In the absence of the wind and pressure the sea rose. It jumped, it
leaped, it soared straight toward the clouds. Remember, from every
point of the compass that inconceivable wind was blowing in toward the
center of calm. The result was that the seas sprang up from every
point of the compass. There was no wind 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 had
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 afterwards 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