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Updated: May 23, 2025
I caught sight of him toiling at the main-sheet, heaving it in and flat with his tremendous muscles, the stern of the schooner lifted high in the air and his body outlined against a white surge of sea sweeping past. All this, and more, a whole world of chaos and wreck, in possibly fifteen seconds I had seen and heard and grasped.
It was a shark that was thus blockading Bob, and the splashing was resorted to, to frighten the creature from attacking him. I carefully measured my distance, and exactly at the right moment jammed my helm hard down, hauling in the main-sheet as I did so. The Lily shot into the wind, just clearing the buoy by a hair's- breadth.
"Thompson," said I, "let go the main-sheet, and the main-brace." Running forward myself, I let go the main-tack, and bowlines; the main-yard came square of itself. Thompson got a lantern, which he held up on the starboard quarter. The frigate passed close under the stern, shewing a beautiful pale side, with a fine tier of guns; and, hailing us, desired to know what vessel it was.
This animal was so much displeased with the disturbance which our ship had given him, for in our passage we had with our rudder scratched his nose, that he beat in all the gallery and part of the quarter deck with his tail, and almost at the same instant took the main-sheet anchor, which was suspended, as it usually is, from the head, between his teeth, and ran away with the ship, at least sixty leagues, at the rate of twelve leagues an hour, when fortunately the cable broke, and we lost both the whale and the anchor.
When he took the tiller, somehow the craft seemed to know it, and bobbed up half a point nearer to the wind; and when we were running free with the main-sheet eased off, and the foresail shivering, her wake would be as straight as her mast; only, he was a rare fellow for carrying on, was old Captain Goss!
Then, next moment: "Stand by the dory," as the smaller of the boats, with two men aboard, came sliding by and was almost thrown on top of the seine-boat by a cross-sea. There came a fire of orders from the captain, which Colin could hardly follow, and he wondered how the helmsman and one man on deck could keep up with them. "Ease off the main-sheet!
What made this circumstance the more wonderful, and indeed beyond all comprehension, was, that the violence of the shock was such that we lost our rudder, broke our bow-sprit in the middle, and split all our masts from top to bottom, two of which went by the board; a poor fellow, who was aloft, furling the main-sheet, was flung at least three leagues from the ship; but he fortunately saved his life by laying hold of the tail of a large sea-gull, who brought him back, and lodged him on the very spot from whence he was thrown.
Now, too, the boat showed itself what it really was, the best boat in Ranen. The weather, meantime, had become worse, and they had already got a couple of dangerous seas right upon them. They broke in over the main-sheet in the forepart of the boat where Bernt sat, and sailed out again to leeward near the stern.
In order to prevent such disasters for the future, my patron ordered a carpenter to build a little state room or cabin in the middle of the long-boat, with a place behind it to steer and hale home the main-sheet, with other conveniences to keep him from the weather, as also lockers to put in all manner of provisions, with a handsome shoulder of mutton sail, gibing over the cabin.
After a tedious contention with dead water, light puffs of wind that came down the gulleys on our starboard beam, and shifted to our bows, and then veering right aft, jibed the main-sheet, we cast anchor about twenty yards from the rock on whose summit the Union-jack waved. The Consul sent on board to say, that his house was at our service, as well as any other kindness he could show us.
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