We put the _Pactolus_ through her paces, I can assure you; carried sail till all was blue. Luck sent us strong and favourable winds. In the dead of night I would often see the steamer’s officers, dressed and wandering around the decks, or gathered in a group and holding low conversation; the ship would be scuppers under, the deck at a dangerous angle, masts and yards buckling and groaning, a spread of motionless canvas rising aloft as hard as a board; the whole hull humming like a top, as she raced through the water at a fourteen-knot clip. It made them nervous; they wanted to give me their advice, but being young and proud, they wouldn’t do it. I suppose they called me a reckless Yankee. But I knew my ship and trusted in my gear, knew exactly what I could do with them; and didn’t carry away so much as a rope-yarn throughout the passage. Only once did I have to call on our visitors for help. Closing in with Nantucket, we had run full-tilt into another southerly wind. It wasn’t more than half a gale, and I had kept her running under a heavy press of canvas. After twelve hours had gone by, I knew that soon the wind would jump into the westward in a flurry, as all southeasters do in the end. Feeling secure, with extra men to draw on in case I got caught aback, I held my sail and course till the last gun was fired. We were running with the wind on the port beam, under three whole topsails, whole mainsail and foresail, spanker, mizzen, main and foretopmast staysails, and inner jib. And before I knew it, I had really got caught. The wind jumped without warning, jumped quick and hard; one minute it was our old half-gale from the southward, the next minute it was a howling westerly squall. Before we could possibly pay off to the northward, the ship was flat aback. Then it was "All hands on deck to shorten sail!" with a vengeance, the vessel lying down to port, the masts cracking, the shrouds slackening with an ominous sag, and things in general looking badly for a while. The officers of the steamer ran on deck feather white, feeling the ship go over to windward; her first mate ranged up close beside me, and kept glancing backward and forward from my face to the masts, as if he expected them to go over the side any minute and wanted to watch me when they fell.