“On May 5th,” the captain said, “we touched at St. Michael’s for water. We had had an easy voyage from Girgenti, in Sicily, and we wanted to finish an easy run here. We left St. Michael’s on the same day. Nothing worth while talking about occurred until two days afterward—Wednesday, May 7th.
“We were plodding along slowly that day. About noon I took the bridge to make an observation. It seemed to be hotter than ordinary. I shed my coat and vest and got into what little shade there was. As I worked it grew hotter and hotter. I didn’t know what to make of it. Along about 2 o’clock in the afternoon it was so hot that all hands got to talking about it. We reckoned that something queer was coming off, but none of us could explain what it was. You could almost see the pitch softening in the seams.
“Then, as quick as you could toss a biscuit over its rail, the Nordby dropped—regularly dropped—three or four feet down into the sea. No sooner did it do this than big waves, that looked like they were coming from all directions at once, began to smash against our sides. This was queerer yet, because the water a minute before was as smooth as I ever saw it. I had all hands piped on deck and we battened down everything loose to make ready for a storm. And we got it all right—the strangest storm you ever heard tell of.
“There was something wrong with the sun that afternoon. It grew red and then dark red and then, about a quarter after 2, it went out of sight altogether. The day got so dark that you couldn’t see half a ship’s length ahead of you. We got our lamps going, and put on our oilskins, ready for a hurricane. All of a sudden there came a sheet of lightning that showed up the whole tumbling sea for miles and miles. We sort of ducked, expecting an awful crash of thunder, but it didn’t come. There was no sound except the big waves pounding against our sides. There wasn’t a breath of wind.
“Well, sir, at that minute there began the most exciting time I’ve ever been through, and I’ve been on every sea on the map for twenty-five years. Every second there’d be waves 15 or 20 feet high, belting us head-on, stern-on and broadside, all at once. We could see them coming, for without any stop at all flash after flash of lightning was blazing all about us.
“Something else we could see, too. Sharks! There were hundreds of them on all sides, jumping up and down in the water. Some of them jumped clear out of it. And sea birds! A flock of them, squawking and crying, made for our rigging and perched there. They seemed like they were scared to death. But the queerest part of it all was the water itself. It was hot—not so hot that our feet could not stand it when it washed over the deck, but hot enough to make us think that it had been heated by some kind of a fire.
“Well that sort of thing went on hour after hour. The waves, the lightning, the hot water and the sharks, and all the rest of the odd things happening, frightened the crew out of their wits. Some of them prayed out loud—I guess the first time they ever did in their lives. Some Frenchmen aboard kept running around and yelling, ‘Cest le dernier jour!’ (This is the last day.) We were all worried. Even the officers began to think that the world was coming to an end. Mighty strange things happen on the sea, but this topped them all.
“I kept to the bridge all night. When the first hour of morning came the storm was still going on. We were all pretty much tired out by that time, but there was no such thing as trying to sleep. The waves still were batting us around and we didn’t know whether we were one mile or a thousand miles from shore. At 2 o’clock in the morning all the queer goings on stopped just the way they began—all of a sudden. We lay to until daylight; then we took our reckonings and started off again. We were about 700 miles off Cape Henlopen.
“No, sir; you couldn’t get me through a thing like that again for $10,000. None of us was hurt, and the old Nordby herself pulled through all right, but I’d sooner stay ashore than see waves without wind and lightning without thunder.”
FIERY STREAM CONTAINED POISONOUS GASES