A calm succeeds the tempest, a cyclone passes over, a wind dies away, we replace the broken mass, we check the leak, we extinguish the fire; but what is to be done with this enormous bronze beast?  How can it be subdued?  You can reason with a mastiff, take a bull by surprise, fascinate a snake, frighten a tiger, mollify a lion; but there is no resource with the monster known as a loosened gun.  You cannot kill it,—­it is already dead; and yet it lives.  It breathes a sinister life bestowed on it by the Infinite.  The plank beneath sways it to and fro; it is moved by the ship; the sea lifts the ship, and the wind keeps the sea in motion.  This destroyer is a toy.  Its terrible vitality is fed by the ship, the waves, and the wind, each lending its aid.  What is to be done with this complication?  How fetter this monstrous mechanism of shipwreck?  How foresee its coming and goings, its recoils, its halts, its shocks?  Any one of those blows may stave in the side of the vessel.  How can one guard against these terrible gyrations?  One has to do with a projectile that reflects, that has ideas, and changes its direction at any moment.  How can one arrest an object in its course, whose onslaught must be avoided?  The dreadful cannon rushes about, advances, recedes, strikes to right and to left, flies here and there, baffles their attempts at capture, sweeps away obstacles, crushing men like flies.

The extreme danger of the situation comes from the unsteadiness of the deck.  How is one to cope with the caprices of an inclined plane?  The ship had within its depths, so to speak, imprisoned lightning struggling for escape; something like the rumbling of thunder during an earthquake.  In an instant the crew was on its feet.  It was the chief gunner’s fault, who had neglected to fasten the screw-nut of the breeching chain, and had not thoroughly chocked the four trucks of the carronade, which allowed play to the frame and the bottom of the gun-carriage, thereby disarranging the two platforms and parting the breeching.  The lashings were broken, so that the gun was no longer firm on its carriage.  The stationary breeching which prevents the recoil was not in use at that time.  As a wave struck the ship’s side the cannon, insufficiently secured, had receded, and having broken its chain, began to wander threateningly over the deck.  In order to get an idea of this strange sliding, fancy a drop of water sliding down a pane of glass.

When the fastening broke, the gunners were in the battery, singly and in groups, clearing the ship for action.  The carronade, thrown forward by the pitching, dashed into a group of men, killing four of them at the first blow; then, hurled back by the rolling, it cut in two an unfortunate fifth man, and struck and dismounted one of the guns of the larboard battery.  Hence the cry of distress which had been heard.  All the men rushed to the ladder.  The gun-deck was empty in the twinkling of an eye.