In the longitude of the
Azores there was a dead calm, and the whole fleet lay idle for days. Then
came a squall, with lightning. Several ships were struck. On one of them
six men were killed, and on the seventy-gun ship "Mars" a box of musket and
cannon cartridges blew up, killed ten men, and wounded twenty-one. A
storeship which proved to be sinking was abandoned and burned. Then a
pestilence broke out, and in some of the ships there were more sick than in
health.
On the 14th of September they neared the coast of Nova Scotia, and were in
dread of the dangerous shoals of Sable Island, the position of which they
did not exactly know. They groped their way in fogs till a fearful storm,
with thunder and lightning, fell upon them. The journalist of the voyage, a
captain in the regiment of Ponthieu, says, with the exaggeration common in
such cases, that the waves ran as high as the masts; and such was their
violence that a transport, dashing against the ship "Amazone," immediately
went down, with all on board. The crew of the "Prince d'Orange," half
blinded by wind and spray, saw the great ship "Caribou," without bowsprit
or main-topmast, driving towards them before the gale, and held their
breath in expectation of the shock as she swept close alongside and
vanished in the storm.
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