Dangers have now aroused the man and his courage grows apace. Moments
supreme come to every captain at sea, the same as to captains who wage
wars on the land.
The decks are drenched, great waves pound the forward deck and life-boats
are broken from their moorings. Battened hatches imprison below a
regiment of souls, some suffering the torments of stomachs in open
rebellion, others of heads swollen, while others lose entire control
of an army of nerves that center near and drive mad the brain.
To the uninitiated, words are powerless to reveal the torments of the
imprisoned in a modern steel inquisition, rocking and pitching at the
mercy of mighty torrents in a mid-ocean cyclone. Mephistopheles, seeking
severest punishment for the damned, displayed tenderness in not adopting
the super-heated and sooted pits where stokers in storms at sea are
forced to labor and suffer.
All that terrible second day and night at sea, the Harrises and others
tossed back and forth in their unstable berths, some suffering with
chills and others with burning heat. Some, Mrs. Harris and daughter among
them, lay for hours more dead than alive, their wills and muscles utterly
powerless to reach needed and much coveted blankets.
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