“Listen!”
The wind had suddenly died away for a moment, although the sea was like an ocean of mountains lumbering over each other; and as I ‘listened’, as Jim the sailor had told me, I heard a musical sound that I instantly recognised. It was that of the negro cook’s banjo, and Sam’s voice, too, most unmistakably, singing the same old air I knew so well:
“Oh, down in Alabama, ’fore I wer sot free.”
The instrument seemed to give out a double twang at this point, as if all the strings were twitched at once, and I noticed that Captain Snaggs, who stood near me, turned as white as a sheet.
“Thunder!” he exclaimed, his eyes almost starting out of his head. “The Lord hev mercy on us! What air thet?”
As if in answer to his question, the same wild, ghostly melody was repeated, the sound seeming to hover in the air and yet to come from underneath the deck under our feet, the tune swelling in intensity as we all listened, so that every man on board must have heard it as well as the captain and myself.
And then, just as the last bar was struck with another resounding twang, a fiercer blast than the first caught the ship on her port quarter, and she heeled over to starboard until her deck was almost upright, while at the same time a terrible wave washed over us fore and aft, sweeping everything movable overboard.
I held on to the weather rigging like ‘grim Death,’ amidst a mass of seething foam, that flowed over the poop as if it were the open sea, with the roar of rushing waters around me and the whistling and shrieking of the wind as it tore through the shrouds and howled and wailed, sweeping onward away to leeward.
The spirit of the storm seemed to have broken loose; its black cloud-wings covering the heavens and fanning up the waves into fury, and then hurling them at the Denver City, which, poor, stricken thing, quailed before the onslaught of the cruel blast and remorseless rolling billows which followed each other in swift succession. These bore her down, and down, and down, until she was almost on her beam-ends, labouring heavily and groaning and creaking in every timber, and looking as if she were going to capsize every instant.
Not a man on board but thought his last hour had come.