All might still have gone well had the northwester continued as it was.  But about noon this tempest, which already seemed as furious as it could possibly be, suddenly increased to an absolute hurricane, the wind fairly shoving the brig sidelong over the water.  Bang went the spanker, and then bang the spencer, both sails at once flying out to leeward in streamers, and flapping to tatters before the men could spring on the booms to secure them.  The destruction was almost as instant and complete as if it had been effected by the broadside of a seventy-four fired at short range.

“Bend on the new spencer,” shouted the captain.  “Out with it and up with it before she rolls the sticks out of her.”

But the rolling commenced instantly, giving the sailors no time for their work.  No longer steadied by the wind, the vessel was entirely at the mercy of the sea, and went twice on her beam ends for every billow, first to lee and then to windward.  Presently a great, white, hissing comber rose above her larboard bulwark, hung there for a moment as if gloating on its prey, and fell with the force of an avalanche, shaking every spar and timber into an ague, deluging the main deck breast high, and swashing knee-deep over the quarter-deck.  The galley, with the cook in it, was torn from its lashings and slung overboard as if it had been a hencoop.  The companion doors were stove in as if by a battering ram, and the cabin was flooded in an instant with two feet of water, slopping and lapping among the baggage, and stealing under the doors of the staterooms.  The sailors in the waist only saved themselves by rushing into the rigging during the moment in which the breaker hung suspended.

Nothing could be done; the vessel must lift herself from this state of submergence; and so she did, slowly and tremulously, like a sick man rising from his bed.  But while the ocean within was still running out of her scuppers, the ocean without assaulted her anew.  Successive billows rolled under her, careening her dead weight this way and that, and keeping her constantly wallowing.  No rigging could bear such jerking long, and presently the dreaded catastrophe came.

The larboard stays of the foremast snapped first; then the shrouds on the same side doubled in a great bight and parted; next the mast, with a loud, shrieking crash, splintered and went by the board.  It fell slowly and with an air of dignified, solemn resignation, like Caesar under the daggers of the conspirators.  The cross stays flew apart like cobwebs, but the lee shrouds unfortunately held good; and scarcely was the stick overboard before there was an ominous thumping at the sides, the drum-beat of death.  It was like guns turned on their own columns; like Pyrrhus’s elephants breaking the phalanx of Pyrrhus.

“Axes!” roared the captain at the first crack.  “Axes!” yelled the mate as the spar reeled into the water.  “Lay forward and clear the wreck,” were the next orders; “cut away with your knives.”