Serpent Wind

Only peoples who live on the afflicted coasts will ever know the furious hell that is a hurricane.  And even they are lucky, in one respect.  They only have to endure its destructive violence once for a few hours, twice if the eye passes over them, the winds then attacking from different directions.  They will still have to cope with the grim realities of the aftermath, but the fury of the hurricane is relatively brief.  But for those unfortunate souls unlucky enough to be entrapped by such a hostile tempest while at sea, the torture must be endured much, much longer in the frenzied jaws of the swirling storm.

Sometimes the waves of the great oceans are described as walls or mountains.  The waves generated by the most powerful hurricanes make mockery of such descriptions.  For walls and mountains are sometimes solitary beasts.  The great grinding wheels of destruction send out frenzied, ferocious armies of gargantuan waves.  And like the chaos of congested close combat, the multitudinous waves beat on each other with a death fury.

The surviving galleons were dwarfed by the massive raging waves.  Each of them held to a fine thread of survival.  Each had but one faint hope – keep the bow aimed forward and run before the fury of the storm.  A seemingly simple maneuver, yet one that is nearly impossible to execute when your rudder is being beaten like the face of a defenseless boxer.

Many of the huge waves crashed angrily over the decks of the galleons.  The large wooden ships were merely wine corks floating in the bath of an angry kicking child.  Sometimes the massive waves seemed to hit them from both sides at once.  Other times the waves would lift the great galleons high into the air.  But then they would suddenly drop away underneath them, leaving the heavily laden wooden castles to fall hard against the rough, little yielding floor of water.

There were very few passengers who did not suffer the sickness of the drunken sea.  The violence of the storm-tossed sea was so great that even the most experienced seamen suffered some nausea.  The bile stench of vomit permeated many of the cabins and companionways.  And cleaning the smelly mess was out of the question, with bodies being tossed around in the cabins like human dice.  Stomachs had emptied in the first hours of the storm.  Now, days later, the regurgitation was more akin to the retching convulsions of death.  And still the hurricane raged.

The winds did not howl.  Howling can never begin to describe the shrieking fury of such winds.  Perhaps only a demon choir from the lowest depths of hell could re-create such an opera of terror.  Or maybe it is merely the intense amplification of the sound of the whip, the second before its lash cuts flesh.  Perhaps the typhoon song, like the secret names of God, can never be uttered by living creatures.

Some of the galleons were lost in the first collision with the hurricane.  The hammering gusts of wind snapped the masts of those that failed to take in their sails in time.  Others were caught broadside by the relentlessly ruthless waves, causing them to broach and sink.  Two of the galleons had been straggling behind the fleet as it left Havana.  They were lucky in their delay, being only grazed by the southern fringe of the fierce storm.  They were able to turn back to the safety of the Cuban port.

But life had taken a malignantly violent turn for the other galleons.  Some were cut to pieces on the rocks and reefs of the Florida straits as the storm skirted the north coast of Cuba. One by one the hurricane devoured the galleons, swallowing them into the dark stomach of the sea. And each time a galleon disappeared beneath the waves, there were no survivors.  The spiraling storm was insatiable in its hunger for death.

Yet like a yo-yo rolling itself up a divine string tied to the finger of God, the hurricane swirled ever westward.  Except for the lucky two that had escaped back to Havana, the remaining galleons had been flogged into a forced death march through the Gulf of Mexico.  Each in its turn perished into the darkness of the storm, until only three galleons remained.  And every fiber of their timbers was now straining at the precipice of destruction.