ten o'clock
I reckoned that , on board a well-disciplined , old-fashioned British man-o ' - war , the task of sending down royal and topgallant yards and masts and stowing all canvas would have been accomplished , under similar circumstances , in about twelve minutes , at the utmost ; but it took us thirty-five minutes by the ship 's clock . This I thought not at all bad , however ; for in the first place we were nothing like so heavily manned as a man-o ' - war of our size would have been , nor had our hands the constant practice in such evolutions that a frigate 's crew would have had . But the main thing was that our lady skipper was satisfied , and was good enough to say so . It remained intensely dark until close upon ten o'clock that night , when the thinnest imaginable suggestion of moonlight came filtering weakly through the dense curtain of cloud that now overspread the heavens , just enough of it to enable us to see objects close at hand and avoid hurting ourselves by running foul of them , as we had been doing while moving about the decks . The weather still remained stark calm , and the ship was rolling so furiously that I should not have been at all surprised to see the masts go over the side at any moment . The gear was all good and new , however , and held bravely ; but the motion was so intensely disagreeable , and we shipped so much water over both rails , flooding the main-deck and necessitating the battening down of the hatches , that at length Mrs Vansittart gave orders to start the engine , and the ship was then put stem-on to the swell , which had now become more regular , setting out from about North-North-East . This action brought us immediate relief , as it enabled the helmsman to keep the ship out of the trough , though the violent rolling was exchanged for almost as violent a pitching .