She lay so low in the water that I
could only catch an occasional glimpse of a pea-green line of bulwark.
She was a brig, but her mainmast had been snapped short off some 10ft.
above the deck, and no effort seemed to have been made to cut away the
wreckage, which floated, sails and yards, like the broken wing of a
wounded gull upon the water beside her. The foremast was still
standing, but the foretopsail was flying loose, and the headsails were
streaming out in long, white pennons in front of her. Never have I seen
a vessel which appeared to have gone through rougher handling. But we
could not be surprised at that, for there had been times during the last
three days when it was a question whether our own barque would ever see
land again. For thirty-six hours we had kept her nose to it, and if the
_Mary Sinclair_ had not been as good a seaboat as ever left the Clyde,
we could not have gone through. And yet here we were at the end of it
with the loss only of our gig and of part of the starboard bulwark.
It did not astonish us, however, when the smother had cleared away, to
find that others had been less lucky, and that this mutilated brig
staggering about upon a blue sea and under a cloudless sky, had been
left, like a blinded man after a lightning flash, to tell of the terror
which is past.
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