Then,
indeed, it may lull; for the winds do often seem to reverence the glory
of the heavens too much to blow their might in its very face!"
"We must do our duty to ourselves and the country," returned Barnstable.
"Go, get the two bowers spliced, and have a kedge bent to a hawser:
we'll back our two anchors together, and veer to the better end of two
hundred and forty fathoms; it may yet bring her up. See all clear there
for anchoring and cutting away the mast! we'll leave the wind nothing
but a naked hull to whistle over."
"Ay, if there was nothing but the wind, we might yet live to see the sun
sink behind them hills," said the cockswain; "but what hemp can stand
the strain of a craft that is buried, half the time, to her foremast in
the water?"
The order was, however, executed by the crew, with a sort of desperate
submission to the will of their commander; and when the preparations
were completed, the anchors and kedge were dropped to the bottom, and
the instant that the Ariel tended to the wind, the axe was applied to
the little that was left of her long, raking masts. The crash of the
falling spars, as they came, in succession, across the decks of the
vessel, appeared to produce no sensation amid that scene of complicated
danger; but the seamen proceeded in silence to their hopeless duty of
clearing the wrecks. Every eye followed the floating timbers, as the
waves swept them away from the vessel, with a sort of feverish
curiosity, to witness the effect produced by their collision with those
rocks that lay so fearfully near them; but long before the spars entered
the wide border of foam, they were hid from view by the furious element
in which they floated.
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