three o'clock
It was still very dark , and seen under the night from the little boat , the ocean and the sky seemed immense and terrible ; the great waves grew out of the obscurity ahead of them , rushing down upon the boat , big , swelling , silent , their crests occasionally hissing and breaking into irruptions of cold white froth . As one of them would draw near , the boat would rise upon it as though it would never stop , would hang a moment upon its summit and then topple into the black gulf that followed , sending the bitter icy spray high into the air . The wind blew steadily . Suddenly toward three o'clock it began to rain . Vandover , the engineer , all the five sailors , and two of the passengers were clothed . The rest of the passengers were little better than naked . Here and there a man had snatched a blanket from his berth , and one or two of them were wearing their trousers , but the rest were clothed for the most part only with their shirts and drawers .