Head winds, which began with a fresh breeze off King's Ferry and culminated in a three days' hurricane, knocked us about the Tappan Zee, driving us from point to cove; and for forty-eight hours I saw our gunboats, under bare poles, tossing on the gray fury of the Hudson, and a sloop of war, sprit on the rocks, buried under the sprouting spray below Dobbs Ferry. Safer had we been in the open ocean off the Narrows, where the great winds drive bellowing from the Indies to the Pole; but these yelling gales that burst from the Highlands struck us like the successive discharges of cannon, and the Wind-Flower staggered and heeled, reeling through the Tappan Zee as a great water-fowl, crippled and stung to terror, drives blindly into the spindrift, while shot on shot strikes, yet ends not the frantic struggle.
Once we were beaten back so far that, in the dark whirlwind of dawn, I saw a fire-ball go whirring aloft and spatter the eastern horizon. Then, through the shrilling of the tempest, a gun roared to starboard, and at the flash a gun to port boomed, shaking our decks. We had beaten back within range of the British lines, and the batteries on Cock Hill opened on us, and a guard-ship to the west had joined in. Southeast a red glare leaped, and died out as Fort Tryon fired a mortar, while the Wind-Flower, bulwarks awash, heeled and heeled, staggering to the shelter of Tetard's Hill. Southward we saw the beacons ablaze, marking the chevaux de frise below Fort Lee, and on the Jersey shore the patrol's torches flashing along the fort road. But we had set a bit o' rag under Tetard's Hill, and slowly we crept north again past Yonkers, struggling desperately at Phillips, but making Boar's Hill and Dobbs Ferry by mid-afternoon. And that night the wind shifted so suddenly that from Tappan to Tarrytown was but a jack-snipe's twist, and we lay snug in Haverstraw Bay, under the lee of the Heights of North Castle, scarce an hour's canoe-paddle from the wharf where we had embarked four days before.
And now delay followed delay, a gunboat holding us twenty-four hours at Dobbs Ferry--why, I never knew--and, at the Chain, two days' delay were required before they let us pass.
When at last we signaled West Point, at the close of one long, calm August afternoon, through the flaming mountain sunset, the black fortress beckoned us to anchor, nor had we any choice but to obey the silent summons from those grim heights, looming like a thunder-cloud against the cinders of the dying sun.