The Captain took the helm then, and ordered us to stand by and be ready to tend the sails.
“Look out, too, for the swinging of that boom,” he said, “and make Ugly get out of the way and lie down somewhere.”
Ugly, hearing that speech, did not wait for further commands, but stowed himself away at the foot of the mast.
Now the wind came in heavier puffs, and then in squalls from the east.
“I hope it will settle there,” spoke out the Captain. “It is coming heavier, but I hope steady.”
He kept his eyes on all parts of the now lowering sky, and presently added—
“Take two reefs in the mainsail and shift the jib! Get the storm-jib up. Now hook on. Run it out. Hoist away.”
That was done, no easy matter for novices in a heavy sea, and we flew away before the increasing gale. Fortunately the night was not very dark, there being a quarter moon to throw its light through the rifts of clouds.
How fast the sea got up! The wind grew heavier every moment. The mast of our little cutter creaked with each plunge, and the plunges were hard and quick. The scene was truly alarming, and we felt the danger of our situation. To be sure, we were comparatively safe if the gale should grow no worse; but it was increasing every moment in a manner that threatened in another hour to be too much for us. There was danger, too, that something might be carried away, or that, in the frothy sea and uncertain light, we might strike some of the sunken rocks that now and then stood off from shore like sentries. But the Youth leapt furiously onward from one mad wave to another, our good Captain steering with a strong hand.
The black, broken clouds rolled close to the sea, which seemed striving madly to swallow them; but on they flew with the screams of the wind. The thin moonlight, streaming unsteadily through the troops of clouds across the riven waves, had a ghastly effect—sometimes obscuring, sometimes exaggerating the terrors surrounding us. The shore, a mile to leeward, was to our sight only a bristling, indefinite terror; for there, where loomed the land we longed for, was the greatest peril—the line of fierce breakers that shouted their threats in terrible chorus.