Volume I Part 4 (1/2)
At the moment of the boat smiting the first of the breakers I grasped the tiller-ropes, and on the men letting go the haul-off line I headed the craft away on the port tack, my intention being to 'reach' down in the direction of Hurricane Point, so as to be able to fetch the barque on a second board.
One had hardly the wits to notice the scene at the first going off, so headlong was the tumble upon the beach, so clamorous the rush of the tempest, and so frightfully wild the leapings and launchings of the boat amid the heavily broken surface of froth. But now she had the weight of the gale in the close-reefed lug that had been shown to it, and this steadied her; and high as the sea ran, yet as the water deepened the surge grew regular, and I was able to settle down to my job of handling the boat, the worst being over, at least so far as our outward excursion went.
I glanced sh.o.r.ewards and observed the blaze of a portfire, held out by a man near the boat-house to serve as a signal to the barque that help was going to her. The fire was blue, the blaze of it was brilliant, and it lighted up a wide area of the foresh.o.r.e, throwing out the figures of the crowd who watched us, and the outline of the boat-house, and flinging a ghastly tint upon every tall upheaval of surf. The radiance lay in a sort of circle upon the ebony of the night, with what I have named showing in it, as though it was a picture cast by a magic-lantern upon a black curtain. You could see nothing of the lights of the town for it.
On either hand of this luminous frame the houses went blending into the land, and each way all was sheer ink.
Shortly after this signal of portfire they sent up a rocket from the barque. It was a crimson ball, and it broke like a flash of lighting under the ragged rush of the sky, and then outleaped afresh the flames of a flare, or, as you might call it, a bonfire, from the deck of the vessel--a burning tar-barrel, perhaps; and the light of it disclosed the vision of the s.h.i.+p plunging awfully, again and again veiled by storms of crystal which the fathom-high flames of the flare flashed into prisms.
One of our men roared out with an oath: 'She'll have taken the Twins afore we get to her!' and another bellowed: 'Why did they wait to drag a mile afore they signalled?' But no more was said just then.
Indeed, a man needed to exert the whole strength of his lungs to make himself heard. The edge of the wind seemed to clip the loudest shout as it left the lips, as you would sever a rope with a knife.
Our boat was small for a craft of her character, but a n.o.ble, brave, nimble fabric, as had been again and again proved; and every man of us, allowing that good usage was given her, had such confidence in the _Janet_, that we would not have exchanged her for the largest, handsomest, and best-tested boat on the coast of the United Kingdom. You would have understood her merits had you been with us on this night. I was at the yoke-lines; Pentreath, my second in command, sat with his foot against the side, gripping the foresheet, ready to let go in an instant; the mizzen had been hoisted, and the rest of the men, crouching down upon the thwarts, sat staring ahead, with iron countenances, with never so much as a stoop among them to the hardest wash of the surge that might sweep with a wild hissing shriek athwart their sea-helmets and half fill the boat as it came bursting in smoke over the weather-bow, till, for the s.p.a.ce of a wink or two, the black gale was as white as a snowstorm overhead.
As we 'reached' out the sea grew weightier. Never before had I known a greater sea in that bay. The ridges seemed to stand up to twice the height of our masts; every peak boiled, and as we rose to the summit of it, the boat was smothered in the foam of her own churning, and in the headlong, giddy, dazzling rush into which she soared, with the whole weight of the gale in her fragment of lug bowing her over and sending her, as you might have believed, gunwale under down the long, indigo slant of the under-running billow.
We held on, all as mute as death in the boat. From time to time as we rose to the head of a sea I would take a look in the direction of the barque, and catch a glimpse of the windy spark of her flare, or of the meteoric sailing of a rocket over her mastheads. There should have been a moon, but the planet was without power to strike the faintest illumination into the heaps and rags of vapours which were pouring up like smoke over the edge of the raging Atlantic horizon. The picture of the parlour I had just left would sometimes arise before me: I figured my mother peering out at the black and throbbing scene of bay; I imagined good Mr. Trembath at her side, uttering such words of comfort and of hope as occurred to him; but such fancies as these seemed to be beaten away by the breath of the hurricane, as rapidly as they were formed. Should we be in time? If the vessel's cables parted she was doomed. Nay; if she should continue to drag another quarter of an hour, she would be on to the Twins, and go to pieces as a child's house of bricks falls to the touch of a hand!
