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Updated: June 3, 2025
"It is well we stripped her so thoroughly, and that she is not heavily laden." Four men had been placed at the wheel, and it needed all their strength to keep her from yawing. In half an hour the sea began to get up, and the captain laid her course south-east, which put the wind on her quarter. "It is well we were not a degree or so farther south, Captain."
He steered carefully but resolutely, luffed her up, watched her coming to, prevented her from yawing, and from running into the wind's eye: noted the leeway, the little jerks of the helm: was observant of every roll and pitch of the vessel, of the difference in her speed, and of the variable gusts of wind.
We came up after one of these deep plunges into the valleys of the ocean, and, to our alarm, saw the English ship yawing directly athwart our course, and within fifty fathoms of us. This was about the distance at which I intended to pass, little dreaming of finding the other ship so completely in our way.
She was yawing about most frightfully, sheering first to port and then to starboard in a manner which seemed every moment to threaten that she would broach-to.
The lieutenant applied the glass to his eye again and took a deliberate look in silence, and replied: 'I think she is a heavy ship, and that we shall have some hard fighting, but of one thing I am certain, she is not a frigate; if she were, she would not keep yawing and showing her broadsides as she does; she would show nothing but her head and stern; we shall have the advantage of her, and the quicker we get alongside the better. Our captain ordered English colors to be hoisted, and the ship to be cleared for action.
"How soon, Senor Applegarth, do you think we'll be before we're alongside her?" "In about half an hour at the outside, sir, unless something gives way. We would have been up to her before if she had been lying-to; but she's going ahead too, like ourselves, and not making bad way either, considering the state she's in aloft, and her yawing this way and that. It is wonderful how she keeps on!"
In all the annals of British seamanship there is no more heroic story than that of the fight between the Resolution and the six French men of war. From six in the morning until half past three in the afternoon she maintained the unequal contest, still keeping on under full sail toward her port, only yawing occasionally to pour a broadside into one or other of her foes.
The two vessels for some time made no attempt to escape, believing probably that the stranger in sight was really French, and wishing for some reason or other to speak her. By yawing occasionally that is moving the ship's head from one side to the other the French ensign was visible to the two vessels to leeward.
For they were two souls hanging together on the verge of eternity alone; two souls with death all about fusing them until they were as one. She looked at him long. "Are you hurt?" she asked. The words sounded thick. "No a little. It got my neck and ears. The ship was yawing, though, and that saved us. It was like snapping your hand through a gas flame."
The ship was yawing again. Tongues of flame reached hungrily for them, licking above Dan's red-gold hair and his back, but never touching the girl. Then the swing of the vessel and the wind again; then the fire and the torturing heat.
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