I thought to myself, and, if so, would it be possible for me to board her? A light canoe floated alongside our bark, on which my eye fell as these ideas rose up in my mind. But, when I reflected a minute, I saw how mad would be any attempt to make my way in the darkness, and amid pursuing boats, to the vessel, even although she might be, what I had no certain means of knowing her—a friend. While I was pondering thus, Captain Garbo accosted me in a whisper— ‘This is but a mad freak of your countrymen,’ he said, ‘for such I judge them to be. They could not expect to carry off the bark from the middle of a fleet, and without a breath of wind either.’ Just as he spoke, a jagged flash of lightning, which dazzled me, tore right across the sky to the westward, and the loud crackling thunder had not ceased to explode above us, when a heavy puff of wind, bearing broad plashing rain-drops before it, struck our bark, and made her swing round to her anchor like a weathercock. ‘A squall,’ I cried out, ‘and the privateer knew it was coming. It was that made them so bold.’ Just then a whole row of lanterns was run up to the gaff of the great ship. ‘See,’ said Garbo—‘a squall indeed. That is the signal for the recal of all her boats.’ There was nothing which appeared to me very ominous in the look of the night. I only expected a pretty sharp outburst of wind and rain with thunder and lightning. And so, indeed, it proved, for in less than five minutes from the first flash, a strong gusty wind, driving before it a pelting rain, was whitening the sea around us, and hissing and whistling through the few ropes which formed our rigging, while the bark herself tore and plunged at her anchor, as if she would have wrenched it out from its hold amid the oysters. In a moment the flaming torches, shown from so many of the fleet, were blown out or quenched; but the great ship, burning a bright light in her main rigging, we saw her all lurid and blue in the glare, leaning heavily over to the blast, her slanting yards dotted with the seamen, who were taking in sail as fast as they had spread it forth. In a few minutes again all around was darkness, except where the glimmer of a lantern, tossing and tumbling as though a giant were flinging it from hand to hand, showed where one of the Pearl Fleet was jerking and straining at her anchor. The strength of the squall was not alarming, but it tore up the sea upon these shallow banks into quick cross-running and angry waves, and the rain was driven in our faces so sharply that the drops struck like hailstones. ‘The only thing I fear,’ said Garbo to me, as we stood holding on by the foremast, ‘is for the frigate’s boats. There will be no great damage to anything else.’