Free Trade Wind by M. M. Kaye

Miss Hollis, who had not only managed to dress herself (no mean feat in that rolling, pitching pandemonium), but had actually made her way to the saloon where she had drunk a pannikin of cold coffee and eaten a hearty meal consisting of salt beef, pickles and biscuits. After which, on finding that there was still no assistance that she could render to Amelia, she had returned for a time to her own cabin. But it had been far too dark to read or sew (even if the violent motion of the ship had not precluded either occupation) and there had been nothing to do but he and look up at the ceiling, or endure with closed eyes the unpleasant sensation of being lifted up for dizzying, interminable moments of time, only to be dropped again with a long jarring rush that seemed as though it must end with the entire vessel being engulfed and dragged under by the enormous seas.
    Hero had always thought of herself as being sensible and level-headed; but the gloom and the incessant creaking, grinding, deafening tumult, and above all those terrible downward swoops into unseen gulfs, began to tell on her nerves, and presently the uncomfortable thought crept into her mind that the narrow, high-sided berth in which she lay bore a depressing resemblance to a coffin.
    She had heard stories of ships that had vanished in storms and never been heard of again, and once, when she was a little girl, one of her Crayne cousins had told her how, when on a voyage to Rio de Janeiro, he had seen a great ship under full topsails slide into a long watery hollow and disappear—run under in a wild waste of ocean. If a similar fate should overtake the Norah Crayne , she would know nothing about it until the cabin door burst in and the black water swirled up to the ceiling. She would not even be able to get out of her berth, but would be trapped there and drowned, and the whole, desperate, straining ship would become one vast wooden tomb, sinking slowly down through leagues of cold darkness until it came to rest at last on the quiet ooze of the sea floor.
    Perhaps the frenzied motion of the ship was making her a little lightheaded, for her imagination suddenly presented her with a vivid and startlingly unpleasant picture of great eels and octopuses slithering down the wrecked companionways and through the cabin doors to batten on the bodies of the drowned, while sharks swam hungrily past the blind portholes and between the tangled rigging outside…
    Hero dismissed the horrid fancy with an effort; angry with herself for entertaining such absurd notions and beginning to wonder if it had been really wise to eat salt beef and pickles for breakfast. For there was no disguising the fact that she was not feeling at all well, and it could not possibly be seasickness, because Mr Marrowby had told her that once she had got her “sea-legs’ she would never need to suffer from such a thing again. And she was sure she had acquired those weeks ago. But either Mr Marrowby was wrong or else the heat had had a deleterious effect upon the beef, for she was certainly feeling distinctly queasy.
    The cabin tilted at an acute angle as the ship struggled up the long slope of a watery mountain, and as it reached the top grey daylight peered through the porthole and the rain and spray hissed against the glass as the Norah Crayne balanced briefly on an even keel. Then the bows crashed down and they were falling again, rushing downward into darkness with the seas roaring up and over the glass; down and down until it seemed impossible that they could ever rise again; to bring up with a shock and a jar and a savage roll, as the dead weight of hundreds of tons of water swept across the deck, and the Norah Crayne struggled upwards once more; sluggish, dizzy and punch-drunk, but still gallantly fighting back.
    “I can’t stand this!” said Hero, speaking aloud into the stifling, heavy darkness: “If I stay down here I shall only be sick, and I will not be sick. I will not!”
    She crawled out