A cannon that breaks its moorings suddenly becomes some strange, supernatural beast.  It is a machine transformed into a monster.  That short mass on wheels moves like a billiard-ball, rolls with the rolling of the ship, plunges with the pitching goes, comes, stops, seems to meditate, starts on its course again, shoots like an arrow from one end of the vessel to the other, whirls around, slips away, dodges, rears, bangs, crashes, kills, exterminates.  It is a battering ram capriciously assaulting a wall.  Add to this the fact that the ram is of metal, the wall of wood.

It is matter set free; one might say, this eternal slave was avenging itself; it seems as if the total depravity concealed in what we call inanimate things has escaped, and burst forth all of a sudden; it appears to lose patience, and to take a strange mysterious revenge; nothing more relentless than this wrath of the inanimate.  This enraged lump leaps like a panther, it has the clumsiness of an elephant, the nimbleness of a mouse, the obstinacy of an ox, the uncertainty of the billows, the zigzag of the lightning, the deafness of the grave.  It weighs ten thousand pounds, and it rebounds like a child’s ball.  It spins and then abruptly darts off at right angles.

And what is to be done?  How put an end to it?  A tempest ceases, a cyclone passes over, a wind dies down, a broken mast can be replaced, a leak can be stopped, a fire extinguished, but what will become of this enormous brute of bronze.  How can it be captured?  You can reason with a bulldog, astonish a bull, fascinate a boa, frighten a tiger, tame a lion; but you have no resource against this monster, a loose cannon.  You can not kill it, it is dead; and at the same time it lives.  It lives with a sinister life which comes to it from the infinite.  The deck beneath it gives it full swing.  It is moved by the ship, which is moved by the sea, which is moved by the wind.  This destroyer is a toy.  The ship, the waves, the winds, all play with it, hence its frightful animation.  What is to be done with this apparatus?  How fetter this stupendous engine of destruction?  How anticipate its comings and goings, its returns, its stops, its shocks?  Any one of its blows on the side of the ship may stave it in.  How foretell its frightful meanderings?  It is dealing with a projectile, which alters its mind, which seems to have ideas, and changes its direction every instant.  How check the course of what must be avoided?  The horrible cannon struggles, advances, backs, strikes right, strikes left, retreats, passes by, disconcerts expectation, grinds up obstacles, crushes men like flies.  All the terror of the situation is in the fluctuations of the flooring.  How fight an inclined plane subject to caprices?  The ship has, so to speak, in its belly, an imprisoned thunderstorm, striving to escape; something like a thunderbolt rumbling above an earthquake.