A Son of the Sea by John Arthur Barry — Read

BUT most things have an end; and so it proved with the calm. One night, at sundown, sun and glass went down together, and all hands started to work with a will to shorten sail for the expected blow. Anything was better than the inaction of the last week, during which Torre at least had eaten his heart out in impotent wrath and weariness. By the time they had the vessel under her lower topsails the heavens were black as pitch; so black that the men coming down from the hot yards felt about with their feet like blind people as they descended the hot rattlines, and stumbled against each other as they fumbled along the hot decks, groping for and coiling up the running gear. Suddenly came a tremendous crash of thunder, and from the copper domes of her big steel lighthouses on the break of the forecastle to her taffrail, the Cumberland flamed again with a white intense blaze that made everything for just a second as bright as strong sunlight could have done, and caused her men to stagger and shut their eyes to the blinding brilliancy of it, then feel themselves hurriedly to make sure they were unhurt, and stare hopelessly into the woolly blackness in an attempt to discover whether their sight was gone or not. And the curious thing about this illumination was that from half-way up her lower-masts all was dark as ever. It seemed quite unlike ordinary lightning, resembling more a sheet of snow-white flame that had passed completely and harmlessly along her decks fore and aft. Five minutes more of anxious waiting and suspense, and then suddenly, as if a trap-door in some riverbed had been opened above and directly over the ship, down poured a roaring mass of water—falling not in drops but in thick heavy sheets, drumming on thirsty decks and woodwork, and almost beating to their knees the men who already stood up to their knees in it. Scuppers were powerless to carry off such a deluge, and with much trouble, and not before the water was four feet deep on the main deck, some of the large ports were got open, through which it poured as through the cleft bank of a dam. Then all of a sudden the fall ceased in instantaneous uncanny fashion, as if the trap-door had been slammed down, and at once stillness reigned again, broken only by the drippings from drenched sails and the choking gurgles of the scuppers.

"Next!" muttered the boatswain, shaking himself, as with all hands he stood on the quarter-deck. "This is another five minnit hinterlood, I presoome. Wind, I s'pose, 'll be the next hact of the drammer. But where from, when all's as black as the Herl o' Hell's ridin' boots, it's 'ard to say! Is that you, Mr Leigh?" as a step descended the poop ladder.