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Updated: July 28, 2025
The Augusta Ramsay had all the sails that the Industry had and, besides those sails, she had the sails that belong on the mizzenmast: the cross-jack and the mizzentopsail and the mizzentopgallantsail and the mizzenroyal and the mizzenskysail and all the mizzenstaysails. But the Industry couldn't set those sails on the mizzenmast, because she didn't have any mizzenmast.
There was no talking, no calling to one another, the men hung in the topmast rigging like corpses, and I noticed the second mate to windward of his brother in the top, sheltering him, as best he could, poor fellow, with his body from the wind that went through our skins like showers of arrows. On a sudden I took it into my head to fancy that the mizzenmast wasn't so secure as the foremast.
She seemed to have been a three-masted ship, for Leslie could see the stumps of the fore and main masts, and believed he could make out the stump of the mizzenmast broken close off at the deck.
He broke off to gaze with dropped jaw at a spiral of smoke that coiled and twisted in the lee of the mizzenmast twenty feet above the deck. "Now, how did that get there?" he demanded indignantly. Beneath it there was no smoke. Crawling up from the deck, sheltered from the wind by the mast, by some freak it took form and visibility at that height.
Tuesday morning at five it was lovely, and the reefs were all shaken out; a light air sprang up, and the ship, at 10 o'clock, had come up to her course, when suddenly, without the smallest warning, a gale came down upon us from the S.W. like a wall. The men were luckily very smart in taking in canvas, but at one time the captain thought he should have had to cut away the mizzenmast.
At last a chance shot carried away her mizzenmast, and another dismounted her single great gun, killing a number of men. The carronades, good for only a few discharges, soon left her to the fury of her assailant, and presently the Dorset was no better than a battered raisin-box. Her commander had destroyed his despatches, and nothing remained now but to be sunk or surrender.
It would have resulted much worse, if our sheet anchor, which was lying up forward, had not caught between the rails of a small vessel, whose mizzenmast we also came foul of, whereby our ship turned round, and at the same time our anchor fell, and we touched bottom in the mud, with fine weather and still water.
But ever and anon, through some rent in this smoky curtain, I might catch a glimpse of the English ship, her shot-scarred side and rent sails, or the grim havoc of our own decks. And amidst it all, and hard beside me where I crouched in the shelter of the mizzenmast, I beheld Resolution Day limping to and fro, jovial of voice, cheering his sweating, powder-grimed gun-crews with word and hand.
And, if we hadn't, what was we goin' to do about it? Bailey, between you and me and the mizzenmast, Heman Atkins wants to get ahold of that place the worst way." "He does? He DOES? For the land sakes, ain't he got property enough already? Ain't a a palace like that enough for one man, without wantin' to buy a rattletrap like THAT?"
The stranger was, however, nearing us, and as we occasionally got a glimpse of her through our glasses, we saw that she had carried away her main-topmast and mizzenmast, and that she was labouring much, running before the wind with only a close-reefed fore-topsail set. As far as we could judge she looked indeed in some distress. On she came towards us.
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