Both the boatswain and Cornish were at the wheel, and, in order to reach them, I had to drop upon my hands and knees and crawl along the deck. When near them I took a grip of the grating and looked around me.
The first thing I saw was that the mainsail had blown away from most of the gaskets, and was thundering in a thousand rags upon the yard. The foresail was split in halves, and the port mizzen-topsail sheet had carried away, and the sail was pealing like endless discharges of musketry.
All the spars were safe still. The lee braces had been let go, the helm put up, and the ship was racing before a hurricane as furious as a tornado, heading south-east, with a wilderness of foam boiling under her bows.
This, then, was the real gale which the thunder-storm had been nearly all night bringing up. The first gale was but a summer breeze compared to it.
The clouds lay like huge fantastic rolls of sheet lead upon the sky; in some quarters of the circle drooping to the water-line in patches and spaces ink-black. No fragment of blue heaven was visible; and yet it was lighter than it had been when I went below.
The ensign, half-masted, roared over my head; the sea was momentarily growing heavier, and, as the ship pitched, she took the water in broad sheets over her forecastle.
The terrible beating of the mizzen-topsail was making the mizzen-mast, from the mastcoat to the royal mast-head, jump like a piece of whalebone. Although deafened, bewildered, and soaked through with the screaming of the gale, the thunder of the torn canvas, and the spray which the wind tore out of the sea and hurtled through the air, I still preserved my senses; and perceiving that the mizzen-topmast would go if the sail were not got rid of, I crawled on my hands and knees to the foot of the mast, and let go the remaining sheet.
With appalling force, and instantaneously, the massive chain was torn through the sheave-hole, and in less time than I could have counted ten, one half the sail had blown into the main-top, and the rest streamed like the ends of whipcord from the yard.
I crawled to the fore-end of the poop to look at the mainmast; that stood steady; but whilst I watched the foremast, the foresail went to pieces, and the leaping and plunging of the heavy blocks upon it made the whole mast quiver so violently that the top-gallant and royal-mast bent to and fro like a bow strung and unstrung quickly.
I waited some moments, debating whether or not to let go the fore-topsail sheets; but reflecting that the full force of the wind was kept away from it by the main-topsail, and that it would certainly blow to pieces if I touched a rope belonging to it, I dropped on my hands and knees again and crawled away aft.