CHAPTER VI.
WE SPRING A LEAK.
I never remember the like of such a storm as this in these seas, though I have made the passage of the Cape four times and have met some frightful weather off the great Agulhas Bank. Amazing suddenness and violence in the first bursting of a storm you have reason to expect in the inter-tropical regions eastwards of the African continent, but not down here. Captain George Bonny, of the ship Elizabeth Tudor, is the only person that I am acquainted with who has had experience of so sudden a tempest as I have attempted to describe off this African headland; and who is to say that he had not happened upon the neighbourhood of the Death Ship and unwottingly tasted somewhat of the doom of that vessel, whose passage over the limits of her fate the storm the Elizabeth Tudor encountered was designed to furiously arrest?
Be this as it will. I passed from the cabin into as raging and affrighting a scene as was ever witnessed in any ocean. The sky was made unearthly by the flashes of lightning, whose blinding leaps seemed to bring the blackness down like a wall upon the eyes, and if ever an interval lasted long enough to suffer the light to resume its powers, then you found that blackness horrible with the unspeakable shade it took from the plain of boiling froth that stretched like a world covered with snow to the sea-girdle, fading from startling, staring, glaring whiteness around us into a pallid, ghastly dimness, where it sank and melted into the levin-riven inky folds.
I struggled on to the poop and crawled on my hands and knees to the little deck-house, against the foremost end of which I stationed myself; and here I was protected from the rain and wind. Straight as an arrow over the seething smother the Death Ship was running, and her keel slided smooth as a sledge through the feathery surface. The tempest lay like a red-hot iron sheet upon the waters, making it boil and furiously hiss, but stifling all life of billow, ay, of ripple even, out of it. The men had contrived to shorten sail down to the double-reefed fore-course, and under that strip of curved and lifted canvas—a steel-hard belly, black as a cloud against the white water beyond the bows—the ship was driving, three men at the great tiller, and others attending the tackles attached to it. With every blue or green or yellow flash, you saw the rain sweeping along in crystal lines, complexioned by the electric dartings, now like silver wire, now as if the heavens were shedding blood. 'Twas like a sea of water in the wind, and the shrill harsh singing of it above, and the vehement sobbing of it upon the decks, were sounds of themselves amid the universal shrieking and hissing. There was an incessant explosion of thunder, sometimes right overhead, the echoes answering in volleys, and the rattling sharper than the speaking of great guns in mountain scars and hollows. The dazzling play made a fiery tapestry of the scene, and the flying ship came and went in flames, leaping out of the black tempest, then vanishing like a burning shape, eclipsed and revealed by the speeding of sooty vapours.
Amid these fierce swift shinings I would catch sight of the towering form of Vanderdecken standing at the mizzen-rigging, one hand on a shroud or backstay, sloping his figure against the tempest and his beard blown straight out before him. The others being abaft the little house I could not see. The scene now did indeed astonishingly realise the doubtful traditions which depicture the Flying Dutchman perpetually sailing amid storm. Since I had been on board I had viewed her in many conditions of weather; but though her supernatural qualities and characteristics best appeared when they stole out to the faint, waving silver of the moonshine trembling along the oil-like blackness of a midnight calm, yet she could never be more impressive than when, as she was now, fleeing like a witch driven mad by pursuing demons, whose numbers darkened the heavens, the lightning streaming about her like ordnance in Titanic hands fired to bring her to, all her rigging in a scream as she ran, showing in the spaces of dusk betwixt the flashes a great, black, phantasmal shape upon the floor of ringing and frenzied whiteness which the tempest swept along with her, and which broke not therefore in the lightest curl from her stern, nor yielded a hand's-breadth of wake.
She was flying dead into the east, and every minute her keel passed over as many fathoms of sea as would take her hours of plying to recover. I frequently directed my eyes at Vanderdecken, suspecting his wrath, and prepared for a tragical exhibition, whose furiousness should be in awful correspondence with this insanity of sea and sky, but had the life been struck out of him as he stood there his posture could not have been more fixed and unmoving.
It was, however, impossible for such wind as this to blow many minutes without raising a sea. The increased soaring and falling of the black wing of canvas forward against the boiling that rose in a faintness of spume and lustre of its own into the air denoted the gradual hollowing of the water, and then no sooner had the talons of the storm succeeded in scooping shallow troughs out of the levelness of foaming snow than the surge grew magically. Every liquid side was shouldered by the tempest into hills, and the hills swelled into such mountains as you must come down into these seas to behold the like of. Half-an-hour after the first of the hurricane the ship was plunging and laying along amid a very cauldron of infuriate waters, scarcely visible amid the fleecy fog of spray, heights of the sea reaching to her tops, spouting their prodigious lengths alongside, sometimes tumbling in thunder upon her forward decks, sometimes curling in blown snakings ahead of her. Heavy as had been some of the hours of my first six days of storm, the wildest of that time was but as a feather to the weight of this tempest. The lightning ceased, and but for the evening that was now descending, and that had put the shadow of night into the shade of the storm, the heavens must have shown somewhat pale by the thinning of the electrical vapour; but this scarce perceptible clearance did but leave larger room for the wind, and it was now blowing with extraordinary spite. It would be impossible for the ship to run long before the swollen acclivities, whose foaming heads appeared to brush the black ceiling under which they coursed as they arched in the wake of the vessel's narrow stern, and methought they would have to bring her to speedily if she was not to be pooped and swept and smothered.