He told me it was like being swept by a flood through a cavern.

They turned their backs to the squall; the skipper, it seems, got an oar over the stern to keep the boat before it, and for two or three minutes the end of the world had come through a deluge in a pitchy blackness.

The sea hissed "like twenty thousand kettles." That's his simile, not mine.

I fancy there was not much wind after the first gust; and he himself had admitted at the inquiry that the sea never got up that night to any extent.

He crouched down in the bows and stole a furtive glance back.