The vessel was bound from New York for Yokohama with kerosene. She had been out from New York for 196 days without sighting a single ship, and when off the coast of New Caledonia she encountered the typhoon. The captain’s first warning that a tempest was brewing was, of course, a sudden and unaccountable fall of the glass. Suspecting what was in store for him, he went on deck and gave orders to prepare for a typhoon. In fifteen minutes he returned to his cabin, and found that in that short space of time the mercury had actually fallen seven-sixteenths more, and he knew from that indication that he would shortly have to face a storm, which he may well have doubted the powers of his vessel to weather. Before very long the tempest struck her in all its fury. For five days she encountered the direst perils. Her cargo had originally consisted of 80,000 cases of kerosene, and during the worst of the tempest 20,000 had been thrown overboard. On the very first day the rudder was carried away, but by extraordinary efforts the crew contrived to rig a staging at the stern for steering, and they managed to fit up a primitive rudder. The captain was injured when the rudder was carried away, for the long tiller (the _W. C. Watjen_ was so old-fashioned that they did not use a wheel) swept round and hit the master heavily on the groin. A huge hole, six feet in diameter, had been knocked in the stern when the rudder was carried away, and this flooded the cabin and the middle part of the ship. They managed to stop the hole and bale out the cabin, but the tremendous seas denied the crew all access to the forward part of the vessel, where the store of fresh water was kept, and for five days they had nothing to drink but the dish-water which had been left in the cook’s galley. Strangely enough, there was only one very serious casualty, the second mate being disabled by an accident to his knee. The captain told me that during the worst of the storm they were continually under water; the seas seemed to strike them simultaneously at bow, stern, port, and starboard, and at times seemed to descend even from the heavens. How terrible the force of the tempest must have been was proved by the fact that the great steel masts of the vessel, six feet in circumference, had all gone over the side.