"We carried, by Captain Macnaughten's orders, a hurricane lamp on our
fore-stay. Someone had lit a second amidships, where we huddled in
oilskins and under tarpaulins like a congregation of eels. . . .
Jarvis, our best seaman, had the tiller. He sat, all hunched,
crouching forward over a third small lamp--the binnacle lamp with
which our boat, like the others, was providentially fitted.
The rain, however, beat on its glass in such sheets that he could not
possibly have read the compass card floating by the wick. Nor--I am
sure--was he trying to read it. He just sat and steered by the feel
of the seas as they lurched ahead and sank abaft. The lamplight
glowed up on his cheek-bones, but was lost under the pent of his
sou'wester, which had a sort of crease or channel in its fore-flap,
that shed down the rain in a flood. Though we lay, we passengers, on
the bottom boards we could see nothing of his face, so far forward he
bent.
"Then Grimalson lost his head. He was seated at Jarvis's shoulder in
the stern-sheets, with a hefty seaman (Prout by name) on his other
hand tending the sheet--the both of 'em starboard of Jarvis.
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