With all sail stripped off her and a tarpaulin lashed in the weather jigger rigging, the grey daylight revealed the Kelvinhaugh lying hove-to in a sea which words fail to describe. It was a veritable battle of the elements—wind and ocean wrestling for the mastery—and the unfortunate barque was in the “No Man’s Land” of contending forces.
The crew were huddled in their swaying bunks absolutely exhausted in body and spirits. They had put in a desperate period from midnight to dawn, and they felt that another such ordeal was beyond their powers of strength and endurance. They were ready to give up and let the ship go where sea and wind listed, and even Nickerson, driver that he was, could get no more effort out of them. Hour after hour throughout the night they reefed and hauled sail off the barque, and eventually hove-to under fore and main lower topsails. When the main-topsail split in a frightful gust, they stowed the remaining canvas as best they could, and set a staysail of storm fabric. When this small patch burst, they unrolled a tarpaulin hatch-cover in the jigger rigging and seized it there to keep her head up to the mountainous sea.
“Ef she was only a real ship....” growled Nickerson disgustedly, but she wasn’t. She was the Kelvinhaugh—a cheap product of slack times in Clyde shipyards; a stock article for sale at a cheap price, ugly, ill-designed, ill-equipped, over-loaded and under-manned. Her crew knew it that day, and hove-to, their master allowed them to turn in all-standing, and recuperate for the next call to battle. No look-out was kept—there was but little use for a lookout with the ship not under command—and only McLean, tending the lashed wheel, and Nickerson, tenanted the spray and rain-drenched poop. These two men—thorough seamen both—communed together, exchanging weather-lore and experiences and planning to beat the fierce west wind of the “Roaring Fifties” with a ship that was not designed or fabricated or laden to do what ships are called upon to do in the wind-hounded seas of the high latitudes.
The Nova Scotian, oil-skinned and sea-booted, his lean face reddened by the wind and his keen grey eyes peering forth from swollen lids, came out from the shelter of the cabin companionway and squinted to the south’ard. “I think, McLean, it’s haulin’ southerly a mite!” he remarked in a voice harsh with much shouting.
McLean rolled up his sou’wester thatch with a mittened hand and glanced around—sniffing the air like a hound. “Yes, sir, I b’lieve it is. It’s clearin’ a bit to the west’ard, sir. There’s a wee bit break yonder.”
Sagging off to loo’ard, the big barque rolled and plunged ponderously in the swing of the big Horn seas which, ever and anon, swashed over the rails and filled the decks until the clanging wash-ports drained the boarding brine away. Her four heavy masts, denuded of canvas, described wild arcs across the grey skies, while the wind shrieked and thrummed in halliards and wire stays, and clanking chains and chafing parrals added their notes to the general pandemonium. The running gear blew out in great curves to loo’ard and the ends of the halliards, washed off the belaying pins, floated across the swashing decks in an inextricable tangle of snakey coils, or trailed overboard through the ports. In the lee of the houses or the tarpaulin in the jigger rigging, the two men swayed their bodies to the violent lurches, both watching for the hoped-for signs. McLean read them by sea-lore and sailorly instinct alone—the skipper combining these qualities with more scientific forecasts in squints at barometer and compass.
After an hour, Nickerson rubbed his hands together and swung his arms. He laughed—a hoarse, crow-like chuckle—and remarked to the bos’n, huddled in his oilskins and standing alternately on one foot to ease numb toes, “She’s shifting, my bully. We’ll get our slant this time, I cal’late. Sing out to the stoo’ard to give us a mug-up of coffee and bite here, and then we’ll rouse out the hands and get the muslin on her.”
Thompson appeared while they were quaffing the hot brew. “Captain,” he said, “Hinkel wants to see you. He thinks he’s dying.” The skipper smiled saturninely. “I’ll look him up in a spell. He won’t cash in his chips yet awhile. I cal’late I hev time to finish my coffee an’ cake afore he pegs aout, eh?”
A few minutes later he went into the berth where Hinkel was lying. Earlier in the morning he had examined him, and finding only a broken collar bone and a number of bruises, he had set the bone as well as he could and left him to the care of the Cockney steward. “Well, what’s ailin’ ye?” he asked harshly.