The situation really would have been favorable had we not been in the path of the storm.  True, the wind itself tore our canvas out of the gaskets, jerked out our topmasts, and made a raffle of our running-gear, but still we would have come through nicely had we not been square in front of the advancing storm-centre.  That was what fixed us.  I was in a state of stunned, numbed, paralyzed collapse from enduring the impact of the wind, and I think I was just about ready to give up and die when the centre smote us.  The blow we received was an absolute lull.  There was not a breath of air.  The effect on one was sickening.

Remember that for hours we had been at terrific muscular tension, withstanding the awful pressure of that wind.  And then, suddenly, the pressure was removed.  I know that I felt as though I was about to expand, to fly apart in all directions.  It seemed as if every atom composing my body was repelling every other atom and was on the verge of rushing off irresistibly into space.  But that lasted only for a moment.  Destruction was upon us.

In the absence of the wind and pressure the sea rose.  It jumped, it leaped, it soared straight toward the clouds.  Remember, from every point of the compass that inconceivable wind was blowing in toward the centre of calm.  The result was that the seas sprang up from every point of the compass.  There was no wind to check them.  They popped up like corks released from the bottom of a pail of water.  There was no system to them, no stability.  They were hollow, maniacal seas.  They were eighty feet high at the least.  They were not seas at all.  They resembled no sea a man had ever seen.

They were splashes, monstrous splashes—­that is all.  Splashes that were eighty feet high.  Eighty!  They were more than eighty.  They went over our mastheads.  They were spouts, explosions.  They were drunken.  They fell anywhere, anyhow.  They jostled one another; they collided.  They rushed together and collapsed upon one another, or fell apart like a thousand waterfalls all at once.  It was no ocean any man had ever dreamed of, that hurricane centre.  It was confusion thrice confounded.  It was anarchy.  It was a hell-pit of sea-water gone mad.

The Petite Jeanne?  I don’t know.  The heathen told me afterward that he did not know.  She was literally torn apart, ripped wide open, beaten into a pulp, smashed into kindling wood, annihilated.  When I came to I was in the water, swimming automatically, though I was about two-thirds drowned.  How I got there I had no recollection.  I remembered seeing the Petite Jeanne fly to pieces at what must have been the instant that my own consciousness was buffetted out of me.  But there I was, with nothing to do but make the best of it, and in that best there was little promise.  The wind was blowing again, the sea was much smaller and more regular, and I knew that I had passed through the centre.  Fortunately, there were no sharks about.  The hurricane had dissipated the ravenous horde that had surrounded the death ship and fed off the dead.