Adventure Magazine Cover, March 20, 1925 — page 169: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Atlantic Takes a Hand desperate work at the wheel. A slight yaw was dangerous. A bad one meant that the ship would be struck broadside on by a mass of water weighing thousands of tons and moving thirty miles an hour. Willett was in for it. Rain was falling heavily. He was approaching the coast uncertain of his position, and he clung to the bridge, dashing the water out of his eyes with a heavy, impatient hand, while he waited for a report from aft, where the third mate was trying in vain to get a sounding with the deep sea lead. As long as there was plenty of water under the keel things might be worse. Willett could only hold on, trail oil bags, watch the barometer and pray for the sea to moderate. To change course now was to precipitate the disastér he sought to avoid. He had not intended to allow Young to take the wheel, but the wheel was relieved before he realized it, and when Willett did look inside he saw a mate standing at the detective’s elbow, conning the ship in a low voice. Young’s face was white and scared, but he was obeying orders mechanically and the ship was steered as well as before. The third mate reported bottom at one hundred and ten fathoms and brought a sample of gray sand which the soap in the end of the lead had brough up from the bottom. Willett pored over the chart, seeking to verify his position. Gray sand! There was gray sand at that depth in scattered spots for twenty miles along the coast. He went to the bridge again, oblivious to the pitching and heaving of his vessel in his anxiety over her position. Night was falling, and in a few hours more he would be driven either into the harbor or on the lee shore of Long Island or Jersey. Up and down the deck heaved. Blinding wind-driven rain cut into his face. Strain- ing plates creaked underfoot; the rigging overhead sang and boomed in the gale. So, for two hours. Men gathered at the fore- castle door and, watching their chance, dashed across the decks knee-deep in water, racing to avoid being caught by a wave as they went to felieve the watch on duty. With his face exultant Schwartz pounded up the bridge-ladder toward the chart house and stopped an instant, stooping over the flag locker. Then it happened. Topping the bridge ladder, Schwartz had noticed that the lashing holding the flag 151 locker in place had been worn through and broken by the pitching, so that the heavy box was rocking and about to break loose. He had stooped to pull the lashing tight and retie it. Inside, over the wheel, the mate was turning over the ship to his relief, and for an instant his attention was dis- tracted. Young, catching sight of the man he suspected, knowing that it was now or never that the other must recover his emerald, and seeing him stoop mear the locker, had leaned away from the compass to peer out of the chart house door. In that instant one of those bigger, seventh seas, which had raced clear across the Atlantic gathering momentum for this blow, swept mountainously out of the dark- ness astern. From aft came a desperate shout. A seaman half-way across the well- deck took one look and jumped like a mad- man for the weather rigging, climbing as high as he could and wrapping himself around the shrouds like a limpet. The Sachem dropped into the trough, yawed to port, swung broadside and began to roll. Instinctively Captain Willett held his breath. About that roll was something awe- inspiring and deadly. It was so slow. The deck slanted to starboard as a great tree falls before the ax, leaning a little at first, then faster and faster. Willett’s body was accustomed to the normal rolling of his ship in a gale. She rolled to the angle at which she should have paused, but when that point came the deck was still falling away under his feet. The lifeboat carried aft of the bridge swung out in its davits, and the foam-smeared wave seemed to reach up and touch it. Touch it—no more; yet the boat was gone, crushed to match wood, and the heavy triple block of the boat-falls was flung in an arc ten feet upward onto the bridge. Its hook tore a six-inch gouge from the rail at his elbow. Still the Sachem rolled. The well deck was buried in green water. ‘She must be over forty degrees!’’ Willett whispered to himself. The ship paused on her beam ends, and in that instant of time, before the next wave had time to strike Willett pulled himself hand over hand along the rail and clawed his way into the chart house and the wheel over a deck too steeply pitched to walk upon unsupported. The mate was rglling against the lee side, trying to crawl to his feet. Young still clutched the wheel, though he had lost his ANICLOOO (©