Blow the Man Down - A Romance of the Coast

And there Captain Kirby proved a coward at last,

And he played at bo-peep behind the mainmast,

And there they did stand, boys, and shiver and shake,

For fear that that terror their lives it would take.

--Admiral Benbow.

Rain came with the wind, and the weather settled into a sullen, driving,

summer easterly.

Late summer regularly furnishes one of those storms to the Atlantic

coast, a recrudescence of the wintry gales, a trial run of the elements,

a sort of inter-equinoctial testing out so that Eurus may be sure that

his bellows is in working condition.

Such a storm rarely gives warning ahead that it is to be severe. It

seems to be a meteorological prank in order to catch mariners napping.

At midnight the Alden was plunging into creaming seas, her five masts

thrummed by the blast. With five thousand tons of coal weighting her,

she wallowed like a water-soaked log.

Mayo, who was roused from his hideous agony of soul at four bells,

morning, to go on deck for his watch, ventured as near the engine-room

door as he dared, for the rain was soaking his meager garments and

the red glow from within was grateful. The ship's pump was clanking, a

circumstance in no way alarming, because the huge schooners of the coal

trade are racked and wrenched in rough water.

The second mate came to the engine-room, lugging the sounding-rod to the

light in order to examine the smear on its freshly chalked length.

He tossed it out on deck with a grunt of satisfaction. "Nothing to

hurt!" he said to the engineer. "However, I'd rather be inside the capes

in this blow. The old skimmer ain't what she used to be. Johnson, do

you know that this schooner is all of two feet longer when she is loaded

than when she is light?"

"I knew she was hogged, but I didn't know it was as bad as that."

"I put the lead-line on her before she went into the coal-dock this

trip, and I measured her again in the stream yesterday. With a cargo

she just humps right up like a monkey bound for war. That's the way with

these five-masters! They get such a racking they go wrong before the

owners realize."

"They'll never build any more, and I don't suppose they want to spend

much money on the old ones," suggested the engineer.

"Naturally not, when they ain't paying dividends as it is." He stepped

to the weather rail and sniffed. "I reckon the old man will be dropping

the killick before long," he said.