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Updated: May 25, 2025
Over she pressed, and lee-rail under, while he measured the weight of the wind and quested its easement. The tepid sea-water, with here and there tiny globules of phosphorescence, washed about his ankles and knees. The wind screamed a higher note, and every shroud and stay sharply chorused an answer as the Willi-Waw pressed farther over and down. "Down mainsail!"
She rose a little to windward, but her lee-rail was still under water. Down in the scuppers, in the tangle of ropes and splintered wood, sundry dark forms, looking more like bundles of dirty rags than anything else, rolled and tossed helplessly. These were dead and drowning men.
Just before sun-rise we noticed the first indications of a break in the gale, and by eight o'clock it had so far moderated that our lee-rail was just awash, and instead of diving through the seas, as we had been ever since the gale struck us, the cutter managed to rise over everything but the heaviest.
"Steamer's lights ahead on the port bow, sir!" cried the lookout from his station on the forecastle-head. There was excitement in the man's voice. The captain sent Bub below for his night-glasses. Everybody crowded to the lee-rail to gaze at the suspicious stranger, which already began to loom up vague and indistinct.
Her sails are full and straining, every little while she presses her lee-rail under, she flounders, and bumps, and splashes, and that is all. Whenever she begins to gather way, she runs ker- chug into a big mountain of water and is brought to a standstill.
The main-sheet tautened with a brisk rattling of the blocks, the boom uplifted, the sail bellied out, and the Reindeer heeled over over, and over, till the lee-rail went under, the cabin windows went under, and the bay began to pour in over the cockpit rail.
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.
Also, in the rolls and gusts, she was forced down till her lee-rail buried and the sea foamed level across to her hatches. Mr. Pike watched her like a hawk, and like certain death he watched the Maltese Cockney and Tom Spink at the wheel. "Land on the lee bow!" came a cry from for'ard, that was carried on from mouth to mouth along the bridge to the poop. I saw Mr.
He had been in an opium clipper, the celebrated of Boston, and left her, as he told her agent, "because he liked a ship as 'ad a lee-rail to her; and the 's lee-rail," he said, "was commonly out of sight, pretty much all the way from the Sand'eads to the Bocca Tigris." He was rich in what he called "'ats," having one for every hour of the day, and, for aught I know, every day in the year.
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