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I stayed with the Three Crows all that day and shared their dinner with them on the quarterdeck when, wearied to death with the strain of wrestling with the slatting canvas and ponderous boom, they at last threw themselves upon the hamper of "cold snack" I had brought off with me and pledged the success of the venture in tin dippers full of Pilsener.
By the time that she had paid square off before the wind all was ready, the loosened canvas was bellying out as though impatient to be doing its duty once more, loosened ropes were streaming in the gale, the men had laid in off the yards, and the three topsails went soaring away to the mastheads simultaneously; the fore and main tacks were boarded and the sheets hauled aft; the topgallantsails were in like manner all sheeted home and hoisted at the same instant, the two jibs went sliding up their stays, slatting thunderously the while and threatening to snap the booms, until their sheets were tautened, and away flew the Europa, like a started fawn, leaping and plunging through and over the mountainous seas, with a bow-wave roaring and foaming to the height of her hawse-pipes, and with the wind broad over her larboard quarter.
It was during one of these wild sheers that the main topgallant studdingsail-boom snapped short off by the boom-iron; and there was immediately a tremendous hullabaloo aloft of madly slatting canvas and threshing boom, as the studdingsail flapped furiously in the freshening breeze, momentarily threatening to spring the topgallant yard, if, indeed, it did not whip the topgallant-mast out of the ship.
I sprang aloft to take in the main top-gallant studding-sail, but before I got into the top, the tack parted, and away went the sail, swinging forward of the top-gallant-sail, and tearing and slatting itself to pieces. The halyards were at this moment let go by the run; and such a piece of work I never had before, in taking in a sail.
"I don't know 's I'd ought to have put it on her, knowing how she hates confusion and company, and all that; but she seemed to think we'd got to tough it out for a spell, any way; though I don't expect her temper 'll stand the strain very long." The fact was, Samantha was banging doors and slatting tin pails about furiously to keep up an ostentatious show of ill humor.
Up on deck brother Bartholomew, who has developed some grievous complaint of the jaws and teeth complaint not known to us more particularly, but dreadful enough from that description does his duty also, with that heroic manfulness that has marked his whole career; and somewhere in the ship young Ferdinand is sheltering from the sprays and breaking seas, finding his world of adventure grown somewhat gloomy and sordid of late, and feeling that he has now had his fill of the sea . . . . Shut your eyes and let the illusions of time and place fade from you; be with them for a moment on this last voyage; hear that eternal foaming and crashing of great waves, the shrieking of wind in cordage, the cracking and slatting of the sails, the mad lashing of loose ropes; the painful swinging, and climbing up and diving down, and sinking and staggering and helpless strivings of the small ship in the waste of water.
Close in and seen over the tops of the waves were the shaking and slatting sails of a pilot-boat, lying to. One of the sails bore an enormous number six. Vandover slept all that day and the night following, rolled in hot blankets. The next morning he awoke with a strange sense of unreality and of having dropped a day somewhere.
After the second day we had the doldrums fair enough, and there we lay with our courses clewed up and our t'gallantsails wearing out with the continuous slatting, as the ship rolled lazily on the long, easy equatorial sea.
In impudent isolation, the toy schooner has plowed her path of snow across the empty deep, far from all track of commerce, far from any hand of help; now to the sound of slatting sails and stamping sheet blocks, staggering in the turmoil of that business falsely called a calm, now, in the assault of squalls burying her lee-rail in the sea.... Flying fish, a skimming silver rain on the blue sea; a turtle fast asleep in the early morning sunshine; the Southern Cross hung thwart the forerigging like the frame of a wrecked kite the pole star and the familiar plough dropping ever lower in the wake; these build up thus far the history of our voyage.
If I blow their trumpet, the trumpet of the old sea-dogs, these scallawags, these Vikings, what matter if I seem to blow my own, having been their companion one campaign or two upon the deep? That "Me" is dead, I know, and can only be resurgent in memory, and will never laugh or feel afraid again when the slatting canvas jars one's very teeth.
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