The schooner lay on her side for a few minutes, as if she would never right again: at last, like an impatient steed, whose course has been arrested by some temporary barrier, after sustaining the violence of the gust, she sprang forth into the face of the wind, and seemed like a thing of passion and pride, roused to brave the power of the overwhelming hurricane.
With the scanty storm sails, which the foresight of Appadocca had had bent, she shot through the mountain billows with her usual speed, cleaving them through, and throwing the sprays mast high.
On—on, she went, as if actuated by the bold spirit of the man who commanded her, she sought to penetrate the very bosom of the hurricane.
Her slender masts bent like willows to and fro, as she mounted the mountains of rushing water, that struck and shook her to the very keel.
By the flashes of glaring and frequent lightning, the fierce sailors could now and then be seen standing stolidly at their respective stations, their red caps drawn far down over their puckered brows, and their black beards dripping with spray and rain.
A rope fastened each man to his post, and unmoved, like carved wood, they stood in the terrors of the howling winds: the bonds of discipline were still on them.
As for Appadocca himself far from evincing any anxiety, he seemed to take pleasure in the terrible convulsions of nature. With the dark heavens above him re-echoing far and wide with the rolls of the loud and never-ceasing thunder; with the balancing ocean below him, and the terrifying howls of the devastating hurricane around him, he was the same unimpassioned, collected, intrepid man, as when the schooner rode on the calmest sea, under the most smiling sky. He seemed to take pleasure—if his nature could receive pleasure—in the awe-striking scene. Ever and anon he took up his red cap, and pressed his hand over his brow in apparent delight.
The schooner still laboured in the seas that now began to grow higher and higher, and heavier and heavier. The lightnings came and played about her masts, like the spirits of the tempest, that seemed marking her as their victim; but the fluid glided down the wires, and lost itself in the foaming deep.
Still on—on—on she went. A terrible gust.... She was laid on her beams again. The wind was gone: the air was calm and close: not a breath;—her narrow sails hung to her masts, and she was tossed about without wind enough to feel her helm.
At this frightful interval the echoes of rending broadsides were heard towards the north. They were the reports of the man-of-war’s distress guns.