The Death Ship, Volume Iii by W. Clark Russell

I never remember the like of such a storm as this in these seas, though I have made the passage of the Cape four times and have met some frightful weather off the great Agulhas Bank. Amazing suddenness and violence in the first bursting of a storm you have reason to expect in the inter-tropical regions eastwards of the African continent, but not down here. Captain George Bonny, of the ship Elizabeth Tudor, is the only person that I am acquainted with who has had experience of so sudden a tempest as I have attempted to describe off this African headland; and who is to say that he had not happened upon the neighbourhood of the Death Ship and unwottingly tasted somewhat of the doom of that vessel, whose passage over the limits of her fate the storm the Elizabeth Tudor encountered was designed to furiously arrest?

Be this as it will. I passed from the cabin into as raging and affrighting a scene as was ever witnessed in any ocean. The sky was made unearthly by the flashes of lightning, whose blinding leaps seemed to bring the blackness down like a wall upon the eyes, and if ever an interval lasted long enough to suffer the light to resume its powers, then you found that blackness horrible with the unspeakable shade it took from the plain of boiling froth that stretched like a world covered with snow to the sea-girdle, fading from startling, staring, glaring whiteness around us into a pallid, ghastly dimness, where it sank and melted into the levin-riven inky folds.