'Ready about!' I roared.
The helm was put down, the foresheet eased off, and round came the boat n.o.bly on the very pinnacle of a surge, pausing a moment as she was there poised, and then plunging into the hollow to rise again with her foresail full, and heading some points to windward of the vessel we were now steering for.
Through it we stormed, sea after sea bursting from the lifeboat's bow in pallid clouds which the wind sent whirling in shrieks--so articulate was the sound of the slinging spray--into the blackness landwards. Here and there a tiny spark of lamp flickering in the thick of the gloom told us the situation of Tintrenale; but there was nothing more to be seen that way; the land and the sky above it met in a deep, impenetrable dye, towards which, to leeward of us, the tall seas went flas.h.i.+ng in long yearning coils, throbbing into mere pallidness when a cable's length distant.
They had kindled another flare aboard the barque, or else had plied the old one with fresh fuel: she was visible by the light of the flames, the white of her furled canvas coming and going to the fluctuating fires; and I marked, with a heart that sank in me, the dreadful manner of her labouring. She was pitching bows under, and rolling too, and by the s.h.i.+ning of the signal-fire upon her deck offered a most wonderful sight, rendered terrible also by a view that we could now get of a crowd of men hanging in a lump in her starboard fore-rigging.
The second c.o.xswain flashed a portfire that they might know the lifeboat was at hand, and we went plunging and sweeping down to a point some little distance ahead of the barque, the crowd of us irradiated by the stream of emerald-green flame.
'All ready with the anchor, lads?' I shouted.
'All ready, sir!' was the answer.
'Down foresail!' and as I gave this order I put the helm down and brought the boathead to wind about thirty fathoms ahead of the s.h.i.+p.
'Let go the anchor!'
'Unstep the foremast!' bawled the second c.o.xswain, and, while this was doing, he and another swiftly lifted the mizzenmast out of its bearings and laid it along.
'Veer away cable handsomely!' I shouted; and pitching and foaming, now dropping into a hollow that seemed fifty feet deep, now appearing to scale a surge that lifted the boat's bow almost dead on end over her stern--all in a fas.h.i.+on to make the brain of the stoutest and most experienced among us reel again--we dropped alongside.
In what followed there was so much confusion, so much uproar, such distraction of shouts in foreign and unintelligible accents, such a terrible was.h.i.+ng of seas, such bewilderment born of the darkness, of the complicated demands upon the attention through need of keeping the boat clear of the huge chopping bows of the barque, through bawling to the men in the rigging and receiving answers which we could not understand, that this pa.s.sage of my singular adventure could scarcely be less vague to me in memory if, instead of having been an actor in it, I had read it in a book.
There were six or seven men, as well as I could make out, cl.u.s.tered in the fore-rigging. I believed I could see others in the mizzen-shrouds.
This being my notion, my consuming anxiety was to drop the boat down on the quarter as quickly as possible, for it was not only that the Twins were within a cable's range astern, with the fury of the foam there making a kind of s.h.i.+ning upon the water that might have pa.s.sed for moonlight: such was the volume and height of the sea roaring betwixt the labouring s.h.i.+p and our boat, that at every toss of the little fabric, at every ponderous lean down of the great groaning black hull towering over us, we stood to be staved.
The fellows in the fore-ringing seemed to be stupefied. We all of us yelled, 'Jump, jump! Watch as she rises, and jump for G.o.d's sake!'
meanwhile keeping a turn of the cable so as to hold the boat abreast of them. It seemed an eternity before they understood, and yet a minute had not pa.s.sed since we dropped down, when a cry broke from them, and first one jumped, and then another, and then the rest of them sprang, and there they were lying in a huddle in the bottom of the boat, one or two of them groaning dreadfully, as though from broken limbs, or worse injuries still, all of them motionless as they lay when they jumped, like folk nearly dead of terror and cold and pain.
'Veer out now, my lads! veer out!' I cried; 'handsomely, that we may get smartly under the mizzen-shrouds.'