We had to beat up for three days before we could weather the east end of Jamaica, and tearing work we had of it. I had seen bad weather and heavy seas in several quarters of the globe--I had tumbled about under a close-reefed main-topsail and reefed foresail, on the long seas in the Bay of Biscay--I had been kicked about in a seventy-four, off the Cape of Good Hope, as if she had been a cork--I had been hove hither and thither, by the short jumble of the North Sea, about Heligoland, and the shoals lying off the mouth of the Elbe, when every thing over head was black as thunder, and all beneath as white as snow--I had enjoyed the luxury of being tom in pieces by a northwester, which compelled us to lie-to for ten days at a stretch, under storm stay-sails, off the coast of Yankeeland, with a clear, deep, cold, blue sky above us, without a cloud, where the sun shone brightly the whole time by day, and a glorious harvest moon by night, as if they were smiling in derision upon our riven and strained ship, as she reeled to and fro like a wounded Titan; at one time buried in the trough of the sea, at another cast upwards towards the heavens by the throes of the tormented waters, from the troubled bosom of the bounding and roaring ocean, amidst hundreds of miniature rainbows, (ay, rainbows by night as well as by day,) in a hissing storm of white, foaming, seething spray, torn from the curling and rolling bright green crests of the mountainous billows. And I have had more than one narrow squeak for it in the neighbourhood of the “still vexed Bermoothes,” besides various other small affairs, written in this Boke; but the devil such another tumblefication had I ever experienced-not as to danger, for there was none except to our spars and rigging, but as to discomfort as I did in that short, cross, splashing, and boiling sea, off Morant Point. By noon, however, on the second day, having had a slant from the land wind in the night previous, we got well to windward of the long sandy spit that forms the east end of the island, and were in the act of getting a small pull of the weather braces, before edging away for St Jago, when the wind fell suddenly, and in half an hour it was stark calm--‘una furiosa calma,’ as the Spanish sailors quaintly enough call it. We got rolling tackles up, and the topgallant-masts down, and studding sails out of the tops, and lessened the lumber and weight aloft in every way we could think of, but, nevertheless, we continued to roll gunwale under, dipping the main-yardarm into the water every now and then, and setting every thing adrift, below and on deck, that was not bolted down, or otherwise well secured.