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The mighty mass struck her stem frame with the weight of a
hundred thousand tons of water, and drove her forward as a boy launches
his toy-boat on a pond; and though she made so little resistance, stove
in the dead lights and the port frames, burst through the cabin
bulkheads, and washed out all the furniture, and Colonel Kenealy in his
nightgown with a table in his arms borne on water three feet deep, and
carried him under the poop awning away to the lee quarter-deck scuppers,
and flooded the lower deck. Above, it swept the quarter-deck clean of
everything except the shrieking helmsmen; washed Dodd away like a cork,
and would have carried him overboard if he had not brought up against the
mainmast and grasped it like grim death, half drowned, half stunned,
sorely bruised, and gasping like a porpoise ashore.
He held on by the mast in water and foam, panting. He rolled his
despairing eyes around; the bulwarks fore and aft were all in ruins, with
wide chasms, as between the battlements of some decayed castle; and
through the gaps he saw the sea yawning wide for him.


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