All the day following, and all the night, we had hard gales, with a great sea, and much hail and rain. The next morning we had gusts so violent, that it was impossible to stand the deck; they brought whole sheets of water all the way from Cape Notch, which was a league distant, quite over the deck. They did not last more than a minute, but were so frequent, that the cables were kept in a constant strain, and there was the greatest reason to fear that they would give way. It was a general opinion that the Swallow could not possibly ride it out, and some of the men were so strongly prepossessed with the notion of her being lost, that they fancied they saw some of her people coming over the rocks towards our ship. The weather continued so bad, till Saturday the seventh, that we could send no boat to enquire after her; but the gale being then more moderate, a boat was dispatched about four o’clock in the morning, which, about the same hour in the afternoon, returned with an account that the ship was safe, but that the fatigue of the people had been incredible, the whole crew having been upon the deck near three days and three nights. At midnight the gusts returned, though not with equal violence, with hail, sleet and snow. The weather being now extremely cold, and the people never dry, I got up, the next morning, eleven bales of thick woollen stuff, called Fearnought, which is provided by the government, and set all the taylors to work to make them into jackets, of which every man in the ship had one.

I ordered these jackets to be made very large, allowing, one with another, two yards and thirty-four inches of the cloth

Voyaging Accounts