They had been pooped twice, sluiced from taffrail to knightheads by an avalanche of green water that tore coils of rope from the fife-rails, swept men off their feet and dashed them into the guns. In this deluge arms had been broken, an elbow shattered and a leg snapped so cleanly that it lay like a carpenter's angle. Worst of all two men had been washed overboard. One, Midshipman Wickham, they had not seen again, the other, the marine quarter-guard, had been found clinging to the heads, his feet dragging in the water in the last extremity of distress. The experience made the ship's company more cautious and the second pooping caused less damage.

But this morning the sea no longer drove from astern and the wind no longer roared through the standing rigging to tear the slack stays of the upper masts in great bights to leeward. Nor was the air filled with salt and spray driving downwind like buckshot. Instead, the surface of the ocean rose up in heaps; waves slopped with malignant power against each other, flinging dark columns of water high into the air, from which they fell back in a vast welter of confusion.

In this lashing of the sea Patrician was caught helplessly, the violence of her motion whipping her truncated masts so that blocks flew about aloft with sufficient energy to brain a man sent to secure them. Abrupt enough to throw an incautious man from his feet as she lay down to a roll, Patrician's hull would be thrust back by a wave running in opposition to the first. This conflict of forces assailed her simultaneously, sending wracking stresses through her straining hull while the tortured bodies of her company met the onslaught with instinctive and tiring muscular exertions.

If the air no longer boomed with the sound of the great wind, it was now filled with the huge slop and hiss of the aimless sea, and the desperate cries of exhausted birds. The deck was covered with their pathetic, flapping forms, a variety of species including brilliantly coloured land-birds.