It was at eleven this morning that the Plate gave us a fiasco. Last night’s was a real pampero—though a mild one. To-day’s promised to be a far worse one, and then laughed at us as a proper cosmic joke. The wind, during the night, had so eased that by nine in the morning we had all our topgallant-sails set. By ten we were rolling in a dead calm. By eleven the stuff began making up ominously in the south’ard.
The overcast sky closed down. Our lofty trucks seemed to scrape the cloud-zenith. The horizon drew in on us till it seemed scarcely half a mile away. The Elsinore was embayed in a tiny universe of mist and sea. The lightning played. Sky and horizon drew so close that the Elsinore seemed on the verge of being absorbed, sucked in by it, sucked up by it.
Then from zenith to horizon the sky was cracked with forked lightning, and the wet atmosphere turned to a horrid green. The rain, beginning gently, in dead calm, grew into a deluge of enormous streaming drops. It grew darker and darker, a green darkness, and in the cabin, although it was midday, Wada and the steward lighted lamps. The lightning came closer and closer, until the ship was enveloped in it. The green darkness was continually a-tremble with flame, through which broke greater illuminations of forked lightning. These became more violent as the rain lessened, and, so absolutely were we centred in this electrical maelstrom, there was no connecting any chain or flash or fork of lightning with any particular thunder-clap. The atmosphere all about us paled and flamed. Such a crashing and smashing! We looked every moment for the Elsinore to be struck. And never had I seen such colours in lightning. Although from moment to moment we were dazzled by the greater bolts, there persisted always a tremulous, pulsing lesser play of light, sometimes softly blue, at other times a thin purple that quivered on into a thousand shades of lavender.
And there was no wind. No wind came. Nothing happened. The Elsinore, naked-sparred, under only lower-topsails, with spanker and crojack furled, was prepared for anything. Her lower-topsails hung in limp emptiness from the yards, heavy with rain and flapping soggily when she rolled. The cloud mass thinned, the day brightened, the green blackness passed into gray twilight, the lightning eased, the thunder moved along away from us, and there was no wind. In half an hour the sun was shining, the thunder muttered intermittently along the horizon, and the Elsinore still rolled in a hush of air.
“You can’t tell, sir,” Mr. Pike growled to me. “Thirty years ago I was dismasted right here off the Plate in a clap of wind that come on just as that come on.”
It was the changing of the watches, and Mr. Mellaire, who had come on the poop to relieve the mate, stood beside me.
“One of the nastiest pieces of water in the world,” he concurred. “Eighteen years ago the Plate gave it to me—lost half our sticks, twenty hours on our beam-ends, cargo shifted, and foundered. I was two days in the boat before an English tramp picked us up. And none of the other boats ever was picked up.”
“The Elsinore behaved very well last night,” I put in cheerily.
“Oh, hell, that wasn’t nothing,” Mr. Pike grumbled. “Wait till you see a real pampero. It’s a dirty stretch hereabouts, and I, for one, ’ll be glad when we get across It. I’d sooner have a dozen Cape Horn snorters than one of these. How about you, Mr. Mellaire?”
“Same here, sir,” he answered. “Those sou’-westers are honest. You know what to expect. But here you never know. The best of ship-masters can get tripped up off the Plate.”