Mayflower (Flor de mayo): A Tale of the Valencian Seashore

by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

"What's up!" the Rector answered, coming to himself.

"The hurricane! It's coming! It's on top of us!"

The mass of black was driving rapidly nearer, and spreading out as it advanced. Overhead a livid flash of lightning seemed to rend the sky in twain, and the thunder crashed, as though a huge piece of canvas had been ripped asunder. And a moment after, the levante itself, that dread easterly gale that never blows in the Gulf of Valencia but with the breath of doom!

As the tornado struck the Mayflower, the vessel went over on her beam ends as though a giant hand had seized her by the keel and were trying to roll her over. The water came up over the lee rail almost to the hatches. The great lateen sail was flat on the sea like a sheet. Then as the vessel righted partly, down again, and again!

All this was the work of an instant. The first tremendous blast of the hurricane had caught the sail full, and about capsized the boat. But tio Batiste and the Rector scrambled along the almost perpendicular deck to the mast, loosened the peak-halyards and let the yard down. Freed from the pressure of the sail, the Mayflower came back to an even keel with the next wave. But Pascualo had had to let go the tiller, and the boat was wallowing in the trough, spinning round and round like a top in the boiling waters. The Rector was crawling back to the helm, with the idea of putting the Mayflower's head to the wind. She would not come round, however. The heavy net now held her fast by the stern, though a moment before it had kept the vessel from foundering by acting as a counter to the violent pulling of the sail.

The skipper looked around for his running mate. She came booming down the wind, dismasted, her sail overboard, her stern to the blow. She had cut loose from the net to keep from going over and was being tossed to leeward by the gale. The waves piled up behind her steep as walls, the tops blowing off every one of them and crashing down on her decks in a deafening roar. But she had done well, all the same. The Mayflower, too, must get free from the seine, and try to make Valencia. A knife was laid to the cable. It snapped at the next pitch of the vessel, which, with the tiller hard down, came round into the wind. The sail had slipped down to the deck, the cross-boom sticking within easy reach of the hand. But that bit of canvas caught the hurricane with tremendous force, bending the mast threateningly and giving considerable headway to the Mayflower, which was taking every comber over forward.

In that critical extremity the Rector became his real self again. "All hands, attention! Obey orders, and be quick about it. We've got to come about!" That was the supreme moment. If one of those water-mountains caught her abeam, it would all be over in a second. Pascualo, upright, his feet glued to the deck, had his eyes on the waves ahead, studying every comber carefully as it swept toward the vessel. He was looking for a smooth one among those driving ridges of water—some pocket in the gale, which would enable him to swing around without turning turtle.

"Now, now, now ... ah ... ah ... ah!"

The Mayflower veered like a shot, sank into a great yawning chasm between two smooth but almost perpendicular walls, and she had her stern to windward just as the next huge breaker came, lifting the whole vessel aft, shoving her nose under forward, and tossing her to leeward as with a mighty punch in the back. Trembling, staggering, she broke free. The crew, catching their breath from the terror of the moment, looked out after the great green mountain as it passed on. They saw it curve in a somber arch of emerald over the other craft, dismantled, that was drifting helpless before the storm. The enormous comber broke, like a mine exploding, with cataracts of foam, and water thrown on high in columns. And when the giant, literally blown to pieces by the gale, had disappeared, to be followed by other billows just as noisy and just as high, the surface of the sea was bare, save for a piece of timber and a barrel with the head gone.

"Requiescat in pace!" tio Batiste murmured crossing himself and lowering his head. Tonet and the two sailors, pale and haggard, answered instinctively: "Amen!"