“Do you fellows remember this? Somebody found ‘Tex’ on his knees, just after the whole wet ocean spilled into the after hatch. He was not a prayerful man, as a rule, so the spectator stood by to listen to ‘Tex’ at his supplications. He wasn’t praying for his own life, but for the safety of Shelton Farr who had tried hard to make ‘Tex’ follow the course of a virtuous sailor. ‘Oh, Lord, don’t bother about me, but save Fair,’ was the petition. ‘He is entirely too good to die.’”
“I said my prayers earnest and often,” confessed a stalwart gunner’s mate. “On the whole, the crowd behaved pretty darn well. I happened to see two or three boys sort of sticking to each other for comfort, and there were tears in their eyes and maybe one did blubber a little, but they were mere kindergarten infants, sixteen or seventeen years old, and it was a rough deal to hand ’em. A quartermaster came off watch from the bridge and one of these babies stopped him to ask what the skipper and Captain Porter thought about it. ‘They say the ship is going to pull through,’ the quartermaster tells these children. That was all they wanted to hear. They bucked right up and began to grin.”
To have the deck-houses smashing about their ears was enough to make the battered crew unhappy, but the most serious accident was the loss of the heavy round hatch plate which covered the entrance to the store-room or lazarette. Into this opening the sea poured in torrents as it broke and roared aboard, and it might have sunk the ship in a short time. You may be able to fancy how they labored to plug this hole with anything that came handy, while searching parties crawled and groped to find the missing hatch plate. Never was a game of hide-and-seek so desperately energetic. Luckily the metal cover had not gone overboard and before the holds filled with water it was found and screwed down to stay.
TEMPORARY REPAIRS, AFTER THE HURRICANE
WHAT THE FORWARD DECK-HOUSE LOOKED LIKE WHILE RUNNING FOR LISBON
Much water flowed down the stairways and ladders when deck-houses and bulkheads were rent and twisted, and the living quarters were as wet as a duck farm, but such damage was not vital. When the spacious forward house, used as the officers’ dining-room, was crushed for half its length, among the débris flung this way and that was the panel with the carved couplet:
“North, East, South and West,
The Corsair sails and knows no rest.”