ching tempest; and soon after the sun went down on the seventh
night a hurricane suddenly swept the surface of the Mediterranean. The
ship bent to the fury of the gust--her very yards were deep in the
water. But when the rage of that dreadful squall subsided, the gallant
bark righted again, and bounded triumphantly over the foaming waves.

A night profoundly dark set in; but the white crests of the billows were
visible through that dense obscurity: while the tempest rapidly
increased in violence, and all the dread voices of the storm, the
thunder in the heavens, the roaring of the sea, and the gushing sounds
of the gale, proclaimed the fierceness of the elemental war. The wind
blew not with that steadiness which the skill of the sailor and the
capacity of the noble ship were competent to meet, but in long and
frequent gusts of intermittent fury. Now rose the gallant bark on the
waves, as if towering toward the starless sky, in the utter blackness of
which the masts were lost; then it sank down into the abyss, the foam of
the boiling billows glistening far above, on all sides, amidst the
obscurity. What strange and appalling noises are heard on board a ship
laboring in a storm--the cracking of timber, the creaking of elastic
planks, the rattling of the cordage, the flapping of fragments of sails,
the failing of spars, the rolling of casks got loose, and at times a
tremendous crash throughout the vessel, as if the whole framework were
giving way and the very sides collapsing!

And amidst those various noises and the dread sounds of the storm, the
voices of the sailors were heard--not in prayer nor subdued by
terror--but echoing the orders issued by the captain, who did not
despair of guiding--nay, fighting, as it were, the ship through the
tumultuous billows and against the terrific blast.

Again a tremendous hurricane swept over the deep: it passed, but not a
spar remained to the dismantled bark. The tapering masts, the long
graceful yards were gone, the cordage having snapped at every point
where its support was needed--snapped by the fury of the tempest, as if
wantonly cut by a sharp knife. The boats--the crew's last alternative of
hope--had likewise disappeared. The ship was now completely at the mercy
of the wild raging of the winds and the fury of the troubled waters; it
no longer obeyed its helm, and there were twenty men separated, all save
_one_, from death only by a few planks and a few nails! The sea now
brok