Figure this, and then you will very faintly realize what “taking the lee-earing” in a gale at sea means.
The cries of the men aloft, and the beating of the canvas, sounded like an unearthly contest in mid-air; but they ceased presently, and then the hands came hurrying down the rigging and fell to the halyards. Holdsworth sprang on to the poop, his cap gone, his hair blown about his eyes, and roared out orders, while the captain, more easy in his mind about his spars, went aft and hung about the binnacle, watching the compass often.
The ship was now under double-reefed topsails, and reeling through the darkness almost bare of sail. The wind was increasing in violence every five minutes, and an ugly Atlantic sea was running right athwart the ship’s course, hurling great waves against her starboard beam, which ran in water-spouts of foam as high as the maintop, and was blown in big, hissing flakes through the rigging to leeward. It was soon deemed expedient to close reef the topsails; but even under these mere streaks of canvas the Meteor lay over to the gale down to her water-ways, with the water bubbling in her lee-scuppers. But luckily the gale was right abeam, and the vessel could hold her course; but her speed was comparatively small, and she labored heavily.
So passed the darkest hours of the night. At four o’clock the gale was at its worst. They had rigged up a hurricane-house in the mizzen-rigging—a square of tarpaulin, which the wind flattened hard against the shrouds—and under this shelter sat Holdsworth and the captain, scarce able to hear their own voices, pitched in the loudest key, amid the howling of the tempest. Once Holdsworth went below to look at the glass, and came back saying it was steady. The skipper roared that he never before remembered so sudden a gale, and Holdsworth owned that only once was he so caught—in the Pacific, when they lost their foretop-mast.
There was nothing more to be done, unless they hove the ship to; but this was not needful. The dawn broke at five, and the pale, cheerless light illuminated a wild and dreary scene of tumbling desolate waters billowing in mountains to the horizon. The Meteor, almost under bare poles, her yards pointed to the gale, her ropes and lines blown in semicircles to leeward, labored heavily, caught now by a sea that threw her on her beam-ends, and now swooping into a chasm walled with boiling green water, making the gale screech like a million steam-whistles through her rigging, as she drove up against it, while coiling tongues of water ran in cataracts up her glistening sides and fell in dead weights upon her deck. The sky, from horizon to horizon, was a dark lead color, along which under-clouds, in appearance resembling volumes of smoke, were swept along, torn and rent, and discharging at intervals quick, biting showers of rain.