“Despair seized on every heart, for the helm had ceased to produce its wonted power in directing the ship’s course. The Master, mistaking our situation, could not be persuaded of the danger until another immense sheet of lightning again exposed the dreadful evil. The helm was moved, and endeavours made to turn a remnant of sail which had not been blown away. A ray of hope appeared for a moment to illumine the drooping hearts of the seamen by the cry ‘_She goes off_’, which was eagerly caught and repeated by all. “The lightning now becoming more vivid and frequent, contrasted with the intense darkness of the night,—the roaring of the wind,—the foamy rushing of the sea,—the noise of the ropes, and the indistinct cries of the despairing mariners, together with reiterated peals of thunder rolling over our heads for an amazing length of time and ending in a tremendous crash, gave existence to the most frightful picture that human imagination is capable of painting, or perhaps that human nature could sustain. “Fear, when guilt is the cause, is indeed shocking. My apprehensions of danger may magnify the evils by which I am likely soon to be overwhelmed. I have tried to pray, ‘but the Lord laughed at my calamity.’ I have tried to meet death with philosophic composure; but, shaken by the angry voice of an avenging God, and involved in chaos, what sinner can affect to be unmoved? “Another wave of vast magnitude has broken over the vessel, which I thought had actually sunk her never to rise again;—she was certainly a long while ingulfed, and, as I thought, completely upset. The undaunted Master endeavoured to cheer us with a hope that, in the event of the vessel foundering, our lives might be saved by the boat; but in the last afflicting crush that resource was dashed to atoms, and the mainmast broken in two. The lightning serves to unveil that wretchedness which darkness had so kindly concealed, and the sight is absolutely indescribable:—every thing floating about and dashing in furious confusion. When the lightning bursts upon our view, it appears to rend the heavens, leaving in its stead a wide gaping gulf of boundless and unutterable gloom. “The long-wished-for day begins at length to appear, and the horrible spectacle it unfolds defies all attempt at description. The fury of the wind is unabated; by its force alone, large bodies of the waves are torn off, and driven over the vessel like frightful cataracts, and in smaller quantities resembling a violent shower of snow, so completely obstructing vision, as to render it impossible to see any object distinctly at two yards distance.