ship subsided into her usual orderly discipline. The northwester still
continued, with a clear blue sky, without a cloud overhead by day, and a
bright cold moon by night. It blew so hard for the three succeeding days,
that we could not carry more than close reefed topsails to it, and a reefed
foresail. Indeed, towards six bells in the forenoon watch, it came
thundering down with such violence, and the sea increased so much, that we
had to hand the fore--topsail.

This was by no means an easy job. "Ease her a bit," said the first
lieutenant, "there--shake the wind out of her sails for a moment, until the
men get the canvass"--whirl, a poor fellow pitched off the lee fore yardarm
into the sea. "Up with the helm--heave him the bight of a rope." We kept
away, but all was confusion, until an American midshipman, one of the
prisoners on board, hove the bight of a rope at him. The man got it under
his arms, and after hauling him along for a hundred yards at the least--and
one may judge of the velocity with which he was dragged through the water,
by the fact that it took the united strain of ten powerful men to get him
in--he was brought safely on board, pale and blue, when we found that the
running of the rope had crushed in his broad chest below his arms, as if it
had been a girl's waist, cutting into the very muscles of it and of his
back half an inch deep. He had to be bled before he could breathe, and it
was an hour before the circulation could be restored, by the joint
exertions of the surgeon and gunroom steward, chafing him with spirits and
camphor, after he had been stripped and stowed away between the blankets in
his hammock.

The same afternoon we fell in with a small prize to the squadron in the
Chesapeake, a dismasted schooner, manned by a prize crew of a midshipman
and six men. She had a signal of distress, an American ensign, with the
union down, hoisted on the jury--mast, across which there was rigged a