But We Found A Use For It Now; For, There Being
A Reef In The Topsail, The Studding-Sail Could Not Be Set Without
One In It Also.
To be sure, a studding-sail with reefed topsails
was rather a new thing; yet there was some reason in it, for if
we carried that away, we should lose only a sail and a boom;
but a whole topsail might have carried away the mast and all.
While we were aloft, the sail had been got out, bent to the yard,
reefed, and ready for hoisting. Waiting for a good opportunity,
the halyards were manned and the yard hoisted fairly up to the
block; but when the mate came to shake the catspaw out of the
downhaul, and we began to boom-end the sail, it shook the ship
to her centre. The boom buckled up and bent like a whip-stick,
and we looked every moment to see something go; but, being of
the short, tough upland spruce, it bent like whalebone, and nothing
could break it. The carpenter said it was the best stick he had
ever seen. The strength of all hands soon brought the tack to
the boom-end, and the sheet was trimmed down, and the preventer
and the weather brace hauled taught to take off the strain.
Every rope-yarn seemed stretched to the utmost, and every thread
of canvas; and with this sail added to her, the ship sprang through
the water like a thing possessed. The sail being nearly all forward,
it lifted her out of the water, and she seemed actually to jump from
sea to sea. From the time her keel was laid, she had never been so
driven; and had it been life or death with every one of us, she could
not have borne another stitch of canvas.
Finding that she would bear the sail, the hands were sent below,
and our watch remained on deck. Two men at the wheel had as much
as they could do to keep her within three points of her course,
for she steered as wild as a young colt. The mate walked the deck,
looking at the sails, and then over the side to see the foam fly
by her, slapping his hands upon his thighs and talking to the
ship - "Hurrah, you jade, you've got the scent! - you know where
you're going!" And when she leaped over the seas, and almost
out of the water, and trembled to her very keel, the spars
and masts snapping and creaking, - "There she goes! - There she
goes, - handsomely! - as long as she cracks she holds!" - while we
stood with the rigging laid down fair for letting go, and ready
to take in sail and clear away, if anything went. At four bells
we hove the log, and she was going eleven knots fairly; and had it
not been for the sea from aft which sent the ship home, and threw
her continually off her course, the log would have shown her to
have been going much faster.
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