My Danish Sweetheart, Volume Iii by W. Clark Russell

It was about half-past nine when this gale took us, but such was the force and weight of it, so flattening and shearing was its scythe-like horizontal sweep, that no sea worth speaking of had risen till ten o'clock, and then, indeed, it was beginning to run high. All this while there had been no sound of human voices, but at this hour a command was delivered above our heads, and going on to the quarter-deck, I dimly discerned the figures of men hauling upon the forebraces; but they pulled dumbly; no song broke from them; they were silent as though in terror. A little later on I knew by the motions of the barque that she had been brought to the wind and lay hove-to.

That few vessels would better know how to plunge and roll than this old _Light of the World_ I might have guessed from her behaviour in quiet weather, when there was nothing but a slight swell to lift her. But I never could have conjectured how truly prodigious was her skill in the art of tumbling. She soared and sank as an empty cask might. She took every hollow with a shock that threatened to rend her bones into fragments, as though she had been hurled through the air from a mighty height; and when she swung up an acclivity, the sensation was that of being violently lifted, as by a balloon or by the grip of an eagle. Groans and cries rose from her interior as though she had a thousand miserable, perishing slaves -- men, women, and children -- locked up in her hold.