I recall the glorious tropical day that preceded the change in the weather—and such a change! The wind dropped again, the air was hot, almost thick with silence. As night fell, the sky pulsed with the ethereal energy of a thousand thousand stars. Suddenly it came—crash! The storm seemed to break over that vast, silent tropic sea like an explosion: as though some terrific cataclysm had occurred out in the solar system and blown the western horizon out. I fancied I heard the tumultuous tottering of the heavens as that midnight hurricane smashed down upon us.
“All hands on deck! Shorten sail! Aye there! Let go!” Boom! Crash! Then came muffled orders that the wind slashed into a thousand pieces ere they got clear from the Old Man’s lips (he was an old man, too; a grand white beard, wrinkled, sun-tanned face alight with keen, grey eyes).
As we clung aloft, she gave a lurch to windward. A flash of brilliant lightning split the heavens in twain. It lit up the sea. Ye gods, what a sight! It was like some vast Arctic Ocean of mountainous, pinnacled icebergs adrift, dancing with mad, chaotic delight, as they travelled away to the east! As that flash came, I saw the heads of my comrades, their figures clinging on in a row up there high aloft. We looked like puppets clinging on a long stick that was dancing about up in the sky of that inky, black night.
I felt my cap go. The wind ripped my hair, it seemed as though a fiercely thrust knife had whipped out of space and scalped me.
Someone who clung just near me muttered a laboured oath. Then a voice, that seemed to be out somewhere in space, said: “Now we sha’n’t be long!” “Stow yer gab, yer son of a gun,” said another sepulchral voice out in the black infinity. Crash! We felt the vessel shiver as the seas broke over, then she lurched to windward. I felt sure that she was turning turtle. Up she came and righted herself as we grabbed the folds of the straining canvas in our fists. The flapping canvas and the rigging bellowed like monstrous living beings as we all clung aloft, far away up there in the chaos. Suddenly I clung on like grim death. I felt certain that the world had suddenly shifted its orbit and had taken a headlong plunge into infinite space. I turned my head and looked over my shoulder; though the night was pitch black I saw it rise—a thundering, boiling mass of ocean ablaze with phosphorescent light. Up—up—it came. The Rockhampton shivered and crouched like a hunted, frightened stag of the ocean. Crash! We had pooped a sea! A mountain of seething, boiling water rushed along the deck and swept to the galley. I felt the stern sink to the weight of the water as the jib-boom stabbed the sky. Another crash; the galley had been swept away and had crashed overboard like matchwood. The masts shivered, the night moaned. I clung to the fold of the sail with my fist, yes, tight with fright. I think if I had gone before my Maker that next moment—as I expected to—I should have still been clutching that little bit of dirty, wet canvas in my hand—the last remnant of sweet mortality!
I heard a faint cry: it came from somewhere out in the storm-stricken night. What was it, I wondered. It seemed to stab my heart. Then the terrific roar of the night, the moan of the seas below and the thunder of the winds aloft, blew all my faculties away into infinity like dust.
Suddenly the hurricane’s first mighty passion blew itself out.
We all stood on deck, huddled, looking into each other’s faces.
“Are you men all there?” roared the skipper.
“Aye, aye, sir!”