Unseen, surrounded by darkness, Captain Bradley stood upright against the weather rail, an indomitable figure, facing the storm. The world could crush them—never the sea and the wind. The sea was their home, the wind was their brother. This was the fight that found them armed.
VIII
The storm increased; the air was thick with snow, cold with the breath of Arctic winter. In the middle of the night, the foresail and mainsail blew out of the bolt-ropes. They bent and set the heavy new sails. Soon the spanker went, and was replaced. Captain Bradley was driving the ship without mercy; for the wind was hauling inch by inch into the east, heading them off toward the dangerous lee shore. The Viking stood the strain; her seaworthiness had never been put to a harder test, had never shown itself so handsomely. She had been built in a day when work and honour had gone hand in hand.
The morning dawned on a wild scene. Great waves rushed at the ship, lifted her high in air, broke above her bows, and stopped her progress as if she had run against a wall. It was high time to heave her to. They lowered the mainsail, foresail and jib, and managed somehow to get them furled. The quarter-deck was comparatively dry; they had no difficulty in double-reefing the spanker. In his specifications to the sailmaker, Captain Bradley had insisted on a double row of reef-point for this sail.
To this tiny patch of canvas the Viking rode hove-to for the next forty-eight hours, while the storm howled down on them from the waste of waters. The decks were piled with snow, the ropes and sails were clogged with ice; slowly, mile after mile, the ship drifted against a pitiless lee shore. Captain Bradley constantly kept the deck. There was nothing more to be done—but he had to see the business through.
When the storm broke, they were less than five miles off the Jersey shore at Atlantic City—so close had been their call. The drive through the night at the beginning of the storm had saved them; without the offing made at that time, they would long since have landed in the breakers at Barnegat. The wind jumped into the southwest, the clouds quickly rolled away. They chopped the gaskets, cleared the ice away from the booms and sheets and halyards, and set all sail. The ship paid off, heading up the coast; from the frozen and snowbound shore the sweet land-smell, always a miracle to sailors nearing port in winter, came off to them. Night fell, the air grew crystalline, stars sparkled white and big in the cloudless sky. Minute by minute the easterly swell decreased, knocked down by the offshore wind, as the old barge crept northward. She sunk the lights of Atlantic City, picked up Barnegat, brought it abeam, dropped it on her port quarter. Then Captain Bradley left the deck, for almost the first time in three days.
He could not have kept on his feet any longer. The pain in his chest, that had set in the night before and grown by leaps and bounds during the last day of the storm, had now become so intense, at spasmodic intervals, that he felt unable to conceal his distress. At times it was well-nigh unbearable. His heart seemed trying to burst out of his body. Perhaps rest would ease the pain. At any rate, he wanted to sit down somewhere, alone, in an effort to face and compass this new development. He wanted to give his courage an overhauling.
They had sounded the pumps at sunset, with no result; the splendid old hull had not leaked a drop throughout the storm. But at midnight they found two feet of water in the hold. The mate, frightened half out of his wits, rushed below with the news. Captain Bradley sat like a statue in the big chair, gripping the arms, his face white and drawn. In his excitement, the mate did not notice his extraordinary pallor and rigidity.
"Captain, Captain, she's sprung a leak! There's two feet of water in the hold already!
"Two feet of water? ... Impossible!"