to check them. They popped up like corks released from the bottom
of a pail of water. There was no system to them, no stability.
They were hollow, maniacal seas. They were eighty feet high at
the least. They were not seas at all. They resembled no sea a man
had ever seen. They were splashes, monstrous splashes, that is
all, splashes that were eighty feet high. Eighty! They were more
than eighty. They went over our mastheads. They were spouts,
explosions. They were drunken. They fell anywhere, anyhow. They
jostled one another, they collided. They rushed together and
collapsed upon one another, or fell apart like a thousand
waterfalls all at once. It was no ocean any man ever dreamed of,
that hurricane-center. It was confusion thrice confounded. It was
anarchy. It was a hell-pit of sea water gone mad.

The Petite Jeanne? I don't know. The Heathen told me afterward
that he did not know. She was literally torn apart, ripped wide
open, beaten into a pulp, smashed into kindling wood,
annihilated. When I came to, I was in the water, swimming
automatically, though I was about two-thirds drowned. How I got
there I had no recollection. I remembered seeing the Petite
Jeanne fly to pieces at what must have been the instant that my
own consciousness was buffeted out of me. But there I was, with
nothing to do but make the best of it, and in that best there was
little promise. The wind was blowing again, the sea was much
smaller and more regular, and I knew that I had passed through
the center. Fortunately, there were no sharks about. The
hurricane had dissipated the ravenous horde that had surrounded
the death ship.

It was about midday when the Petite Jeanne went to pieces, and it