The third sea—­the biggest of the three—­did not do so much damage.  By the time it arrived nearly everybody was in the rigging.  On deck perhaps a dozen gasping, half-drowned, and half-stunned wretches were rolling about or attempting to crawl into safety.  They went by the board, as did the wreckage of the two remaining boats.  The other pearl-buyers and myself, between seas, managed to get about fifteen women and children into the cabin, and battened down.  Little good it did the poor creatures in the end.

Wind?  Out of all my experience I could not have believed it possible for the wind to blow as it did.  There is no describing it.  How can one describe a nightmare?  It was the same way with that wind.  It tore the clothes off our bodies.  I say tore them off, and I mean it.  I am not asking you to believe it.  I am merely telling something that I saw and felt.  There are times when I do not believe it myself.  I went through it, and that is enough.  One could not face that wind and live.  It was a monstrous thing, and the most monstrous thing about it was that it increased and continued to increase.

Imagine countless millions and billions of tons of sand.  Imagine this sand tearing along at ninety, a hundred, a hundred and twenty, or any other number of miles per hour.  Imagine, further, this sand to be invisible, impalpable, yet to retain all the weight and density of sand.  Do all this, and you may get a vague inkling of what that wind was like.

Perhaps sand is not the right comparison.  Consider it mud, invisible, impalpable, but heavy as mud.  Nay, it goes beyond that.  Consider every molecule of air to be a mud-bank in itself.  Then try to imagine the multitudinous impact of mud-banks.  No; it is beyond me.  Language may be adequate to express the ordinary conditions of life, but it cannot possibly express any of the conditions of so enormous a blast of wind.  It would have been better had I stuck by my original intention of not attempting a description.

I will say this much:  The sea, which had risen at first, was beaten down by that wind.  More:  it seemed as if the whole ocean had been sucked up in the maw of the hurricane, and hurled on through that portion of space which previously had been occupied by the air.

Of course, our canvas had gone long before.  But Captain Oudouse had on the Petite Jeanne something I had never before seen on a South Sea schooner—­a sea-anchor.  It was a conical canvas bag, the mouth of which was kept open by a huge hoop of iron.  The sea-anchor was bridled something like a kite, so that it bit into the water as a kite bites into the air, but with a difference.  The sea-anchor remained just under the surface of the ocean in a perpendicular position.  A long line, in turn, connected it with the schooner.  As a result, the Petite Jeanne rode bow on to the wind and to what sea there was.