Lashings were cast off the boat and the falls attached, when the men fled to holding-vantage just ere the whale arrived.  She struck the Mary Turner squarely amidships on the port beam, so that, from the poop, one saw, as well as heard, her long side bend and spring back like a limber fabric.  The starboard rail buried under the sea as the schooner heeled to the blow, and, as she righted with a violent lurch, the water swashed across the deck to the knees of the sailors about the boat and spouted out of the port scuppers.

“Heave away!” Captain Doane ordered from the poop.  “Up with her!  Swing her out!  Hold your turns!  Make fast!”

The boat was outboard, its gunwale resting against the Mary Turner’s rail.

“Ten inches, sir, and making fast,” was the mate’s information, as he gauged the sounding-rod.

“I’m going after my tools,” Captain Doane announced, as he started for the cabin.  Half into the scuttle, he paused to add with a sneer for Nishikanta’s benefit, “And for my one chronometer.”

“A foot and a half, and making,” the mate shouted aft to him.

“We’d better do some packing ourselves,” Grimshaw, following on the captain, said to Nishikanta.

“Steward,” Nishikanta said, “go below and pack my bedding.  I’ll take care of the rest.”

“Mr. Nishikanta, you can go to hell, sir, and all the rest as well,” was Daughtry’s quiet response, although in the same breath he was saying, respectfully and assuringly, to the Ancient Mariner:  “You hold Killeny, sir.  I’ll take care of your dunnage.  Is there anything special you want to save, sir?”

Jackson joined the four men below, and as the five of them, in haste and trepidation, packed articles of worth and comfort, the Mary Turner was struck again.  Caught below without warning, all were flung fiercely to port and from Simon Nishikanta’s room came wailing curses of announcement of the hurt to his ribs against his bunk-rail.  But this was drowned by a prodigious smashing and crashing on deck.

“Kindling wood—­there won’t be anything else left of her,” Captain Doane commented in the ensuing calm, as he crept gingerly up the companionway with his chronometer cuddled on an even keel to his breast.

Placing it in the custody of a sailor, he returned below and was helped up with his sea-chest by the steward.  In turn, he helped the steward up with the Ancient Mariner’s sea-chest.  Next, aided by anxious sailors, he and Daughtry dropped into the lazarette through the cabin floor, and began breaking out and passing up a stream of supplies—­cases of salmon and beef, of marmalade and biscuit, of butter and preserved milk, and of all sorts of the tinned, desiccated, evaporated, and condensed stuff that of modern times goes down to the sea in ships for the nourishment of men.

Daughtry and the captain emerged last from the cabin, and both stared upward for a moment at the gaps in the slender, sky-scraping top-hamper, where, only minutes before, the main- and mizzen-topmasts had been.  A second moment they devoted to the wreckage of the same on deck—­the mizzen-topmast, thrust through the spanker and supported vertically by the stout canvas, thrashing back and forth with each thrash of the sail, the main-topmast squarely across the ruined companionway to the steerage.