and the captain said nothing. You can't hit back, you know. He would
strike us and kick us for fun. I felt sure he'd be murdered; but when
we got into difficulty and could have tossed him over, we never made
a motion.

"On the seventy-third day out, came the terror. The wind is from the
southeast. There is little light. The sea is high, and everything is
in a smother. We took down the topsails and furled the spanker. The
wind was getting up, and the call came for all hands on deck. We had
watch and watch until then. That's four hours off and four hours
on. When the watch below left their bunks, that was the last of
our sleep on the El Dorado. A gale was blowing by midnight. We were
working all the time, taking in sail and making all snug. There was
plenty of water on deck. Schooner was bumping hard on the waves and
making water through her seams. We took the pumps for a spell.

"We had no sleep next day. In the morning we set all sails in a lull,
but took them down again quickly, because the wind shifted to the
northwest, and a big gale came on. Now began trouble with the cargo. We
had the hold filled with lumber, planks and such, and on the deck we
had a terrible load of big logs. These were to hold up the walls and
roofs in the mines of Chile. Many of them were thirty-six feet long,
and very big around. They were the trunks of very big trees. They
were piled very high, and the whole of them was fastened by chains
to keep them from rolling or being broken loose by seas. In moving
about the ship we had to walk on this rough heap of logs, which lifted
above the rails. They were hard to walk on in a perfectly smooth sea,
and with the way the El Dorado rolled and pitched, we could hardly
keep from being thrown into the ocean.