It was fished out from under the deck planking which had been pried up by the sea, and the seaman who found it eyed the oaken board in a pensive manner as he said:
“Truer words were never spoken. The old boat has sailed every which way in the last two days, including upside down, and you can take it from me that there’s been nothing restful about her, nothing at all.”
Ensign Schanze tried to tell what happened when next he wrote to the folks at home and he succeeded very well, adding details and touches which might otherwise have been overlooked:
Picture to yourself the situation of a ship partly filling with water, at three o’clock in the morning, in a storm of ever-increasing violence, everybody on board wet and cold and exhausted, and then suddenly having a few beer-kegs loaded with dynamite going off just astern of her. It was a five-reel thriller and no mistake. We took the seaman’s forlorn hope of turning in that sea and trying to run before the storm, and we got away with it. The danger in that point of sailing lies in the possibility of having a sea board you from astern, and when that happens the ship usually founders.
When I say that the Corsair was wet, I mean wet, not merely moist. There was not a deck or a room in her, excepting the chart-house, which had at any time less than six inches of water sloshing about in it. At the instant just preceding the big smash that made us turn tail, I had left the bridge to go aft and look the ruins over. The big sea that squashed us, after doing its dirty work, rushed aft just as the ship rose to climb the next oncoming wave. At that moment I had reached the foot of the ladder that leads from the lower bridge to the main deck. As she was rolling hard and had a foot of water all over that deck, I was hanging to the hand-rail that runs along the deck-house. I heard the crash and knew what was stepping in my direction, so I clawed onto the hand-rail with both hands. The water came racing aft and piled up against my back until I was in a depth of at least six feet. My hold on the rail was useless and I was carried down the deck about a hundred feet in a most undignified attitude, to wit—in a posture halfway between sitting and lying on my back. Just as I regained my feet, the first mine went off. You can imagine my thoughts on the subject.
As it was out of the question to sleep in any of the regular living quarters, our men clustered around the engine-room hatch and in the blower-rooms and got what sleep they could in that manner. None of the officers got any sleep for thirty-six hours. At one time, when we were running before the storm, I looked into one of the blower-rooms and saw a man seated in about six inches of water, fast asleep. Tommy, the ship’s cat, was asleep in his lap. A comber boarded us over the side and increased the depth of water so that the next roll of the ship got Tommy very wet. He jumped from a sound slumber in the man’s lap to a wide-awake and frightened posture upon the man’s shoulder. Another sea climbed aboard to disturb poor Tommy again, so he perched himself upon the man’s head and there he stayed for two hours.
I saw Commander Porter get into an argument with a big boarding sea and my next view showed him lying alongside the outer rail in water two feet deep. There is no sense in arguing with a sea like that. One must go where it takes him and be glad when he is jammed into a secure corner.
Several boxes and packages came aboard for me just before this trip, each marked “To be Opened on Christmas,” so I carefully stowed them away. The hurricane flooded my room, of course, and drenched all my precious holiday packages. Despite the big flood, everything came through in fairly good order, barring the Christmas cakes, which turned into a beautiful clinker after they had been dried out on a steam radiator. Now we have to dig them apart with an ice-pick.
The walnuts and Brazil nuts sent by my loving friends did very well in the storm. They went adrift early in the excitement and got caught in the bilge strainer during the time we were pumping the water out of the ship. The chief engineer found them all when he put on his diving suit to see what kept the pumps from working, and I claimed the whole bunch, knowing full well they were mine. Several odd socks also mingled with the bilge strainer, but they were not mine. The captain, Gray, and I had a nut party in my room on Christmas night and very much enjoyed the bilged nuts.
Yeoman Connolly was not likely to forget the night of the storm which caused him to say of his own emotions: