“Mind,” said the Doctor to me, “the moment of the catastrophe is not far off.”
The sailors went towards the bows, whilst we fastened ourselves to the second mast, and looked through the spray, which fell in showers over us with each wave. Suddenly there was another swoop more violent than the first, and the sea poured through the barricading by the opened breach, tore off an enormous sheet of cast-iron which covered the bit of the bows, broke away the massive top of the hatchway leading to the crew’s berths, and lashing against the starboard barricadings, swept them off like the sheets of a sail.
The men were knocked down; one of them, an officer, half-drowned, shook his red whiskers, and picked himself up; then seeing one of the sailors lying unconscious across an anchor, he hurried towards him, lifted him on his shoulders and carried him away. At this moment the rest of the crew escaped through the broken hatchway. There were three feet of water in the tween-decks, new spars covered the sea, and amongst other things several thousand of the dolls, which my countryman had thought to acclimatize in America; these little bodies, torn from their cases by the sea, danced on the summits of the waves, and under less serious circumstances the sight would have been truly ludicrous. In the meantime the inundation was gaining on us, large bodies of water were pouring in through the opened gaps, and according to the engineer, the “Great Eastern” shipped more than two thousand tons of water, enough to float a frigate of the largest size.
ONE OF THE SAILORS LYING UNCONSCIOUS.
“Well!” exclaimed the Doctor, whose hat had been blown off in the hurricane, “to keep in this position is impossible; it is fool-hardy to hold on any longer; we ought to take flight, the steam-ship going with her battered stem ahead, is like a man swimming between two currents, with his mouth open.”
This Captain Anderson understood at last, for I saw him run to the little wheel on the bridge which commanded the movement of the rudder, the steam immediately rushed into the cylinders at the stern, and the giant turning like a canoe made head towards the north, and fled before the storm.
At this moment, the Captain, generally so calm and self-possessed, cried angrily,—
“My ship is disgraced.”