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It is in this cavernous darkness that in our climate the Polar
waterspout makes its appearance.
A great muddy cloud, like to the belly of a hydra, hung over ocean, and
in places its lividity adhered to the waves. Some of these adherences
resembled pouches with holes, pumping the sea, disgorging vapour, and
refilling themselves with water. Here and there these suctions drew up
cones of foam on the sea.
The boreal storm hurled itself on the hooker. The hooker rushed to meet
it. The squall and the vessel met as though to insult each other.
In the first mad shock not a sail was clewed up, not a jib lowered, not
a reef taken in, so much is flight a delirium. The mast creaked and bent
back as if in fear.
Cyclones, in our northern hemisphere, circle from left to right, in the
same direction as the hands of a watch, with a velocity which is
sometimes as much as sixty miles an hour. Although she was entirely at
the mercy of that whirling power, the hooker behaved as if she were out
in moderate weather, without any further precaution than keeping her
head on to the rollers, with the wind broad on the bow so as to avoid
being pooped or caught broadside on. This semi-prudence would have
availed her nothing in case of the wind's shifting and taking her aback.
A deep rumbling was brewing up in the distance. The roar of the abyss,
nothing can be compared to it. It is the great brutish howl of the
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