steering true east; consequently if my calculations were accurate, we were at that moment on the exact parallel of Saint Paul, which also according to my calculations then lay in line with our jibboom, eighty miles distant.
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