was haunted by one thought of action, a sailing direction for the Horn:
_Whatever you do, make westing! make westing!_ It was an obsession. He
thought of nothing else, except, at times, to blaspheme God for sending
such bitter weather.

_Make westing!_ He hugged the Horn, and a dozen times lay hove to with
the iron Cape bearing east-by-north, or north-north-east, a score of
miles away. And each time the eternal west wind smote him back and he
made easting. He fought gale after gale, south to 64°, inside the
antarctic drift-ice, and pledged his immortal soul to the Powers of
Darkness for a bit of westing, for a slant to take him around. And he
made easting. In despair, he had tried to make the passage through the
Straits of Le Maire. Halfway through, the wind hauled to the north 'ard
of northwest, the glass dropped to 28.88, and he turned and ran before a
gale of cyclonic fury, missing, by a hair's breadth, piling up the _Mary
Rogers_ on the black-toothed rocks. Twice he had made west to the Diego
Ramirez Rocks, one of the times saved between two snow-squalls by
sighting the gravestones of ships a quarter of a mile dead ahead.

Blow! Captain Dan Cullen instanced all his thirty years at sea to prove
that never had it blown so before. The _Mary Rogers_ was hove to at the
time he gave the evidence, and, to clinch it, inside half an hour the
_Mary Rogers_ was hove down to the hatches. Her new main-topsail and
brand new spencer were blown away like tissue paper; and five sails,
furled and fast under double gaskets, were blown loose and stripped from
the yards. And before morning the _Mary Rogers_ was hove down twice
again, and holes were knocked in her bulwarks to ease her decks from
the weight of ocean that pressed her down.

On an average of once a week Captain Dan Cullen caught glimpses of the