Cape weather as bad I had seen before, but always in good-sized ships; and I owned to Snelling I would rather have handled any one of them, even with a lee-shore near, ten times over, than this schooner of ours in the present case. However, none of us were in any mood for speaking at the time, let alone the waste of breath it was. The best thing we had to do, after getting somewhat satisfied of her weathering it this way, was to have the grog served out to the men, swig off a stiff pannikin one's self, and make one's self as comfortable as possible with his pea-coat in the lee of something. The sight of the sea ridging up with a dim glimmer against the dark, kept your eye fixed to it: first you thought it would burst right aboard, crash down upon the decks; then she lifted with it, swelling broad under her, while the long steady sweep of the gale drove just over the bulwarks with a deep moan: for half a minute, perhaps, a shivering lull, when you heard the bulkheads and timbers creak and strain below from stem to stern, and the bilge-water yearning, as it were, to the water outside. Then, again, it was a howl and a shriek, a wide plunge of sea bore up her weather-bow, and the moment ere she came fairly to, one felt as if the schooner were going to pitch God knows where. Her whole bulwarks shook and shivered, the wind found out every chink in them, whistling round every different rope it split upon, while all the time, the loose wet dreary spars behind the long-boat kept slatting and clattering against each other in the lashings, like planks in a woodyard of a November night. This was the way we stuck till the morning watch showed it all in a drizzling, struggling sort of half light, blowing as hard as ever, the Cape seas rolling and heaving mountain-high, of a pale yesty hue, far and wide to the scud; the spray drifting from the crests, and washing over her bare forecastle, with now and then the white wings of a huge albatross to be seen aslant to windward, riding on the breast of a long wave down into the trough.