all sizes, from the man of war to the small fishers' boat, which lay

sailorless, and rotting on the lazy deep. The emigrants embarked by

hundreds, and unfurling their sails with rude hands, made strange havoc of

buoy and cordage. Those who modestly betook themselves to the smaller

craft, for the most part achieved their watery journey in safety. Some, in

the true spirit of reckless enterprise, went on board a ship of an hundred

and twenty guns; the vast hull drifted with the tide out of the bay, and

after many hours its crew of landsmen contrived to spread a great part of

her enormous canvass--the wind took it, and while a thousand mistakes of

the helmsman made her present her head now to one point, and now to

another, the vast fields of canvass that formed her sails flapped with a

sound like that of a huge cataract; or such as a sea-like forest may give

forth when buffeted by an equinoctial north-wind. The port-holes were open,

and with every sea, which as she lurched, washed her decks, they received

whole tons of water. The difficulties were increased by a fresh breeze

which began to blow, whistling among the shrowds, dashing the sails this

way and that, and rending them with horrid split, and such whir as may have

visited the dreams of Milton, when he imagined the winnowing of the

arch-fiend's van-like wings, which encreased the uproar of wild chaos.

These sounds were mingled with the roaring of the sea, the splash of the

chafed billows round the vessel's sides, and the gurgling up of the water

in the hold. The crew, many of whom had never seen the sea before, felt

indeed as if heaven and earth came ruining together, as the vessel dipped

her bows in the waves, or rose high upon them. Their yells were drowned in

the clamour of elements, and the thunder rivings of their unwieldy

habitation--they discovered at last that the water gained on them, and

389

The Last Man