An enormous wave came down abeam, and fell on the vessel’s quarter.  There is always in storms a tiger-like wave, a billow fierce and decisive, which, attaining a certain height, creeps horizontally over the surface of the waters for a time, then rises, roars, rages, and falling on the distressed vessel tears it limb from limb.

A cloud of foam covered the entire poop of the Matutina.

There was heard above the confusion of darkness and waters a crash.

When the spray cleared off, when the stern again rose in view, the skipper and the helm had disappeared.  Both had been swept away.

The helm and the man they had but just secured to it had passed with the wave into the hissing turmoil of the hurricane.

The chief of the band, gazing intently into the darkness, shouted,—­

“Te burlas de nosotros?”

To this defiant exclamation there followed another cry,—­

“Let go the anchor.  Save the skipper.”

They rushed to the capstan and let go the anchor.

Hookers carry but one.  In this case the anchor reached the bottom, but only to be lost.  The bottom was of the hardest rock.  The billows were raging with resistless force.  The cable snapped like a thread.

The anchor lay at the bottom of the sea.  At the cutwater there remained but the cable end protruding from the hawse-hole.

From this moment the hooker became a wreck.  The Matutina was irrevocably disabled.  The vessel, just before in full sail, and almost formidable in her speed, was now helpless.  All her evolutions were uncertain and executed at random.  She yielded passively and like a log to the capricious fury of the waves.  That in a few minutes there should be in place of an eagle a useless cripple, such a transformation is to be witnessed only at sea.

The howling of the wind became more and more frightful.  A hurricane has terrible lungs; it makes unceasingly mournful additions to darkness, which cannot be intensified.  The bell on the sea rang despairingly, as if tolled by a weird hand.

The Matutina drifted like a cork at the mercy of the waves.  She sailed no longer—­she merely floated.  Every moment she seemed about to turn over on her back, like a dead fish.  The good condition and perfectly water-tight state of the hull alone saved her from this disaster.  Below the water-line not a plank had started.  There was not a cranny, chink, nor crack; and she had not made a single drop of water in the hold.  This was lucky, as the pump, being out of order, was useless.

The hooker pitched and roared frightfully in the seething billows.  The vessel had throes as of sickness, and seemed to be trying to belch forth the unhappy crew.