The sea, flattened down in the heavier gusts, would uprise and overwhelm
both ends of the Nan-Shan in snowy rushes of foam, expanding wide,
beyond both rails, into the night. And on this dazzling sheet, spread
under the blackness of the clouds and emitting a bluish glow, Captain
MacWhirr could catch a desolate glimpse of a few tiny specks black as
ebony, the tops of the hatches, the battened companions, the heads of
the covered winches, the foot of a mast. This was all he could see of
his ship. Her middle structure, covered by the bridge which bore him,
his mate, the closed wheelhouse where a man was steering shut up with
the fear of being swept overboard together with the whole thing in one
great crash--her middle structure was like a half-tide rock awash upon a
coast. It was like an outlying rock with the water boiling up, streaming
over, pouring off, beating round--like a rock in the surf to which
shipwrecked people cling before they let go--only it rose, it sank, it
rolled continuously, without respite and rest, like a rock that should
have miraculously struck adrift from a coast and gone wallowing upon the
sea.

The Nan-Shan was being looted by the storm with a senseless, destructive
fury: trysails torn out of the extra gaskets, double-lashed awnings
blown away, bridge swept clean, weather-cloths burst, rails twisted,
light-screens smashed--and two of the boats had gone already. They had
gone unheard and unseen, melting, as it were, in the shock and smother
of the wave. It was only later, when upon the white flash of another
high sea hurling itself amidships, Jukes had a vision of two pairs of
davits leaping black and empty out of the solid blackness, with one
overhauled fall flying and an iron-bound block capering in the air, that
he became aware of what had happened within about three yards of his
back.