As Patrician dipped her reefed jib-boom, one such wall of water rose on her bow, its vast face gaining in brightness as it approached the vertical and reflected the growing light from the east. Patrician rolled away from it, her topsails, hard reefed though they were, suddenly flapping from want of wind and a hush falling eerily upon her decks. Her hull seemed suddenly inert as the advancing sea sped towards them, its slope streaked with spindrift, debris of a million million successive disintegrations of its toppling crest.

'Hold on there!'

Drinkwater grabbed the nearest hammock stanchion and braced himself as Lieutenant Quilhampton called the warning to his watch. It seemed as if they all held their breath.

And then the frigate began to lift her bow as the trough that preceded the wave passed beneath her and she felt the breasting rise of that mountainous wave. From a sluggish tremor the angle rapidly increased and then she canted and the bow reared skywards. Aft, the waterlevel rose almost to the rail, so that the sea squirted in round the gun-ports and from below came the crash and curse of men and loose gear tumbling about. Drinkwater prayed that the double-lashed breechings of the guns had not worked slack during the night and the dual crash that ended this strange hiatus momentarily persuaded him that he was mistaken. But instinct made him look upwards to where the wind had reached the topsails. The maintopsail was already in shreds, pulling at its bolt ropes like wool caught on a fence, and the foretopsail was bending its yard like a bow. An explosion of white reared up all along the starboard rail as they reached the breaking crest and it flung all its fury at the ship. She rolled to leeward and lay down under the violent onslaught of the wind. The air, a moment earlier almost motionless before the advancing mass of water, was now suddenly filled with the terrible noise of the gale, solid with the particles of water it had ripped from the surface of the ocean and drove downwind with the velocity of buckshot.