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Updated: June 26, 2025
Sighted the Goth island, a portion of the Japanese empire. The next morning the wind had increased to a heavy gale, and we were compelled to reduce our canvass to a close-reefed main topsail, staysail, and trysail. We rounded Cape Goth within a quarter of a mile, and lay to under the lee of the island, where the sea was comparatively smooth.
He fell, without life, on the deck of his enemy. Ludlow watched every movement, with a calmness that neither personal responsibility, nor the uproar and rapid incidents of the terrible scene, could discompose. "Now is our time to bring the matter hand to hand!" he cried, making a gesture to Trysail to descend from the ladder, in order that he might pass.
Ludlow then proceeded to the deck, where he made the final dispositions for the attack. The ship was left in charge of Mr. Luff, with an injunction to profit by any breeze that might offer, to draw as near as possible to the chase. Trysail was placed in the launch, at the head of a strong party of boarders.
The whistling of shot, and the crash of wood, had been heard amid the din of the combat. Giving a glance at his enemy, who still stood on, Ludlow leaned from the poop, and, with all a sailor's anxiety, he endeavored to scan the gear aloft. "What is gone, Sir?" he asked of Trysail, whose earnest face just then became visible through the drifting smoke. "What sail is so heavily flapping?"
As soon as the anchor was let go, we got our head-sail in, ran in the bowsprit, and got our topmast on deck; the trysail was close-reefed, and the sheet trimmed amidships, the anchor-light hoisted well up on the fore-stay, and our preparations for the night were complete.
Some of them lifted us up, and sliding from under us, seemed to let us drop through the air like a flat plank upon the body of the water. In a few minutes we were in the low, regular swell, and pulled for a light, which, as we came up, we found had been run up to our trysail gaff.
With a yell of indescribable fury the blast struck us, and as the storm-wave boiled in over our taffrail and swept along the deck, filling it to the level of the rail and taking with it in its rush for'ard every movable thing in its way, I saw the storm trysail fill, with a terrific jerk of the doubled sheets, and then go flying away out of the bolt-ropes like a sheet of tissue paper.
Somebody unhooked the throat-halliard block, and thought he had hooked it into the head-cringle of the trysail, and sang out to hoist away, but he had missed it in the dark, and the heavy block went flying into the lee rigging, and nearly killed him when it swung back with the weather roll.
It was his intention to maintain a north-west course for the ensuing twenty-four hours, in order to obtain a good offing, and then to haul up to the northward; but, to his disgust, when he turned out on the following morning he found that the wind had shifted and was blowing strong from about north-east, and that, with her yards braced right forward, and main trysail set, the brig would look no higher than north-west.
Wind there was none, though occasionally a breath of hot air came from the land, like the first efforts of the night-breeze. The heavens were clouded, though a few thoughtful stars glimmered between the masses of vapor. "A calmer night never shut in the Americas!" said the veteran Trysail, shaking his head doubtingly and speaking in a suppressed and cautious tone.
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