On they swept, gaining fast on the Spaniard. “Call the men up, and to quarters; the rain will be over in ten minutes.”
Yeo ran forward to the gangway; and sprang back again, with a face white and wild—
“Land right ahead! Port your helm, sir! For the love of God, port your helm!”
Amyas, with the strength of a bull, jammed the helm down, while Yeo shouted to the men below.
She swung round. The masts bent like whips; crack went the fore-sail like a cannon. What matter? Within two hundred yards of them was the Spaniard; in front of her, and above her, a huge dark bank rose through the dense hail, and mingled with the clouds; and at its foot, plainer every moment, pillars and spouts of leaping foam.
“What is it, Morte? Hartland?”
It might be anything for thirty miles.
“Lundy!” said Yeo. “The south end! I see the head of the Shutter in the breakers! Hard a-port yet, and get her close-hauled as you can, and the Lord may have mercy on us still! Look at the Spaniard!”
Yes, look at the Spaniard!
On their left hand, as they broached-to, the wall of granite sloped down from the clouds toward an isolated peak of rock, some two hundred feet in height. Then a hundred yards of roaring breaker upon a sunken shelf, across which the race of the tide poured like a cataract; then, amid a column of salt smoke, the Shutter, like a huge black fang, rose waiting for its prey; and between the Shutter and the land, the great galleon loomed dimly through the storm.