"
By little and little, by ones and twos, boats, battered and with sails
torn to ribbons, with crews exhausted and distraught, kept arriving
during the Saturday and Sunday, bringing men, as it were, back from the
dead. One or two, under bare poles, had ridden the gale out at sea,
lying up into the wind as near as might be, threshing through those
awful seas hour after hour, buried almost, sometimes, in the seething
cauldron, or struck by tons of solid water when some huge mountain of a
wave, toppling to its fall, rushed at her out of the blackness. From
minute to minute the men never knew but that the next roaring billow
would engulf them also, as already they had seen it roll over and
swallow up their neighbours.
It was the skipper of the _White Star_ that told afterwards how, before
the tornado burst--as some said, "like a clap of thunder"--the first
thing to take his attention from the shooting of his lines was boats on
the weather side of him hurriedly shortening sail, or letting all run.
To the nor'ard, from horizon almost to zenith, already the sky was black
as ink, the sea beneath white with flying spume. Then like magic the sea
got up, and the _White Star_ turned to run for Eyemouth, with the
_Myrtle_ in company.
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