Captain West estimates there must be at
least two hundred sail of us. A ship hove-to with preventer tackles
on the rudder-head is unmanageable. Each night we take our chance of
unavoidable and disastrous collision. And at times, glimpsed through
the snow-squalls, we see and curse the ships, east-bound, that drive
past us with the West Wind and the West Wind Drift at their backs.
And so wild is the mind of man that Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire still
aver that on occasion they have known gales to blow ships from east
to west around the Horn. It surely has been a year since we of the
Elsinore emerged from under the lee of Tierra Del Fuego into the
snorting south-west gales. A century, at least, has elapsed since we
sailed from Baltimore.
And I don't give a snap of my fingers for all the wrath and fury of
this dim-gray sea at the tip of the earth. I have told Margaret that
I love her. The tale was told in the shelter of the weather cloth,
where we clung together in the second dog-watch last evening. And it
was told again, and by both of us, in the bright-lighted chart-room
after the watches had been changed at eight bells.
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