"Far out to sea, meanwhile, was occurring one of the strangest stories of the sea. The annals of the ocean hold many thrilling escapes, but none, perhaps, more startling than that of the stranding of the three-masted schooner _Allison Doura_, which passed through the eye of the Galveston hurricane. Obed Quayle, a Cape Cod sailor who was one of the men on board, told me the story. "'We were six days out of Progresso, Mexico,' he said, 'with a cargo of bales of sisal. The weather had been fair, with a goodish bit of head winds, but we reckoned to make Mobile on Sunday, the fifteenth. On Friday the weather began to look dirty and there was a long rollin' swell from the eastward that I thought was going to yank the booms out of her. "'At eight bells of the second watch, the wind shifted, and any one could see with half an eye that there was trouble brewin'. The sea smelt of a storm. We made everything snug alow and aloft, put in double reefs and lay by. "'At two bells of the afternoon watch, the gale struck us, and it struck us hard. Captain Evans Wood, the skipper, a mighty good seaman, handled the craft well, but our foretopmast was snapped right out before the gale had been on us an hour. "'The jib-boom, too, went with the crash and the nasty mess of timber and shrouds, floatin' to leeward, began to hammer at our hull in an ugly fashion. A couple of us got at the wreckage as best we could, but before we had cut it adrift, the _Allison Doura_ had sprung a leak and four of us went to the pumps. "'While we were workin' at the wreckage of the foremast, the schooner was pooped and the wheel was carried away. Bill Higgins, a young fellow who was at the wheel, was swept against the rail and had his head split open. "'I've seen some bad weather in my time, but never just in that way. With the mizzen boom we rigged up a fore jury-mast and made shift to hoist a storm staysail to give us steerin' way and rigged up a tiller for steerin'. The wind was whistling like all possessed. It was askin' more than any vessel had a right to stand, and around midnight the fore staysail was blown clean out of the bolt ropes and she lost steerage way again. We couldn't hold her to the wind. "'With losin' steerage way so much and without bein' able to hold her up to the wind at all, we couldn't run out of the storm. The gale drove us in and in to the centre of the hurricane. Somewhere around dawn on Sunday mornin' the wind decided to show us what it really could do. We were runnin' before the wind with a triple-reefed mainsail and not another stitch. "Why weren't we under bare poles," you asks? Because there was a sea chasin' after us with every wave looking like a whale out of water. We weren't lookin' to get pooped, any more than we had to. The mainmast went with a crash.