In Hazard by Richard Hughes Read Free Book Online

it! However, there was nothing to be done but watch the compass-needle creep round in the compass. For by the time anyone could get the emergency wheel on the poop in action, she would be broadside; and then no power on earth could straighten her again till the wind eased. It took about five minutes, altogether; and then she was lying broadside on to the wind, heeled over steeply, vulnerable; and Mr. Buxton, noting the time, entered it in the log.
    He also noted, with satisfaction, that her motion was a short, sharp rolling. This might be uncomfortable, but from the point of view of stability it was satisfactory. But she was heeled over so far that walls and floor seemed to have almost equal claims to represent the horizontal.
    In the wheelhouse the little Chinese quartermaster clung to the useless wheel, like a cold monkey to the neck of its master. A sudden lurch tore him off. The mat on which he stood skiddered down the steep slope of the bridge: a snapshot (from the chartroom) of the Chinaman shooting by, with a concentrated expression, on his inadequate toboggan: then he fetched up against the rails at the far end with such a terrific impact as to bend them, and send the shield of the navigating light spinning into the sea. There he stopped, inert, on the brink: till Buxton and the Captain together managed to drag him back. Was he dead or alive? One does not bend iron rails with one’s body for nothing. Yet, oddly enough, he was alive.
    Gaston, the fourth engineer, a young dark Channel-islander, in temporary charge of the engine-room, telephoned for help. The engine-room sky-light had blown off, deluging the engine-room with spray, and fusing the lights; and with the ship heeled right over like that the engines would anyhow have been difficult to work. The second and third engineers came, but not Mr. MacDonald. For, leaving his room, he saw that the coir matting in the corridor had got jammed in the steering rods; and he was down on hands and knees, tearing at it with his finger-nails.
    These steering-rods were his: and though the matting was Mr. Buxton’s he knew he ought to have vetoed its presence in that passage, near his rods. But he had not noticed it: and now it had jammed the steering.
    As soon as he felt the ship turn, Dick Watchett tried to leave his room. But he could not. The wind had fixed the door shut. It would have held it against an elephant. He was a prisoner there. He would have to stay there till a lull came and let him out.
    Captain Edwardes telegraphed to the engine-room to reduce speed to dead slow: if full speed ahead could not hold her, it was better to save the engines.
    The force of the wind continued to increase. Through its solid roar nothing—not even the impact of the seas—could now be heard. Captain Edwardes had been through several hurricanes; but never anything like this. He tried to assess its velocity: but he had nothing to go by. There is no figure on the Beaufort Scale to express such a wind-force as this was. No anemometer is made that would register so great a ferocity of air. Any anemometer yet made would be smashed by it. He thrust his hand out, for a moment, into the force of the spray, then drew it back bleeding at the finger-tips, and numbed as if by an electric shock. For the wind was blowing now with a velocity of about two hundred miles an hour. It begins to be called a hurricane when it reaches seventy-five; and the pressure at two hundred would be seven times greater. To be exposed to a wind like this was of the order of having to cling to the bare wings of an aeroplane racing.
    When a hurricane blows the roof off a house, it does not as a rule get inside the house and burst it from within. The flow of the wind over the roof makes a vacuum on the lee side of the roof, and so sucks it off. When the “Archimedes” heeled over away from the weather, her deck made an angle very similar to the lee side of a roof: therefore the suction this wind exerted