Smart as we had been in making our preparations, we were only barely in time. We had just comfortably completed our work, and I had established myself at the tiller, with Giaccomo at the mainsheet, and François—as the French lad called himself—at the jib-sheet, when there came a terrific flash of lightning, green and baleful, illumining for a single instant the entire scene, and revealing our pertinacious friend, the “Vigilant,” in her old berth astern, with her long tapering yards lowered to the deck, and two stumpy lugs and a pocket-handkerchief of a jib hoisted in their place. Then, as the opaque darkness closed down upon us again, there followed the long deep reverberating roll of the thunder. Another vivid flash quickly succeeded, the thunder this time being much louder and nearer; and then, after a pause of about a minute, there came a perfect blast of lightning, so intensely bright that the whole atmosphere appeared for one brief moment to be literally on fire. Simultaneously with the flash came the awful deafening crackling crash of the thunder, the terrific detonations of which completely stunned and unnerved me while they lasted, so overpowering were they in comparison with anything of the kind which I had before heard. We had scarcely time to recover our hearing before we became conscious of a hissing roaring sound in the atmosphere, momentarily increasing in intensity, and, looking to windward, there appeared in startling relief against the sable background a long line of luminous milky foam rushing down toward us from the horizon. In an incredibly short time the squall was upon us. On it came, like a howling fiend, over the tortured surface of the ocean, causing it to hiss and seethe like the contents of a boiling cauldron, and striking the cutter with such resistless fury that she went over helplessly before it, burying her lee-rail so deeply in the brine that her sails lay prostrate upon the surface of the water.
Each of us instinctively shouted to the others to “hold on,” grasping at the same moment whatever came nearest. I managed somehow to clamber up the deck, as the cutter went over, and, passing out over the low bulwarks, established myself on the upturned side of the little craft. Giaccomo had done the same, while François was standing on the side of the cabin-companion, and clinging convulsively with both hands to the weather-rail.
Crawling up to the side of the Corsican, I placed my mouth to his ear and shouted,—
“Do you think you can cut away the mast?”
“No! no! no!” he earnestly returned. “See, signor, her head is paying-off, and she will come up again in a minute or two; she cannot turn over altogether, her ballast is too well secured for that, and she will not fill even if she remains thus for half an hour yet; no water can get below except through the companion, and the doors fit so well that very little will get down even through them. See there, she is coming up again already.”
It was even so. While the man was speaking, the cutter’s bows had been rapidly paying-off, until we headed, as nearly as we could guess, straight for the shore; when, the pressure of the wind being no longer upon her broadside, the heavy ballast had gradually dragged the yacht into an upright position, and we had, somewhat precipitately, to scramble inboard again.
The moment that the yacht recovered herself, the wind of course caught her sails, and away we at once started to leeward with the speed of a hunted stag. This, however, would never do; the shore was straight ahead, and, at the rate at which we were travelling, twenty minutes would have seen us dashed into matchwood upon the rocks.
Very cautiously, therefore, we brought her upon a wind, and though, when we again got broadside-to, she threatened to go over once more with us, we managed by careful manipulation of the sheets to avoid such a catastrophe; and when we had got her once fairly jammed close upon a wind, some former experience of mine in cutter sailing enabled me to keep her right side uppermost. But it was perilous work for a good hour after the squall struck us. I have occasionally seen in my later days some bold and even reckless match-sailing, but I have never yet seen a craft so desperately overdriven as was, perforce, the little “Mouette” on that memorable night. While the first strength of the gale lasted we were literally under water the whole time, the sea boiling and foaming in over our bows, and sweeping away aft and out over the taffrail in a continuous flood.
I believe we should have sailed faster, and we should assuredly have made much better weather of it, had we been able to get a close reef down in the mainsail; but under the circumstances this was impossible, since, being so short-handed, it would have delayed us long enough to allow the “Vigilant” to get alongside us before we had got through with the work. There was, therefore, nothing for it, but to keep on as we were, the cutter heeling over to an angle of quite 50 deg., so that we were really standing upon the inside of the lee bulwark, with our backs resting against the steeply-inclined deck, up above our knees in the sea, beneath which the little craft’s lee-rail was deeply buried; while, owing to our great speed, we rushed through instead of riding over the sea which was rapidly getting up, so that, when an unusually heavy “comber” met us, we were literally buried for the moment, while it swept over us.
Luckily the first mad fury of the blast lasted only for two or three minutes, or our mast could never have resisted the tremendous strain upon it; as it was, stout though the spar—absurdly disproportionate to the size of the craft, I then considered it—it swayed and bent like a fishing-rod, causing the lee-rigging to blow out quite in bights, while that to windward was strained as taut as harp-strings, the resemblance to which was increased by the weird sound of the wind as it shrieked through it.