The orders of the skipper were obeyed.  The Languedocian made a third sailor.  All bore a hand.  Not satisfied with brailing up, they furled the sails, lashed the earrings, secured the clew-lines, bunt-lines, and leech-lines, and clapped preventer-shrouds on the block straps, which thus might serve as back-stays.  They fished the mast.  They battened down the ports and bulls’-eyes, which is a method of walling up a ship.  These evolutions, though executed in a lubberly fashion, were, nevertheless, thoroughly effective.  The hooker was stripped to bare poles.  But in proportion as the vessel, stowing every stitch of canvas, became more helpless, the havoc of both winds and waves increased.  The seas ran mountains high.  The hurricane, like an executioner hastening to his victim, began to dismember the craft.  There came, in the twinkling of an eye, a dreadful crash:  the top-sails were blown from the bolt-ropes, the chess-trees were hewn asunder, the deck was swept clear, the shrouds were carried away, the mast went by the board, all the lumber of the wreck was flying in shivers.  The main shrouds gave out although they were turned in, and stoppered to four fathoms.

The magnetic currents common to snowstorms hastened the destruction of the rigging.  It broke as much from the effect of effluvium as the violence of the wind.  Most of the chain gear, fouled in the blocks, ceased to work.  Forward the bows, aft the quarters, quivered under the terrific shocks.  One wave washed overboard the compass and its binnacle.  A second carried away the boat, which, like a box slung under a carriage, had been, in accordance with the quaint Asturian custom, lashed to the bowsprit.  A third breaker wrenched off the spritsail yard.  A fourth swept away the figurehead and signal light.  The rudder only was left.

To replace the ship’s bow lantern they set fire to, and suspended at the stem, a large block of wood covered with oakum and tar.

The mast, broken in two, all bristling with quivering splinters, ropes, blocks, and yards, cumbered the deck.  In falling it had stove in a plank of the starboard gunwale.  The skipper, still firm at the helm, shouted,—­

“While we can steer we have yet a chance.  The lower planks hold good.  Axes, axes!  Overboard with the mast!  Clear the decks!”

Both crew and passengers worked with the excitement of despair.  A few strokes of the hatchets, and it was done.  They pushed the mast over the side.  The deck was cleared.

“Now,” continued the skipper, “take a rope’s end and lash me to the helm.”  To the tiller they bound him.

While they were fastening him he laughed, and shouted,—­

“Blow, old hurdy-gurdy, bellow.  I’ve seen your equal off Cape Machichaco.”

And when secured he clutched the helm with that strange hilarity which danger awakens.

“All goes well, my lads.  Long live our Lady of Buglose!  Let us steer west.”