A pampero at its ordinary level is no joke; but this was the charge of a wild elephant, which would exhaust itself soon, but for the nonce was terrific. Pitch darkness settled down upon the ship. Except in the frequent flashes of lightning, literally blue, I could not see the forecastle boatswain's mate of the watch, who stood close by my elbow, ready pipe in hand. The rain came down in buckets, and in the midst of all the wind suddenly shifted, taking the sails flat aback. The shrillness of the boatswain's pipes is then their great merit. They pierce through the roar of the tempest, by sheer difference of pitch, an effect one sometimes hears in an opera; and the officer of the deck, our second lieutenant, who bore the name of Andrew Jackson, and was said to have received his appointment from him--which shows how far back he went--had a voice of somewhat the same quality. I had often heard it assert itself, winding in and out through the uproar of an ordinary gale, but on this occasion it went clean away--whistled down the wind. "I always think bad of it," said Boatswain Chucks, "when the elements won't allow my whistle to be heard; and I consider it hardly fair play." Such advantage the elements took of us on this occasion, but the captain came to the rescue. He had the throat of a bull of Bashan, which went the elements one better on their own hand. Under his stentorian shouts the weather head-braces were led along (probably already had been, as part of the preparation, but that was quarter-deck work, outside my knowledge) and manned. All other gear being coiled out of the way, on the pins, there was nothing to confuse or entangle; the fore topsail was swung round on the opposite tack from the main, a-box, to pay the ship's head off and leave her side to the wind, steadied by the close-reefed fore and main topsails, which would then be filled. She was now, of course, going astern fast; but this mattered nothing, for the sea had not yet got up. The evolution, common enough itself, an almost invariable accompaniment of getting under way, was now exciting even to grandeur, for we could see only when the benevolent lightning kindled in the sky a momentary glare of noonday. "Now that's a clever old man," said the boatswain's mate next day to me, approvingly, of the captain; "boxing her off that way, with all that wind and blackness, was handsomely done." After this we settled down to a two days' pampero, with a huge but regular sea.