152
The Wireless Operator
served as breakwaters to the sea and broke the sweep of the winds. When at last the little ship turned eastward at George’s Island, and faced the storm with the last vestige of protection gone, she trembled and shook in the grasp of the roaring blasts.
A smother of foam was the sea. Waves rose and broke in incredible confusion. The waters were churned as by a giant hand. The racing winds whipped the crests from the combers and flung them forward in sheets of blinding spray. Fog drove onward in clouds, now completely hiding the sea, now lifting momentarily, to expose the wild waste of tossing waters. The fury of the storm was indescribable.
Mountain high indeed seemed the waves. Before the bow of the Iroquois they rose up, up, up, as high as the men on the bridge, then rushed savagely at the little boat, seemingly bent on her destruction. Down they crashed, and the nose of the cutter was buried in a smother of foaming water. Sometimes the crests swept completely over the bow, pouring over the forward deck in great floods that raced aft and went foaming out of the scuppers. Now Henry saw why the decks had been cleared of all movable objects. Indeed, as he watched the smashing combers crash over the bow, he feared that the big guns themselves would be torn from their foundations on the iron