In this desperate struggle they worked themselves into a sort of Berserker frenzy of strength and determination to master flogging canvas, wind, weather, and the limitations of the human constitution. The sail had to be furled. There was no getting away from that. The Anglo-Saxons showed the grit of their northern blood and tugged and hauled and gasped blistering blasphemies in a savage rage at the opposition of wind and canvas to their muscles and brains, while the Latins and others hung on to the jack-stay, useless, apathetic, whining and remonstrating feebly at the kicks and curses bestowed on them by their sturdier shipmates.
“You yellow dogs! Oh, you herring-gutted, paperbacked swine!” snarled Thompson at two frightened, cowering seamen alongside him. Then, with up-raised fist, he threatened in hoarse rage, “Grab-ahold, curse you! Grab-ahold, or I’ll jam my fist into the monkey-mug they gave you for a face when they made ye! Never mind grabbin’ that jack-stay! Grab canvas! That’s what ye’re up here for, you—you—” he paused for a suitable epithet, but none coming to mind, he broke off in disgust and beat at the sail as if he were beating the men he had threatened.
Forty minutes aloft and twenty men had failed to subdue the sail. Martin at the bunt stood on the truss and clutched the chain sling. “Now, men,” he bawled hoarsely while the canvas jigged a rigadoon below them, “we’re going to make one more try—just one more, and she’s got to come this time. If any man sojers or lays back on the job, I’ll kill him—s’help me God, I will! Now then! A-a-all together!” And they bent to the task again—cursing, whining, crying, and wishing the fores’l, the ship, and everyone aboard her in sulphurous flaming hell.
They got the rolled-up canvas on the yard at last and were passing the bunt and quarter gaskets when someone gave a guttural yell in the blackness, and two of the men instinctively felt that a man was gone from between them. “Somebody’s fell off the yard!” cried a seaman sensing the gap in the ranks along the foot-rope. “Who is it? Where did he go?” yelled Thompson, who was on the fateful yard-arm.
“Hinkel, I think, sir!” The second mate swung back of the men along the foot-ropes to the truss and scrambled down the weather rigging, followed by Martin. Dodging a boarding sea, both men slid down to loo’ard behind the for’ard house and scanned the lee scuppers. “He ain’t there!” shouted Martin. “Must ha’ gone over the side!”
“Might have fallen on top of the house,” cried Thompson climbing the ladder. A moment later his hail brought Martin up. “He’s here. It’s Hinkel, and he’s alive, though unconscious. Get some of the hands and we’ll get him aft!”
The former second mate was carried into the cabin and placed in a spare bunk. He was unconscious and bleeding from a cut on the head. His arms and legs hung limp, and at the moment, it was impossible to determine the extent of his injuries. “Tell the stoo’ard to attend to him,” said Captain Nickerson. “I’ll look him over later.”
Crashing and floundering in the big seas under shortened sail, the Kelvinhaugh staggered south, driven by the fury of the gale and filling her decks with frigid brine in monotonous regularity. All hands were sodden, frozen and exhausted, but as they huddled around the bogie-stoves in fo’c’sle and half-deck, “standing-by,” they murmured curseful thanks for the grateful warmth to the iron man who paced the poop and studied glass, ship, wind and sea with an eye vigilant for the weak opening in Cape Horn’s armor of implacable spite.