CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.
PAT DOOLAN "CARRIES ON." Jorrocks's cry to put the helm up was instantly obeyed by the man at the wheel, who jammed it hard-a-port with all his strength.

The hands belonging to the watch on duty, at the same time, knowing with the aptitude of seamen what this order necessitated, rushed to the lee braces, easing them off without any further word of command, while those on the weather side were hauled in, thus squaring the yards and getting the ship round before the wind, when she ran off to the north-westwards, on a course almost at right angles to her former direction--which was on a bowline, with the sou'-south-east wind nearly on her beam.
"Hoot mon, what d'ye mean ?" shouted Mr Macdougall, when he had recovered from the surprise which the unexpected order of the boatswain, so rapidly carried out, had caused.

"Are ye gone clean daft ?" But Jorrocks had no need to explain the reason for his interference with the mate's duties.
As the vessel payed off, the sound of surf, loudly thundering against some rocky rampart projecting from the deep which opposed the onward roll of the ocean billows, was heard louder and louder; and, in another instant, Mr Macdougall and those who stood beside him on the poop held their breath with awe as the _Esmeralda_ glided by a triangular-shaped black peak that seemed as high as the foretopsail yard--so closely that they could apparently have touched it by merely stretching out their hands, while over it the waves, driven by the south wind, were breaking in columns of spray, flakes of which fell on the faces of all aft, as they looked over the side, and trembled at the narrowly-avoided danger.
"Whee-ew!" whistled Jorrocks through his teeth.

"That were a squeak, an' no mistake!" It was.
We had been saved by a miracle.
Five minutes, nay, half a minute longer on our previous course, and the _Esmeralda_ would, with the way she had on her, have been dashed to pieces on the jagged teeth of these isolated rocks standing in mid- ocean, when never a soul on board would have lived to tell the tale of her destruction; for, in the pale phosphorescent light emitted by the broken water surrounding the crag, some of the sailors averred, as we sheered by, that they saw several sharks plunging about--ready to devour any of us who might have tried to swim ashore had the vessel come to grief.
It was an escape to be thankful for to Him who watches over those who travel on the treacherous seas, and protects them from its perils "in the night, when no man seeth!" A dead stillness prevailed for a moment on board after the bustle of wearing the ship round had ceased, so that you might have heard a pin drop, as the saying is, although in the distance away astern the melancholy cadence of the waves breaking on Saint Paul's Islets was borne down to us on the wind.

As I stood in the waist, whither so far aft I had followed Jorrocks, I could have caught any words spoken on the poop above me, but I noted that Mr Macdougall didn't utter a syllable in continuance of the reprimand he had begun against the boatswain for his "officiousness," as he apparently considered his order to put the ship off her course.