Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/363

 distinguished person it was they had the honor to travel with. I did not gratify their curiosity. Thus my reappearance in the Fatherland was exceedingly modest and untriumphant. But I was wide awake when my railroad train stopped in the station at Cologne, and I listened to the sound, so familiar from my boyhood days, of the church-clocks striking the hour, and when crossing the dear old Rhine I heard the rushing of its waters in the darkness.

Early in January I embarked with my family on the Hamburg steamship “Bavaria,” a vessel of some 2500 or 3000 tons, which would be considered nowadays quite small for an ocean liner, but which was then of the usual size. We had a terrible voyage. From the start, fierce head-winds were blowing and heavy seas rolling against us, under lowering skies. Some distance east of the Newfoundland banks, a hurricane struck us which lasted six days and nights, blowing now from one quarter and then from another, and sometimes seemingly from all points of the compass at the same time. The waves thundered against the sides of the ship with frightful force. They swept away all the bulwarks, all the boats, all the deck-houses, and having torn off the skylights, flooded the cabin with water. They knocked down the heavy lower spars from the masts, together with part of the rigging, so that the deck was covered with tangled wreckage. One night so large a quantity of water came down the smoke-stacks that there was danger of the fires being extinguished, and, we were afterwards told, as the room was filled with steam, the chief engineer had to keep the firemen at their task with an axe in one hand and a revolver in the other. The first night of the hurricane I had an experience which I cannot refrain from describing. Everyone who has gone through heavy gales at sea will remember that sometimes the storm-tossed ship will seem to rest for an instant on