We stood watching in the shelter of the companion way. The longer I looked, the stranger, the more forlorn, the more lamentable the scene showed, the more perilous and hopeless our situation seemed. What sort of cloths were they going to spread upon such a height of boom as they were chorusing at? I thought of the spacious concavities which had risen to the stars, and to the blue heavens of our voyage, those symmetric breasts of lustrous canvas which, when trimmed, snatched an impulse for our clipper keel, from the antagonism of the head wind itself; I saw the ship robed in the beauty of her sails, lifting her star-saluting royals to the very path of the flying scud with jibs and staysails yearning from bowsprit and jibboom towards some deeper ocean solitude past the horizon; and then I looked at the naked boom the men were hoisting at the triangle or shears. 'Oh, that cannot help us,' I cried; 'what does Captain Burke intend?' 'Even if it should fail as a mast,' Mrs. Burke answered, 'it will be useful as a flag-post. Why, this hull lies so flat without spars a ship might pass three or four miles off and not see us.' Here the captain looked round and spied our heads. With a note of his old cheerfulness he called out: 'Many a good prize has been navigated out of an ocean battle-field under leaner sticks than that, and added to the Royal Navy after tasselling Jack's pocket-handkerchief with dollars.' This he seemed to say as much for the men as for me. He then approached and asked me how I did; and told me not to look too long at the wreck. 'Keep up your heart, miss,' said he. 'We'll have you out of this in good time. Mary, don't let her stand here dwelling upon this scene. Why, it was a nightmare even to my seasoned eyes when it first came out of the dawn.' 'Is that mast meant to carry a sail?' said I. 'When we fix it and stay it we'll set something square upon it, certainly. There'll be room for a bit of fore and aft canvas between the head of it and the bowsprit end. Then let the wind blow south with God's blessing, or east or west will do, to edge us north. We need but steerage way, after which there'll be nothing to do but keep warm till all's well. Take her below, Mary. Look at her face! She'll wither here.' The hours of daylight were so few that the night was upon the rolling hull before the seamen had done more than lash the jury-mast to the stump with a stay or two for support. And with the darkness of the night there came along a black Cape Horn snow squall, like a dust storm in its blinding power, with a thunder of wind in it, and so much more afterwards that by five o'clock as high a sea was running as that of the preceding day.