It will only be a mad romp, which will serve right well to blow us along homeward.
But, oh, what a short-sighted creature is vain man, who thinks to read the signs of the skies, the winds and the waves!
The merry whistling of the wind soon gave place to the dismal howl of the blast.
The storm fiend was stalking abroad.
The startled waters now leaped wildly up from their beds, rolled tumultuously onward, whipped into foam and fury by ten thousand lashes of the blast, till, in their mad efforts to escape, they dashed themselves against the very clouds.
The scene was terrible. ’Twas useless to command, for not a throat of steel could have drowned the wild yells of the tempest.
To my horror, I discovered that we had sprung a leak.
The pitch and tar, softened by the heat of the water in Neptune’s Caldron, had bulged from the ship’s joints and allowed the calking to escape.
Like a sheet of card board, our rudder was now torn from its place and whirled away on the crest of a giant billow.
Behold us now at the very mercy of the storm, the plaything of wind and wave, a cockle shell fallen on the battle ground of nature’s waning elements.