‘Here it comes again!’ cried the boy. But this time the squall swept past ahead of us, and the craft only reeled to the swollen waves, as they tore by.
‘We ‘d better go about, sir,’ said Tom to me; ‘there’s a heavy sea outside, and it’s blowing hard now.’
‘And there’s a split in the mast as long as my arm,’ cried the boy.
‘I thought she’d live through any sea, Tom!’ said I, laughing, for it was his constant boast that no weather could harm her.
‘There goes the spar!’ shouted he, while with a loud snap the mast gave way, and fell with a crash over the side. The boat immediately came head to wind, and sea after sea broke upon her bow, and fell in great floods over us.
‘Out away the stays—clear the wreck,’ cried Tom, ‘before the squall catches her!’
And although we now laboured like men whose lives depended on the exertion, the trailing sail and heavy rigging, shifting the ballast as they fell, laid her completely over; and when the first sea struck her, over she went. The violence of the gale sent me a considerable distance out, and for several seconds I felt as though I should never reach the surface again. Wave after wave rolled over me, and seemed bearing me downwards with their weight. At last I grasped something; it was a rope—a broken halyard; but by its means I gained the mast, which floated alongside of the yawl as she now lay keel uppermost. With what energy did I struggle to reach her! The space was scarcely a dozen feet, and yet it cost me what seemed an age to traverse. Through all the roaring of the breakers, and the crashing sounds of storm, I thought I could hear my comrades’ voices shouting and screaming; but this was in all likelihood a mere deception, for I never saw them more!
Grasping with a death-grip the slippery keel, I hung on to the boat through all the night. The gale continued to increase, and by daybreak it blew a perfect hurricane. With an aching anxiety I watched for light to see if I were near the land, or if any ship were in sight; but when the sun rose, nothing met my eyes but a vast expanse of waves tumbling and tossing in mad confusion, while overhead some streaked and mottled clouds were hurried along with the wind. Happily for me, I have no correct memory of that long day of suffering. The continual noise, but more still, the incessant motion of sea and sky around, brought on a vertigo, that seemed like madness; and although the instinct of self-preservation remained, the wildest and most incoherent fancies filled my brain. Some of these were powerful enough to impress themselves upon my memory for years after, and one I have never yet been able to dispel. It clings to me in every season of unusual depression or dejection; it recurs in the half-nightmare sleep of over-fatigue, and even invades me when, restless and feverish, I lie for hours incapable of repose. This is the notion that my state was one of afterlife punishment; that I had died, and was now expiating a sinful life by the everlasting misery of a castaway. The fever brought on by thirst and exhaustion, and the burning sun which beamed down upon my uncovered head, soon completed the measure of this infatuation, and all sense and guidance left me.
By what instinctive impulse I still held on my grasp, I cannot explain; but there I clung during the whole of that long dreadful day, and the still more dreadful night, when the piercing cold cramped my limbs, and seemed as if freezing the very blood within me. It was no wish for life, it was no anxiety to save myself, that now filled me. It seemed like a vague impulse of necessity that compelled me to hang on. It was, as it were, part of that terrible sentence which made this my doom for ever!
An utter unconsciousness must have followed this state, and a dreary blank, with flitting shapes of suffering, is all that remains to my recollection.