"Midships the helm!" I shouted, and watched to see how the dhow would behave. A squall struck her, and a wave of great height, leaping over us, surged on board—solid water. The dhow heeled over till we could not stand, and those lashings round the foot of the sail gave way like pistol shots, one after the other; the whole of that huge sail shot out like a balloon, and we gave a tremendous lurch.
Where the bows had been was now a churning mass of water; the lee gunwale and the foot of the lee shrouds were out of sight; I was up to my waist in water; one of the Arabs was washed overboard, and the nakhoda would have been had he not been lashed to that ringbolt.
I struggled to the main sheet, yelling to Dobson to ease it, but it was under water and had jammed; no one could get at it.
I thought that unless the mast carried away we must capsize.
"Cut it, for God's sake, cut it!" I roared, and Dobson hacked away at one of the thick ropes. Whilst he was sawing away—his knife was blunt and would not cut—Jaffa, quick as lightning, pulled out his Mauser pistol, put the muzzle up against the rope, and fired in quick succession.
With a leap and a shriek the rope gave way, the running parts lashed through the sheaves of the "purchase", the sail flew out to leeward, and the dhow began to right herself, shaking the water from her like a dog.
Thank God we had not opened the hatch cover! If we had done so we should have sunk like a stone.
As it was, we were in a bad enough plight. The huge sail was beating madly, one second half-buried in the sea, the next whirled as high as the masthead, and cracking with a noise like thunder, the big block on the standing part of the main sheet attached to the sail being hurled about like a stone on the end of a rope. This block kept on sweeping over the stern, where we were taking shelter, splintering the railings like matchwood, and it was all we could do to dodge it. If it had struck anyone, that would have been the last of him.
Perhaps, for most of the time, the sail, or the lower part, was in the water, and the dhow could not lift it out or herself on an even keel; like a huge bird, with one wing broken, we went rolling and reeling to leeward, waiting for the mast to carry away.
To have attempted to drag the sail on board and smother it would have been sheer lunacy, even if we had twenty men to do it. It would have been as easy to try to stop a wounded elephant tearing up trees round him by lassoing his trunk with twine.