“There isn’t much sea on,” answered David; “hardly more than what we used to call in Shetland ‘a northerly lipper.’ But yet I don’t like the look to the east’ard and the nor’ard.”
“Nor I. You had better tell Elizabeth. Talk to her, David; coax her to hurry and get out of the bay. Promise her a new coat of paint; say that I think of having her figurehead gilded.”
David was used to hearing Elizabeth treated as if she were a living, reasonable creature, but he always smiled kindly at the imputation; it touched something kindred in his own heart, and he replied:
“She’ll do her best if she’s well handled. It’s her life as well as ours, you know.”
“It is; anybody knows that. If you ever went into shipping and insurance offices, David, you would hear even landsmen say so. They make all their calculations on the average life of a ship. My lad, men build her of wood and iron, but there is something more in a good ship than wood and iron.”
“Look to the east, captain.”
Then there was the boatswain’s whistle, and the shout of sailormen, and the taking in of sails, and that hurrying and scurrying to make a ship trig which precedes the certain coming of a great storm. And the Bay of Biscay is bad quarters in any weather, but in a storm it defies adequate description. When the wind has an iron ring and calls like a banshee, and the waves rise to its order as high as the masthead, then God help the men and ships on the Bay of Biscay!
Five days after the breaking of this storm the Elizabeth was sorely in need of such potential help. Her masts were gone, the waves were doubling over her, and her plunges were like the dive of a whale. At the wheel there was a man lashed,–for the hull was seldom above water,–and this man was David Borson. He was the only sailor left strong enough for the work, and he was at the last point of endurance. The icy gusts roared past him; the spray was like flying whiplashes; and it was pitiful to see David, with his bleeding hands on the wheel, stolidly shaking his head as the spray cut him.
He had been on deck for forty hours, buffeted by the huge waves, and he was covered with salt-water boils. His feet were flayed and frozen, and his hands so gashed that he dared not close or rest them, lest the agony of unclasping or moving them again should make him lose his consciousness. He feared, also, that his feet were so badly frozen that he would never be able to walk on them any more. These miseries others were sharing with him; but David had been struck by a falling spar at the beginning of the storm, and there was now an abscess forming on his lung that tortured him beyond his usual speechless patience. “God pity me!” he moaned. “God pity me!”
When the storm ceased the Elizabeth was as bare as a newly launched hull, and wallowing like a soaked log. David had fallen forward on his face, and was asleep or insensible. He did not hear the handspike thumped upon the deck, and the cry, “On deck! on deck! Lord help us! she is going down!” But some one lifted him on to a raft which had been hastily lashed together, and the misery that followed was only a part of some awful hours when physical pain from head to feet drove him to the verge of madness. He never knew how long it was before they were met by the Alert, a large passenger packet going into the port of London, and taken on board. Four of the men were then dead from exhaustion, and the physician on the Alert looked doubtfully at David’s feet.