The Atlantic Monthly, page 79 by Various Authors
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-tables, while the swinging-lamp oscillated drearily overhead, and sent uncertain shadows into the state-room doors. There is the story which Vivian Grey told us of the beautiful clipper "Nighthawk,"--her who sailed with the "Bonita" and "Driving-Scud" and "Mazeppa," in the great Sea-Derby, whose course lay round the world. How, one Christmas-day, off the pitch of Cape Horn, he, standing on her deck, saw her dive bodily into a sea, and all of her to the mainmast was lost in ocean,--her stately spars seemingly rising out of blue water unsupported by any ship beneath;--it seemed an age to him, he said, before there was any forecastle to be seen rising from the brine. Also, how, caught off that same wild cape, they had to make sail in a reef-topsail-breeze to claw off its terrible rocks, seen but too plainly under their Ice. How, as he said, "about four in the afternoon it seemed to blow worse than ever, and you could see the staunch boat was pressed down under her canvas, and every spar was groaning and quivering, while the ship went bodily to leeward." And next, "how she seemed to come to herself, as it were, with a long staggering roll, and to spring to windward as if relieved of a dead weight; for the gale had broken, and the foam-belt along the cliffs grew dimmer and dimmer, and the land fainter and fainter. And then," he said, "to hear the fo'castle-talk, you would have said that never was such a ship, such spars, such a captain, such seamanship, and such luck, since Father Jason cleared the 'Argo' from the Piræus, for Colchis and a market."
Or I might tell you how Dr. ----, the ship-surgeon, was in that Collard steamer which ran down the fishing-boat in the fog off Cape Race,--and how, looking from his state-room window, he saw a mighty cliff so near that he could almost lay his hand upon it. How Fanshaw was on board the "Sea-King" when she was burned, off Point Linus,--and how he hung in the chains till he was taken off, and his hair was repeatedly set on fire by the women--emigrant-passengers--