A terrific blast of wind caught up our ship like a cockle shell and hurled it along through the seething, bubbling, maddened waters at such a fearful rate that every instant it seemed as if she must go to the bottom.
I know not how long we were driven along at this furious speed, for I was half dazed by the roar of the warring elements and blinded by the continuous flashing of the lightning. To my horror, the sound of terrible blows, dull but awful in their energy, now fell upon my ears.
We had struck upon the rocks, and our ship was pounding out her own life beneath my very feet.
Instinctively I called upon my faithful Bulger.
But not the voice of brazen throat and lungs could overcome the din of that tempest.
The intense darkness was now dissipated by showers of meteoric fire, which fell like ten times ten thousand bursting rockets as far as the eye could reach. And then deep rifts broke in the inky mantle of the heavens and showers of hail stones, each as large as a goose egg, rattled with the fury of musketry upon the deck.
At that moment a lurch of the vessel had rolled me under a huge copper kettle or my life would have been beaten out of me.
“Farewell, dear Bulger!” I cried, in a tear-strangled voice, “this terrible discharge from heaven’s frozen artillery will surely end thy life! Farewell, faithful dog; a long farewell!”
Gradually this terrifying shower of huge hail-stones lessened its fury, and strange to say, in doing so the falling stones drew most wonderful music from the great copper kettle which covered me like a huge buckler.
The wind moaned a deep bass and the pounding of the vessel kept time like some gigantic drum.