Well, at three o'clock it was blowing downright hard, though the weather was fine, the heavens mottled, the clouds being compacted and sailing higher, stormy in complexion and moving slowly; the sea had grown hollow and was most gloriously violet in colour, with plumes of snow, which curled to the gale on the head of each liquid courser; the sun was over our fore-topgallant yard-arm and showered down his glory so as to form a golden weltering road for us to steer beside. The ship behind catched his light and looked to be chasing us on wings of yellow silk. But never since her keel had been laid had the Saracen been so driven. The waters boiled up to the blackfaced turbaned figure under the bowsprit, and from aft I could sometimes observe the glassy curve of the bow sea, arching away for fathoms forward, showing plain through the headrails. A couple of hands hung grinding upon the wheel with set teeth, and the sinews in their naked arms stood out like cords; others were at the relieving-tackles; and through it we pelted, raising about us a bubbled, spuming and hissing surface that might have answered to the passage of a whirlwind, repeatedly firing at the Dutch man-of-war when the heave of the surge gave us the chance, and noticing the constant flash in his bows and the white smother that blew along with him, though the balls of neither appeared to touch the other of us.
Yet, that we should have been ultimately overhauled and brought to a stand I fully believe but for a providential disaster. For no matter how dark the dusk may have drawn around at sundown, the Dutchman was too close to us to miss the loom of the great press of canvas we should be forced to carry: at least, so I hold; and then, again, there was the consideration of the wind failing us with the coming of the stars, for we were still in the gentle parallels. But let all have been as it might, I had just noted the lightning-like wink of one of the enemy's fore-chasers, when to my exceeding amazement, ere the ball of smoke could be shredded into lengths by the gale, I observed the whole fabric of the Dutchman's towering foremast, with the great course, swelling topsail, topgallant-sail and royal, and the fore-topmast staysail and jibs melt away as an icicle approached by flame; and in a breath, it seemed, the huge ship swung round, pitching and foaming after the manner of a harpooned whale, with her broadside to us, exhibiting the whole fore-part of her most grievously and astonishingly wrecked.
A mighty cheer went up from our decks at the sight, and there was a deal of clapping of hands and laughter. Captain Skevington seized the telescope, and talked as he worked away with it.
"A rotten foremast, by the thunder of Heaven!" he cried, using his favourite adjuration; "it could be nothing else. No shot our guns throw could work such havoc. By the height that's left standing the spar has fetched away close under the top. And the mess! the mess!"
With the naked eye one could see that. The foremast had broken in twain; its fall had snapped off the jibbooms to the bowsprit cap, and I do not doubt a nearer view would have shown us the bowsprit itself severely wrenched. I could not imagine the like of that picture of confusion—her studding-sails, having been set on both sides, drowned all her forward part in canvas, a goodly portion of which had been torn into rags by the fall; immense stretches of sail lay in the water, sinking and rising with the rolling of the ship, and dragging her head to the wind; her main topmast studding-sails, and all the canvas on that mast and the mizzen—the yards lying square—were shaking furiously, owing to the posture in which she had fallen; every moment this terrible slatting threatened her other spars; and it needed not a sailor's imagination to conceive how fearfully all that thunderous commotion aloft must heighten the distracting tumult on deck, the passionate volleys of commands, the hollow shocks of seas smiting the inert hull, the shouting of the seamen, and, as we might be sure, the cries and groans of the many upon whom that soaring fabric of yards, sails, and rigging had fallen with the suddenness of an electric bolt from the clouds.
For a whole hour after this we touched not a rope, leaving our ship to rush from the Dutchman straight as an arrow from a bow. But, Lord!—the storming aloft!—the fierce straining of our canvas till tacks and guys, sheets and braces rang out upon the wind like the clanking of bells, to a strain upon them tauter than that of harp-strings; the boiling noises of the seas all about our bow and under our counter, where the great bodies of foam roared away into our wake, as the white torrent raves along its bed from the foot of a high cataract! There was an excitement in this speed and triumph of escape from what must have proved a heavy and inglorious disaster to us all which put fire into the blood, and never could I have imagined how sentient a ship is, how participant of what stirs the minds of those she carries, until I marked the magnificent eagerness of our vessel's flight—her headlong domination of the large billows which underran her, and the marble-hard distention of her sails, reminding you of the tense cheeks of one who holds his breath in a run for his life.
Distance and the sinking of the sun, and the shadows which throng sharply upon his heels in these climes, left the horizon in course bare to our most searching gaze. We then shortened sail, and under easy canvas, we put our helm a-lee, and stood northwards on a bowline until midnight, when we rounded in upon our weather-braces and steered easterly, Captain Skevington suspecting that the Dutchman would make all haste to refit and head south under some jury contrivance, in the expectation that as we were bound that way when he fell in with us so we should haul to our course afresh when we lost sight of him. Yet in the end we saw him no more, and what ship he was I never contrived to learn; but certainly it was an extraordinary escape, though whether due to our shot, or to his foremast being rotten, or to its having been sprung and badly fished, or to some earlier wound during an engagement, must be left to conjecture.