Needless to say, that night was one of intense anxiety to me, for the responsibility for the safety of the schooner, and all hands aboard her, rested entirely upon my shoulders. I had already done all that was possible in the way of precaution, while I felt that, despite the magnificent behaviour of the little craft, an exceptionally heavy sea might at any moment catch her at a disadvantage and break aboard her, in which event she would most probably founder out of hand. So great, indeed, was my anxiety that I found it impossible to quit the deck for a moment, although my subordinates were thoroughly steady, trustworthy men, and had far more experience than myself. With the men forward it was totally different. Their minds were thoroughly imbued with the seaman’s maxim: “Let those look out who have the watch,” and those whose watch it was below turned in without the slightest hesitation or qualm of anxiety, trusting implicitly to those in charge of the deck to do everything that might be necessary to ensure the safety of the ship.
To me it seemed as though that terrible night would never end, and even when at length the hour of dawn arrived there was no perceptible amelioration in the conditions. The darkness remained as intense as it had been at midnight, and it was not until eight bells—in this case eight o’clock in the morning—that a feeble glimmer of daylight came filtering through the opaque blackness of the firmament over our heads, dimly revealing the shapeless masses of flying cloud and scud, and permitting us to view our surroundings for a space of about a quarter of a mile. But, contracted as was our view, it was more than sufficient to impress us with a deep and overwhelming sense of the impotence of man in the presence of God’s power as manifested in this appalling demonstration of elemental fury. Now, even more than during the hours of darkness, did we appear to be constantly on the point of being lifted out of the water by the terrific strength of the wind. As often as the schooner was hove up on the summit of a sea, and thus exposed to the full force of the hurricane, we could feel her tremble and perceptibly lift when the wind struck her beneath her upturned bilge. As for the sea, I had never seen anything like it before, nor have I since. When people desire to convey the idea of an exceptionally heavy sea they speak of it as running “mountains high”. In the case of which I am now speaking the expression appeared to be no exaggeration at all, for as wave after wave came sweeping down upon us with uplifted, menacing crest, looking up to that crest from the liquid valley in front of it seemed like gazing up the side of a mountain which was threatening to fall upon us and crush us to atoms. Indeed, the wild upward sweep of the schooner, heeling almost to her beam ends as she was flung aloft upon the breast of the onrushing wave, was an experience terrifying enough to turn a man’s hair grey. Yet, after watching the movements of the schooner for about half an hour, and noting how, time after time, when the little barkie seemed to be trembling on the very brink of destruction, she unfailingly came to in time to avoid being overwhelmed, I grew so inured to the experience that I found myself able to go below and make an excellent breakfast with perfect equanimity.
It was about five bells in the forenoon watch, and it had by that time grown light enough for us to discern objects at a distance of about a mile, when, as the schooner was tossed aloft to the crest of an exceptionally gigantic wave, Simpson—whose watch it was—and I simultaneously caught sight for a moment of something that, indistinctly seen as it was through the dense clouds of flying scud-water, had the appearance of a ship of some kind, directly to windward of us. The next instant we lost sight of it as we sank into the trough between the wave that had just passed beneath us and that which was sweeping down upon us. When we topped this wave soon afterwards, we again caught sight of the object, and this time held her in view long enough to identify her as a large brigantine, hove-to, like ourselves, on the starboard tack, under a storm-staysail. Unlike ourselves, however, she had all her top-hamper aloft, forward, and seemed to be making desperately bad weather of it. The glimpses that we caught of her were of course very brief, and at comparatively long intervals, for it was only when both craft happened to be on the summit of a wave at the same moment that we were able to see her. Yet two facts concerning her gradually became clear to us, the first of which was that she was undoubtedly a slaver—so much her short, stumpy masts and the enormous longitudinal spread of her yards told us,—the second was that she was steadily settling down to leeward at a more rapid rate than ourselves, as was only to be expected from the fact that she was exposing much more top-hamper to the gale than we were. It would not be long, therefore, before she would drive away to leeward of us, probably passing us at no very great distance.
Now, although we were fully convinced that the craft in sight was a slaver, yet we had no thought whatever of attempting to take her just then, for the very simple reason that to do so under the circumstances would be a manifest impossibility. In such an awful sea as was then running we could only work our guns at very infrequent intervals and with the utmost difficulty, while, if we were to hit her, we would do so only by the merest accident. And even if we could contrive by any means to compel her to surrender to us, we could not take possession of her. Our interest in her was therefore no greater than that with which a sailor, caught in a heavy gale, watches the movements of another ship in the same predicament as his own.
Meanwhile, by imperceptible degrees she was steadily driving down toward us, until at length she was so close, and so directly to windward of us, that I almost succeeded in persuading myself that there were moments when I could catch, through the strong salt smell of the gale, a whiff of the characteristic odour of a slaver with a living cargo on board. Nor was I alone in this respect, for both Simpson and the man who was tending the schooner’s helm asserted that they also perceived it. But now a question arose which, for the moment at least, was even more important than whether she had or had not slaves aboard, and that was whether she would pass clear of us or not. She had settled away to leeward until she had approached us to within a couple of hundred yards, and as the two craft alternately came to or fell off it alternately appeared as though the stranger would pass clear of us ahead, or fall off and run foul of us. The moment had arrived when it became necessary for one or the other of us to do something to avert a catastrophe; and as those aboard the brigantine gave no indication of a disposition to bestir themselves I ordered Simpson to have the fore-staysail loosed and set, intending to forge ahead and leave room for the other craft to pass athwart our stern. The fore-staysail sheet was accordingly hauled aft, and four men laid out on the bowsprit to loose the sail. This was soon done, and then, when we next settled into the trough of the sea, and were consequently becalmed for the moment, the halyards were manned and the sail hoisted. The brigantine was by this time so dangerously near to us that, even when we were both sunk in the trough of the sea, it was possible for us to see her mast-heads over the crest of the intervening wave, and I now kept my eye on these with momentarily increasing anxiety, for it appeared to me that we were in perilous proximity to a hideous disaster. And then, as the schooner swept upward on the breast of the oncoming wave, I saw the spars of the brigantine forging slowly ahead as the ship to which they belonged fell off, and my heart stood still and my blood froze with horror, for it became apparent that the two craft were sheering inward toward each other, and that nothing short of a miracle could prevent the brigantine from falling foul of and destroying us. For as her spars rose higher into view I saw that her people, too, had set their fore-staysail, and that the two craft, impelled by their additional spread of sail, were rushing headlong toward each other.
