They got a sound flogging, on a very unpoetical part of
their corpuses, and once more the ship subsided into her usual orderly
discipline. The northwester still continued, with a clear blue sky,
without a cloud overhead by day, and a bright cold moon by night. It
blew so hard for the three succeeding days, that we could not carry
more than close-reefed topsails to it, and a reefed foresail. Indeed,
towards six bells in the forenoon watch of the third day, it came
thundering down with such violence, and the sea increased so much, that
we had to hand the foretopsail.

This was by no means an easy job. "Ease her a bit," said the first
lieutenant,--"there--shake the wind out of her sails for a moment,
until the men get the canvas in"----whirl, a poor fellow pitched off
the lee foreyardarm into the sea. "Up with the helm--heave him the
bight of a rope." We kept away, but all was confusion, until an
American midshipman, one of the prisoners on board, hove the bight of a
rope at him. The man got it under his arms, and after hauling him
along for a hundred yards at the least--and one may judge of the
velocity with which he was dragged through the water, by the fact that
it took the united strain of ten powerful men to get him in--he was
brought safely on board, pale and blue, when we found that the running
of the rope had crushed in his broad chest, below his arms, as if it
had been a girl's waist, indenting the very muscles of it and of his
back half an inch deep. He had to be bled before he could breathe, and
it was an hour before the circulation could be restored, by the joint
exertions of the surgeon and gunroom steward, chafing him with spirits
and camphor, after he had been stripped and stowed away between the
blankets in his hammock.

The same afternoon we fell in with a small prize to the squadron in the
_Chesapeake_, a dismantled schooner, manned by a prize crew of a
midshipman and six men. She had a signal of distress, an American
ensign, with the union down, hoisted on the jury-mast, across which
there was rigged a solitary lug-sail. It was blowing so hard that we
had some difficulty in boarding her, when we found she was a Baltimore
pilot-boat-built schooner, of about 70 tons burden, laden with flour,
and bound for Bermuda. But three days before, in a sudden squall, they
had carried away both masts short by the board, and the only spar which
they had been able to rig, was a spare topmast which they had