Whatever you do, make westing! make westing!
--Sailing directions for Cape Horn.
For seven weeks the Mary Rogers had been between 5O degrees south in the Atlantic and 5O degrees south in the Pacific, which meant that for seven weeks she had been struggling to round Cape Horn.For seven weeks she had been either in dirt, or close to dirt, save once, and then, following upon six days of excessive dirt, which she had ridden out under the shelter of the redoubtable Terra del Fuego coast, she had almost gone ashore during a heavy swell in the dead calm that had suddenly fallen.For seven weeks she had wrestled with the Cape Horn graybeards, and in return been buffeted and smashed by them.She was a wooden ship, and her ceaseless straining had opened her seams, so that twice a day the watch took its turn at the pumps.
The Mary Rogers was strained, the crew was strained, and big Dan Cullen, master, was likewise strained.Perhaps he was strained most of all, for upon him rested the responsibility of that titanic struggle.He slept most of the time in his clothes, though he rarely slept.He haunted the deck at night, a great, burly, robust ghost, black with the sunburn of thirty years of sea and hairy as an orang-outang.He, in turn, 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 degrees, 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 north-west, 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 maintopsail 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 sun.
Once, for ten minutes, the sun shone at midday, and ten minutes afterward a new gale was piping up, both watches were shortening sail, and all was buried in the obscurity of a driving snow-squall.For a fortnight, once, Captain Dan Cullen was without a meridian or a chronometer sight.Rarely did he know his position within half of a degree, except when in sight of land; for sun and stars remained hidden behind the sky, and it was so gloomy that even at the best the horizons were poor for accurate observations.A gray gloom shrouded the world.The clouds were gray; the great driving seas were leaden gray; the smoking crests were a gray churning; even the occasional albatrosses were gray, while the snow-flurries were not white, but gray, under the sombre pall of the heavens.
Life on board the Mary Rogers was gray--gray and gloomy.The faces of the sailors were blue-gray; they were afflicted with sea-cuts and sea-boils, and suffered exquisitely.They were shadows of men.For seven weeks, in the forecastle or on deck, they had not known what it was to be dry.They had forgotten what it was to sleep out a watch, and all watches it was, "All hands on deck!" They caught snatches of agonized sleep, and they slept in their oilskins ready for the everlasting call.So weak and worn were they that it took both watches to do the work of one.That was why both watches were on deck so much of the time.And no shadow of a man could shirk duty.Nothing less than a broken leg could enable a man to knock off work; and there were two such, who had been mauled and pulped by the seas that broke aboard.
One other man who was the shadow of a man was George Dorety.He was the only passenger on board, a friend of the firm, and he had elected to make the voyage for his health.But seven weeks of Cape Horn had not bettered his health.He gasped and panted in his bunk through the long, heaving nights; and when on deck he was so bundled up for warmth that he resembled a peripatetic old-clothes shop.At midday, eating at the cabin table in a gloom so deep that the swinging sea-lamps burned always, he looked as blue-gray as the sickest, saddest man for'ard.Nor did gazing across the table at Captain Dan Cullen have any cheering effect upon him.Captain Cullen chewed and scowled and kept silent.The scowls were for God, and with every chew he reiterated the sole thought of his existence, which was make westing.He was a big, hairy brute, and the sight of him was not stimulating to the other's appetite.He looked upon George Dorety as a Jonah, and told him so, once each meal, savagely transferring the scowl from God to the passenger and back again.