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Updated: May 22, 2025
The midshipmen sprang to the main-topsail halyards, Casey and Peter to the fore-topsail; but almost before a rope could be let go, a fierce blast struck the brig. In vain the mate tried to put the helm up. Over she heeled more and more, until the yardarms touched the water. Tom and Desmond seized hold of Billy, who had just before dropped off to sleep, and scrambled up to the weather bulwarks.
In an instant, the watch on deck, bending on to the halliards with a will, hoisted the gleaming white sails aloft and sheeted them home; when, bellying out before the northerly breeze, they expanded their folds, making the yardarms creak again, and looking like the wings of some gigantic seabird, the ship herself bearing out the resemblance and swooping away in a heavy lurch to leeward, after apparently preening her pinions for a fresh flight, being now a perfect pyramid of canvas from truck to deck.
On the ocean he had only a single port, Archangel; and the whole shipping of Archangel was foreign. There did not exist a Russian vessel larger than a fishing-boat. Yet, from some cause which cannot now be traced, he had a taste for maritime pursuits which amounted to a passion, indeed almost to a monomania. His imagination was full of sails, yardarms, and rudders.
Roses garlanded her pink roses by the thousands. They circled her rail like a monster wreath. They hung down from her yardarms, too, in mammoth festoons. And her cargo forward, it was of watermelons, which were arranged in a huge heap at the prow; aft, her load was books! There were books in red bindings, and books in brown and green.
The affrighted vessels seemed to recede together, and they shot asunder in diverging lines, the Foam leading. All further attempts at a communication were instantly useless; the corvette being half a mile ahead in a quarter of an hour, rolling her yardarms nearly to the water.
The topsails were lowered, and the topmen, like bees, swiftly swarmed aloft, laying out on the yardarms. "Hold on by your teeth and eyelids, Billy," said Tom to his old friend Billy Blueblazes, as he sprang up to his station in the main-top. The canvas was speedily reduced to closely-reefed fore and main-topsails and fore-staysail.
The ends of these spars were then crossed by and lashed to the two yardarms of the fore-yard at the end of the raft which he intended for its stern, and to the topsail yardarms at the fore end. This formed a rectangular staging, with the lower-mast running fore and aft through its centre.
On flew our burning ship before the gale, and we would have set more sail to try and overtake the Mary, but we had not strength for it. We steered as near as we could the same course as before. The ship plunged heavily; and as she tore her way through the waves, she rolled her yardarms almost into the water, so that it was difficult to keep the deck without holding on.
The electric light suddenly went out, and two enormous waterspouts crashed onto the deck of the frigate, racing like a torrent from stem to stern, toppling crewmen, breaking spare masts and yardarms from their lashings. A hideous collision occurred, and thrown over the rail with no time to catch hold of it, I was hurled into the sea. A Whale of Unknown Species
So close did they lie that their yardarms interlocked, and their rigging was soon so fouled that Jones could not have got away, even had he wished to do so.
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