"It's only begun," he said. "I scarce remember such a gale as this since I was a boy. Pass that bottle of yours round, Will; we shall be busy again directly. One of you take the helm; I'm stiff with the wet. We shall have it round from the south in a few minutes."
There was scarce a breath of wind now, and she rolled so I thought she would have turned turtle.
"Get out a sweep," Jabez said, "and bring her head round."
We had scarcely done so ere the first squall from behind struck us, and in five minutes we were running back as fast as we had come. The wind was at first south, but settled round to southeast. We got up a little more sail now, and made a shift to keep her to the west, for with this wind we should have been ashore long before morning if we had run straight before it. The sea had been heavy—it was tremendous now; and, light and seaworthy as the Jane was, we had to keep baling as the sea broke into her. Over and over again I thought that it was all over with us as the great waves towered above our stern, but they slipped under us as we went driving on at twelve or fourteen knots an hour. I stood up by the side of Jabez, and asked him what he thought of it.
"I can't keep her off the wind," he said; "we must run, and by midnight we shall be among the Scillys. Then it's a toss-up."
Jabez's calculations could not have been far out, for it was just midnight, as far as I could tell, when we saw a flash right ahead.
"That's a ship on one of the Scillys," Jabez said. "I wish I knew which it was."
He tried to bring her a little more up into the wind, but she nearly lay over onto her beam-ends, and Jabez let her go ahead again. We saw one more flash, and then a broad faint light. The ship was burning a blue light. She was not a mile ahead now, and we could see she was a large vessel. I had often been to the Scillys before, and knew them as well as I did our coast, but I could not see the land. It was as Jabez had said—a toss-up. If we just missed one of them we might manage to bring up under its lee; but if we ran dead into one or other of them the Jane would break up like an egg-shell.
We were rapidly running down upon the wreck when the glare of a fire on shore shone up. It was a great blaze, and we could faintly see the land and a white cottage some hundred yards from the shore.
"I know it," Jabez shouted; "we are close to the end of the island; we may miss it yet. Hoist the mainsail a bit."