“Fore upper topsail’s gone out of the bolt-ropes, sir!”
Broughton smiled grimly to himself. Old Featherstone’s skinflint ways had turned out good policy for once. If that fore upper topsail had held, as it would have done if it had been the stout Number One canvas his soul craved, instead of a flimsy patched affair only fit for the Tropics, they might all have been with Davy Jones by now.
“Take the best hands you can find to the braces,” Broughton ordered. “I must try to get her away before it. Mister!”—this to the mate, who had by this time picked himself out of the scuppers and came scrambling up the deck—“take half a dozen hands down to see to the cargo, and do what you can to secure it if it looks like shifting.”
The helmsman, a big heavy Swede, was still clinging to the wheel like a limpet; partly because it appeared to him good to have something to hold on to, partly because his wits worked so slowly that it hadn’t yet occurred to him to let go. Broughton grasped the spokes and the two men threw every ounce of their strength into the task of putting the helm over.
Gusts of cheery obscenity came out of the darkness forward as the crew fought to get the spars round. “Good men!” Broughton said between his teeth. “‘Maid of Athens, ere we part,’ eh? Not yet, old girl—not yet!”
It seemed as if the helpless ship knew the feel of the familiar hand on her helm, and strove with all her might to respond to it. She struggled; she almost rose. Then, wind and sea beating her down anew, she slid down into the trough again.
Again and again she tried to heave herself free from the weight of water that dragged her down; again and again she slipped back again, like a fallen horse trying vainly to get a footing on a slippery road. The two men wrestled with the wheel in grim silence. It kicked and strove in their grasp like a living thing. But at last, slowly, the ship quivered, righted herself. She shook the seas impatiently from her flanks as the reefed foresail filled. Inch by inch the yards came round to windward. The fight was over.
By daybreak the gale had all but blown itself out. The sea still ran high, but the wind had fallen, and a watery sun was trying to break through the hurrying clouds. The hands were already at work bending a new foretopsail, and their short, staccato cries came on the wind like the mewings of gulls.
“Life in the old dog yet, Mr. Kennedy!” said Broughton to the second mate. He struck his hands together, exulting. The struggle seemed to him a good omen. If she could live through a night like that, surely she could also survive those obscurer dangers which threatened her. His shoulders ached like the shoulders of Atlas from the battle with the kicking wheel. He had not known such physical effort since his apprentice days. The fight had put new heart into him. By God, it had been worth it, he told himself. It made a man feel that it was worth while to be alive....
A few days later the “Maid of Athens” picked up the north-east Trades, and carried them with her almost down to the Line through a succession of golden days and star-dusted nights. She loitered through the doldrums—found her Trades again just south of the Line—wrestled with the Westerlies off the Horn—and, speeding northward again through the flying-fish weather, made the Strait of Juan de Fuca a hundred and nine days out.