My Danish Sweetheart: A Novel. Volume 1 of 3

by William Clark Russell

'Oh! a bad lot, a wicked lot!' he cried. 'They were not Danes,' he added. 'Danish sailors would not have acted as those men did.'

'Are you a Dane?' I asked.

'My father is,' he answered. 'I am as much English as Danish. My mother was an Englishwoman.'

'I should have believed you wholly English,' said I. 'Are you a sailor?'

He answered, 'No.' I was about to speak, when he exclaimed: 'I am a girl!'

Secretly for some time I had supposed this, and yet I was hardly less astonished than had I been without previous suspicion.

'A girl!' I cried, sending my sight groping over her figure; but to no purpose. She was absolutely indistinguishable saving her arms, which were dimly touched by the haze of the binnacle-light as they lay upon the spokes of the wheel.

'It is my whim to dress as a boy on board ship!' she exclaimed, with no stammer of embarrassment that I could catch in her clear delivery, that penetrated to my ear without loss of a syllable through the heavy storming of the gale, flashing with the fury of a whirlwind off the brows of the seas which rushed at us, as the barque's counter soared into the whole weight and eye of the tempest.

So far had we conversed; but at this moment a great surge took the barque and swung her up in so long, so dizzy, and sickening an upheaval, followed by so wild a fall into the frothing hollow at its base, that speech was silenced in me, and I could think of nothing else but the mountainous billows now running. Indeed, as my companion had predicted, the farther we drew out from the land the heavier we found the sea. The play of the ocean, indeed, out here, was rendered fierce beyond words by the dual character of the tempest; for the seas which had been set racing out of the west had not yet been conquered by the violence of the new gale and by the hurl of the liquid hills out of the east; and the barque was now labouring in the same sort of pyramidal sea as had run in the bay, saving that here the whole power of the great Atlantic was in each billow, and the fight between the contending waters was as a combat of mighty giants.

The decks were full of water; at frequent intervals the brow of the sea rushing past us, swift as was our own speed upon its careering back, would arch over the rail and tumble aboard in a heavy fall of water, and the smoke of it would rise from the planks as though the barque were on fire, and make the blackness forward of the mainmast hoary. I sought in vain for the least break in the dark ceiling of the sky. Will the vessel be able to keep afloat? I was now all the time asking myself. Is it possible for any structure put together by human hands to outlive such a night of fury as this? As I have said, I was no sailor, yet my 'longshore training gave me very readily to know that the best, if not the only, chance for our lives was to get the barque hove-to, and leave her to breast the seas and live the weather out as she could with her helm lashed, and, perhaps some bit of tarpaulin in the weather-rigging, to keep her head up. But this, that was to be easily wished, was inexpressibly perilous to attempt or achieve, for, in bringing the vessel to, it was as likely as not we should founder out of hand. A single sea might be enough to do our business; and, failing that, there was the almost certain prospect of the decks being swept, of every erection from the taffrail to the bows being carried away, ourselves included; of a score of leaks being started by a single blow, and, even if the girl and I managed to hold on, of the barque foundering under our feet.