CHAPTER III.
JERRY CONTINUES HIS STORY.
“We sailed from Valparaiso on the 4th of July,” continued Jerry. “I was in hopes we should stay in port one day more, for the Americans were going to have a jolly celebration of Independence; but we were all ready, and the wind was fair, so we sailed early in the morning. It was the middle of winter, but we had not seen any ice, and it was about as warm as it is here in October. We soon got into colder weather, though. I remember one night, when we were a few days out, the air grew very cold, and we discovered an immense iceberg right in our track. It was all of a hundred and fifty feet high, above water, and I should think it must have been a mile round it. We made out just to clear it, and that was all. There had been a thick fog for a day or two before, and if we had come across the iceberg then, we should have gone pell-mell right into it, and I reckon that would have been the end of us. Perhaps it would have been better for us if we had run into it, for the weather was calm, and we were near the coast, and might have saved ourselves in the boats.
“We made a pretty good run down the coast till we got into the neighborhood of the Horn, and then our troubles began again. We were beating about, off the cape, for about a month, before we got around it; and all the time it was cold, stormy, and rough. It was more wintry, and the days were shorter, than when we first doubled the cape. But we finally got into the Atlantic, and began to steer north. We thought the worst of the voyage was over now, and we did have very good luck until we got into the latitude of the Rio de la Plata. Do you know where that is, Emily?”
Emily readily found the river on her map.
“It’s a stormy region,” resumed Jerry. “They have a terrible kind of tempest, called a pampero, and we got caught in one. The day before it broke upon us, the weather was fine and the sea quite calm. Toward night, red and angry-looking clouds began to gather in the west, and now and then there was a flash of lightning. A slight breeze sprung up, but the air was hot and stifling, and the captain said we should have a tough blow, and set us to taking in sail. The gale commenced about sunset, and such a gale I don’t believe any of us ever saw before. It was perfectly furious, and that doesn’t half tell the story. The thunder rolled awfully, without stopping for a moment. The lightning seemed almost to scorch us, it was so near and so sharp. The wind blew a hurricane, and the sea ran mountains high, and broke over the deck, sweeping off everything in its way.”
“Didn’t it rain, too?” inquired Harriet; “you didn’t say anything about rain.”
“Well, I don’t know whether it rained or not,” replied Jerry. “It was impossible to tell, the spray was dashing over us so, all the time. I suppose it did rain, though, and in torrents, too. After two or three hours, it was impossible to do anything. Two of the men were washed away from the deck and lost; and a fellow couldn’t keep on deck, unless he was lashed to something. The rigging began to blow away like cobwebs, and we lost most of our sails and spars, and finally the head of the rudder and wheel were broken, so that we lost all control over the brig. Pretty soon after this, she canted over on her beam-ends, so that the upper lee-rail—the rail is the top of a vessel’s sides, that rises above the deck—was all of two feet under water.
“All hands were now called into the after-cabin, as that was the safest place. In the forecastle, where the sailors slept, the water was up to the lower berths. We were a sober set of fellows, then, I can assure you. There we were, huddled together, expecting every moment to go down. Nobody said anything, but I guess most of us kept up a terrible thinking. I know I did, for one; I thought of everything I’d ever done. The captain kept watching the barometer, and down, down, down it kept going till after midnight. But at last it stopped falling, and in about an hour after that it began to rise. That was a sign that the worst of the storm was over; and we began to have a little hope, now, that we might escape, after all. Pretty soon the wind changed, and about daybreak the brig righted herself, and we went on deck to see how matters stood.