After a momentary hesitation I pulled myself together and determined to hold on.
'Breakers to starboard!' came a shout from the lower bridge, where some of the men were keeping a look-out.
'Hard a-port! Hard over!' Slowly and sluggishly the ship answered to her helm. The seconds grew to minutes. Shielding our faces against wind and water with our hands, we tried to discover where the breakers lay. But all that could be seen was one continuous welter of foam. The waves all round us, high as the side of a house, were breaking with a roar of thunder and shooting their spray high into the air. It was impossible to tell whether it was surf breaking on a reef, or only breaking seas.
Through this hell's brew the little Aud held gallantly on. We were now on an easterly course, and the seas, taking us on the port quarter, swept furiously over the after part of the ship. I tried the effect of increasing speed. It was no use. The only result was that the stern created so much suction that the seas poured over it more violently than before.
One moment we would think we heard breakers to port, the next to starboard, but always it proved to be an illusion. It was the same with the sunken reefs and sandbanks, which we imagined we saw from time to time; they were only dark patches and eddies in the water, due to the plunge of the breaking seas. All this, however, we could see only as if through a veil, for the storm-scourged masses of rain and spindrift blurred the whole surface of the sea.
Again and again, when the seas came charging down and leapt upon her, the little Aud lay over so far to starboard that we thought she would never get up again; and when, on the return roll, she met an oncoming sea, the port end of the bridge was often under water. Suddenly, some two hundred yards to starboard, two birds appeared, low down over the sea. Did that mean rocks?
'Port the helm!'... 'What in the name of Heaven's wrong now?'
'The compass!' shouts the quartermaster, hanging on to the spokes with a desperate grip, to keep the helm hard over. God in heaven! Is everything at once in league against us? In sober fact the compass seemed to have suddenly gone mad. The compass-card spun round like a teetotum, whirling faster and faster. It was only by the direction of the seas that we could tell that the ship's head was now slowly coming round to port. And the run of the seas was for the moment all we had to steer by, for the compass was utterly useless. It pointed one moment North, the next South-West, and absolutely refused to steady.
Meanwhile, from time to time the shouts of the leadsmen aft reached one's ear, but they were almost unintelligible. In the end they made shift to give us the soundings by signing with their fingers. But the depths were too uncertain to give us any help.