A Ship in Distress
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squalls. Then it fell steadily, the dancing flakes driven in swirling clouds before the sweeping winds. At times the snow changed to rain, and was flung in blinding sheets against the little cutter.
Cautiously the Iroquois nosed her way down the channel, the water becoming rougher and rougher as she approached the open sea. Looking into the swirling, blinding curtain of fog and snow, Henry did not see how the captain could possibly find his way. But with chart and compass to direct him, and his wonderful seaman’s sense of direction to aid him, he took the cutter from buoy to buoy, along the channel, straight out again to the Ambrose Lightship.
With the open sea before him, the captain now confidently set the cutter upon the course he had plotted to reach, a point to leeward of the position forty-one north, seventy-one west, whither the Rayolite would likely have drifted. All the while wind and sea were making up, more and more tumultuously. In the wireless shack Henry tried again and again to reach the Rayolite. No one on board knew whether the unfinished tanker was equipped with wireless, but hour after hour, at intervals, Henry persisted in his attempt to get word from the helpless vessel. As the Iroquois continued on her way, the wind began to shift to the east, a fact that Henry noted