Any glory in that? But to proceed.
Next morning the gale still continued, and when the day broke there was
the frigate standing across our bows, rolling and pitching, as she tore
her way through the boiling sea, under a close-reefed main-topsail and
reefed foresail, with top-gallant-yards and royal masts, and everything
that could be struck with safety in war-time, down on deck. There she
lay, with her clear black bends, and bright white streak, and long tier
of cannon on the maindeck, and the carronades on the quarterdeck and
forecastle grinning through the ports in the black bulwarks, while the
white hammocks, carefully covered by the hammock-cloths, crowned the
defences of the gallant frigate fore and aft, as she delved through the
green surge--one minute rolling and rising on the curling white crest
of a mountainous sea, amidst a hissing snowstorm of spray, with her
bright copper glancing from stem to stern, and her scanty white canvas
swelling aloft, and twenty feet of her keel forward occasionally hove
into the air and clean out of the water, as if she had been a sea-bird
rushing to take wing--and the next, sinking entirely out of
sight--hull, masts, and rigging--behind an intervening sea, that rose
in hoarse thunder between us, threatening to overwhelm both us and her.
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