her
little nautical arrangements made which it would require a seaman to
understand as well as to describe in detail.

As the evening advanced the gale increased in violence tenfold, and
darkness settled down like an impenetrable pall over land and sea. The
roar of breakers on the Goodwin Sands became so loud that it was
sometimes heard on board the Gull-light above the howling of the
tempest. The sea rose so much and ran so violently among the
conflicting currents caused by wind, tide, and sand-banks, that the Gull
plunged, swooped, and tore at her cable so that the holding of it might
have appeared to a landsman little short of miraculous. Hissing and
seething at the opposition she offered, the larger waves burst over her
bows, and swept the deck from stem to stern; but her ample scuppers
discharged it quickly, and up she rose again, dripping from the flood,
to face and fight and foil each succeeding billow.

High on the mast, swaying wildly to and fro, yet always hanging
perpendicular by reason of a simple mechanism, the lantern threw out its
bright beams, involving the vessel and the foam-clad boiling sea in a
circle of light which ended in darkness profound, forming, as it were, a
bright but ghostly chamber shut in with walls of ebony, and revealing,
in all its appalling reality, the fury of the sea. What horrors lay
concealed in the darkness beyond no one could certainly know; but the
watch on board the Gull could form from past experience a pretty good
conception of them, as they cowered under the lee of the bulwarks and
looked anxiously out to windward.

Anxiously! Ay, there was cause for anxiety that night. The risk of
parting from their cable was something, though not very great; but the
risk of being run down by passing or driving ships during intervals of
fog was much greater, and the necessity of looking out for signals of
distress was urgent.

It was a night of warfare, and the battle had begun early. Mr Welton's
record of the earlier part of that day in the log ran thus:--

"At 4 a.m. calm, with misty rain; at 8, wind south-east, light breeze.
At noon, west-south-west, fresh breeze and rain. At 4 p.m., wind
south-west, fresh gale and heavy rain. A large fleet anchored in the
Downs. A schooner was seen to anchor in a bad place about this time.
At 7, wind still increasing. The watch observed several vessels part
from their 7 anchors and proceed to Margate Roads. At 7:30 the wind
flew into