The swell was rapidly whitening and getting steeper. The Selache hove herself out of it forward as she swung up with streaming bows. It seemed to Wyllard that he must overrun the boat before he noticed her, but at last he saw Dampier swing himself on to the rail. The skipper stood there clutching at a shroud, and presently swinging an arm, turned toward Wyllard.
“Eight ahead!” he shouted. “Let her come up a few points before you run over them.”
Wyllard put his helm down a spoke or two, which was easy, and then as the bows swung high again there was a harsh cry from the man who stood above Dampier in the shrouds.
“Ice!” he roared. “Big pack of it right under your weather bow.”
Dampier shouted something, but Wyllard did not hear what he said. He was conscious only that he had to decide what he must do in the next few seconds. If he let the Selache come up to avoid the boat, there was the ice ahead, and at the speed she was traveling it would infallibly incrush her bows, while if he held her straight there was the boat close in front of her. To swing her clear of both by going to leeward he must bring the mainsail and boom-foresail over with a tremendous shock, but that seemed preferable, and with his heart in his mouth he pulled his helm up.
He fancied he cried out in warning, but was never sure of it, though three men came running to seize the mainsheet. The schooner fell off a little, swinging until the boom-foresail came over with a thunderous bang and crash. She rolled down, heaving a wide strip of wet planking out of the sea, and now for a moment or two there were great breadths of canvas swung out on either hand. Then the ponderous main-boom went up high above his head, and he saw three shadowy figures dragged aft as they tried in vain to steady it The big mainsail was bunched up, a vast, portentous shape above him, and he set his lips, and pulled up the helm another spoke as it swung.
He never quite knew what happened after that. There was a horrible crash, and the schooner appeared to be rolling over bodily. The spokes he clung to desperately reft themselves from his grasp, the deck slanted until one could not stand upon it, and something heavy struck him on the head. He dropped, and Dampier flung himself upon the wheel above his senseless body.
There was mad confusion, and a frantic banging of canvas as the schooner came up beam to the wind, with her rent mainsail flogging itself to tatters. Its ponderous boom was broken, and the mainmast-head had gone, but it was not the first time the sealers had grappled with similar difficulties, and Dampier kept his head. He had the boat to think of, and she was somewhere to windward, hidden in the sudden darkness and the turmoil of the quickly rising sea, but the schooner counted most of all! His crew could scarcely hear him through the uproar made by the thundering canvas, and the screaming of the wind, but the orders were given, and from habit and the custom of their calling the men knew what the commands must be.
They hauled a jib down, backed the fore-staysail, and got the boom-foresail sheeted in, but they let the rent mainsail bang, for it could do no more damage than it had already done.
A man sprang up on the rail with a blue light in his hand, and as the weird radiance flared in a long streak to leeward a cry rose from the water. In another few moments a blurred object, half hidden in flying spray, drove down upon the schooner furiously on the top of a sea, and then there was sudden darkness as the man flung down the torch.