When the dawn broke it found the _Grosvenor_ under reefed topsails, fore-topmast, staysail, foresail, main-trysail, and spanker, snug enough, but with streaming decks, for the gale had raised a heavy beam sea, and the deep-laden ship was sluggish, and took the water repeatedly over her weather-bulwarks.
The watch below had turned in again, but it was already seven bells, and at four o'clock my turn would come to go to bed. I had charge of the ship, for the captain having passed the night in observing his vessel's sailing powers under all canvas, had gone below, and I was not sorry to get rid of him, for his continued presence aft had become a nuisance to my eyes.
The sea under the gathering light in the east was a remarkable sight. The creaming arching surfaces of the waves took the pale illumination, but the troughs or hollows were livid, and looking along the rugged surface as the ship rose, one seemed to behold countless lines of yawning caverns opening in an illimitable waste of snow. Nothing could surpass the profound desolation of the scene surveyed in the faint struggling dawn, the pallid heaven, bearing its dim and languishing stars, over which were swept long lines of smoke-coloured clouds torn and mangled by the wind; the broken ocean pouring and boiling away to a melancholy horizon, still dark, save where the dawn was creeping upwards with its chilly light, and making the eastern sea and sky leaden-hued.
I had now leisure to recall the fatal accident I have related, and the inhumanity of Captain Coxon's comment upon it. I hugged myself in my thick coat as I looked astern at the cold and rushing waters, and thought of the bitter sudden deaths of the unfortunates we had run down. With what appalling rapidity had the whole thing happened! not even a dying shriek had been heard amid the roar of the wind among the masts. For many a day the memory of that dark-coloured sail, prone upon the foaming water, haunted me. The significance of it was awful to think upon. But for the men on the look-out, never a soul among us would have known that living beings had been hurled into sudden and dreadful death, that the ship in which we sailed had perchance made widows of sleeping wives, had made children fatherless, and that ruin and beggary and sorrow had been churned up out of the deep by our unsparing bows.