The weather got worse as the night wore on, and I suddenly found myself sprawling on the floor. The ship was cutting up curious antics. I crawled on my hands and knees back to my bunk, but I could not go to sleep again, although I was sleepy. My bunk was on the weather side, and first I would be standing nearly on my feet, then nearly on my head, then perhaps she would quiver and go slowly over almost on her beam ends, so that I barely escaped being rolled on to the floor again. I heard the bell striking wildly—the tongue must have got loose—until somebody went and tied it up again, lashed it tight. It must have been two or three o’clock in the morning. She seemed to ease a little, sliding down the side of each sea until I thought she must be bound for the bottom of the ocean; then rising slowly, and struggling up the side of the next, until at last she reached the top. There she paused for what seemed to me, down there in my bunk, as much as an hour, and rolled to leeward, and I held on with all my might. I must have dropped off to sleep again, for the next thing I knew daylight was filtering in. The ship was {110} keeping up her wild coasting down and slow struggles upward, and my muscles were sore and lame with holding on through my sleep. Captain Nelson was on deck when I got there. He must have been there most of the night. Never in my life, before or since, have I seen such seas. They were veritable mountains, with rugged sides, long and high. When we were in a valley we on the deck were sheltered from the worst of the wind, and the oncoming sea towered so above us that I wondered whether the ship would ever be able to climb that steep slope. She did somehow. The seas were so long that she rode them easily enough; with unnatural ease, it seemed to me. At last I discovered the explanation. They had put out oil bags during the night, bags of canvas stuffed with oakum and filled with oil. Two of these bags were fast, by lines long enough to let them trail in the water, to the ends of the spritsail yard, or spreader on the bowsprit, and one to each cathead. As they trailed in the water at the ends of their lines, the oil oozed slowly from them and formed a thin film over the water which prevented its breaking, so that the ship sailed in a little calm area of her own. This eased her wonderfully. The best course she could make was too much to the south to please Captain Nelson, and she was hardly doing more than lie to. Soon after I came up the foretopsail, close-reefed as it was, split from top to bottom, and in a very few minutes it was nothing but ribbons. The men had great trouble in getting in the remnants of the sail, but at last it was secured after a fashion, the strips wound about the yard like a bandage, and lashed.