“My chief mate had a small axe in his berth, which he had made very sharp a few days previous. That was immediately procured; and while the men were employed cutting away the mizenmast, the lower yard-arms went in the water. It is human nature to struggle hard for life; so fourteen men and myself got over the rail between the main and mizen rigging as the mast-heads went into the water. The ship was sinking fast. While some men were employed cutting the weather-lanyards of the rigging, some were calling to God for mercy; some were stupified with despair; and two poor fellows, who had gone from the afterhold, over the cargo, to get to the forecastle, to try to stop the leak, were swimming in the ship’s hold. In about three minutes after getting on the bends, the weather-lanyards were cut fore and aft, and the mizen, main, and foremasts went one after the other, just as the vessel was going down head foremost. “The ship hung in this miserable position, as if about to disappear (as shown in the accompanying reconstruction of the scene by an artist who worked under the direction of the master of the _Calypso_) and then by some miracle slowly righted herself. “On getting on board again, I found the three masts had gone close off by the deck. The boats were gone, the main hatches stove in, the planks of the deck had started in many places, the water was up to the beams, and the puncheons of rum sending about the hold with great violence. The starboard gunwale was about a foot from the level of the sea, and the larboard about five feet. The sea was breaking over the ship as it would have done over a log. You will, perhaps, say it could not have been worse, and any lives spared to tell the tale. I assure you, Sir, it was worse; and by Divine Providence, every man was suffered to walk from that ship to the quay at Wilmington.” From such accounts the hurricane hunters gathered the facts which led to a better “law of storms” and made life at sea safer for the officers and men who struggled with sails and masts in tropical gales. But it is most likely that the experiences of the crews of those sailing ships that were caught in the worst sectors of fully developed hurricanes in the open sea were never told. It is not probable that any survived the calamitous weather on the right front of the storm center, where the sea, the atmosphere, the rotation of the earth, and the forward motion of the hurricane are combined in a frenzy of destructive power. In one sense, all of the men who survived these terrors at sea were hurricane hunters. They had to be. Those who lived were the men who were always alert to the first signs in sea and sky, who knew when one of the big storms of the tropics was just beyond the horizon. They were learning and passing the knowledge along to others. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the mariner had a “law of storms” that kept countless ships out of the most dangerous parts of tropical disturbances.