“Rip! rppppppppp!” the stays and jib were torn to ribbons, were flapping like mighty wings, making a noise which could be heard above the universal clash and clamour of the thundering seas. The skipper helped the crew put fresh sail out to steady the schooner that lay over as though about to turn turtle. The crew worked with a will, for they well knew that their lives were at stake.
“Let me out! I don’t want to be shut in this dismal place,” said Sestrina, in an appealing voice to the skipper who had just entered the cuddy. The schooner was rolling and pitching furiously. The girl had to hold on to the iron stanchions of the cuddy to stay herself from being violently flung to the deck. The skipper, who had rushed into the cuddy for some rope and tackle, tried to soothe Sestrina’s fears. She noticed that his manner had completely changed; he looked serious more manly. But this fact did not ease Sestrina’s mind, since she knew the change in his demeanour was because he saw danger ahead. Nor was the girl wrong in her surmise. The skipper well knew that if the typhoon lasted much longer, the Belle Isle was likely to get broadside on to the great seas and would possibly turn turtle, or the seas would sweep everything on deck away.
“You stay, no fright, Señorita,” he said.
Then the man ran out on deck again.
At this moment little Rajao, the boatswain’s child, rushed into the cuddy and clung to Sestrina’s skirt.
“Ze wins blow! Señorita,” wailed the child, a terrified look in his eyes, as he stared up into her face.
“It’s all right, don’t be frightened, Rajao,” she said.
Sestrina laid the boy down in her bunk and left the cabin door open so that he would not be frightened. Seeing by Rajao’s sudden appearance that the skipper in his haste had left the cuddy’s door unfastened, Sestrina immediately rushed towards it, and opening the door, stared out into the night. By the flashing light of the stars, that seemed to flicker to the force of the typhoon’s breath, she saw the great seas rising up! up! They looked like travelling mountains, foaming liquid ranges and multitudinous ridges lit with phosphorescent foams, that were tossed and swept into tremendous cataracts of glittering sprays as the typhoon’s breath swept the world of water like a huge unseen knife.
Crash! The schooner stopped, seemed to sink by the stern, then giving a shivery jerk, fell before the dead weight of the onrushing seas that crashed over her. The scene the lonely girl saw was as though God again held the oceans in the hollows of His hands, as though the universe of water had been re-thrown into the infinite; majestic liquid mountains tossing mighty arms that resembled promontories of fiery foams, triumphantly travelling through boundless space, bound for new regions, taking the millions of marching stars with them, as like a lone ark, with its little terrified mortality, the Belle Isle flapped its broken wings, bravely struggling in some effort to survive the chaos of a new creation!
In her fright Sestrina shut the cuddy’s door, bang! and then stared in terror through the porthole. She knew that something terrible had happened. She distinctly heard faint wails, like the despairing cries of helpless children calling from somewhere out in the infinity of dark and wind. The square-rigged foremast had been snapped off just above the mainyard—it had gone! The whole crew who had been aloft had disappeared, washed overboard. Sestrina and little Rajao, the child, out of all the crew, were left alone. The Haytian girl stood at the porthole, horrified by the catastrophe which she knew had overtaken the Belle Isle’s crew. Like most women of her type, she revealed true pluck in a great emergency. She rushed to the child Rajao. He had given a terrified scream.