“As I turned round an instant a hoarse, howling bellow struck my ear from the island, and I just caught a glimpse of the tall cocoa-nut-tree flying round and round in the air like an inverted umbrella with a broken stick; while at the same time the men from aloft had reached the deck, and, jumping to the battery, the guns were run in and housed, spare breechings and extra lashings passed, and life-lines rove fore and aft. After that, gentlemen, there was no farther need of a trumpet.
“You all know pretty well what sort of a thing a hurricane is, and the one I speak of must, I think, have given you a touch of its quality here in Jamaica.”
“Ay, by the holy Moses! we remember it well, bad luck to it; and so does Tom Stewart and Piron there, for it didn’t lave a stick of sugar-cane standing from Montego Bay to Cape Antonio.”
“Yes,” said Stewart; “and to show ye what a piff of wind can do, the whirl of it caught up an eighteen-foot Honduras plank, and laid it crosswise, like an axe, full seven inches into an old tamarind trunk standing in my garden, and then twisted off the ends like a heather broom! Hech, mon, ye may see it there now any day!”
Piron was thinking of the barks that were driving before that hurricane, with no thought of the damage done to his own plantations.
“Well, then, I shall spare you all prolix description of it; and you need only fancy a ship blown every where and every how except out of water––now with the lower yard-arms cutting deep into the sea like rakes, the lee hammock-nettings under water, the stern boat torn away into splinters, the main-top-sail picked, bolt by bolt, from the yard until there was not a thread left, and the lee anchor twisted bodily out of its lashings and swept overboard!
“Then a lull, while the sea got up and the ship dashed down on the other side on her bow; then staggering back and making a stern-board till the water was plunged up in a deluge over the poop. Recovering herself again, and almost quivering on her beam-ends, the guns groaning and creaking as the terrible strain came upon the breechings, with the shot from the racks bounding about the decks, 213 dinting holes in the solid oak waterways big enough to wash your face in, and then hopping out of the smashed half-ports to leeward. The spar-deck up to your armpits in water, and every man of us holding on to the life-lines or standing rigging like grim death, while all the time the roaring, thundering yell of the hurricane taught us how powerless we were, by hand or voice, to cope with the winds when they were let loose in all their might and fury!
“Nor need I relate to you the scene presented below––mess-chests, bags, tables, crockery, flying from deck and beam to stanchion, smashing about in the most dangerous way, pell-mell, while the worst of the tempest lasted. But, gentlemen, the ‘Scourge’ had a frame of live-oak, to say nothing of two or three acres of tough yellow-pine timber in her, a good deal of fibrous hemp to hold the masts up; and, moreover, she was well manned, and, though I say it myself, she had a skillful captain and thorough-bred officers, in whose sagacity the crew could rely, to manage that old ‘Scourge.’”
“That she had,” exclaimed Hardy; “and the most skillful and the coolest of them all was the first lieutenant!” The “Monongahela’s” executive officer here bounced off his chair as if he was prepared to fight any man breathing who did not subscribe to that opinion.
“Well, my friends, that awful hurricane continued for about twenty hours, from late one morning till the beginning of the next. As for day, there was none; for the sea and black clouds made one long night of it. Fortunately, too, we had been driven off shore, and when the murky gloom broke away, and we were able to look around, our first anxiety was to see what had become of the brigantine.