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   At about seven p.m. on Monday, June 21, darkness gathered in the worst seas of the whole storm. Field had never experienced anything remotely like this freak hurricane, but he remained on deck hour after hour, day after day, refusing to huddle below decks on Niagara  while other men risked their lives for his cable. Wire-squadron flagship Niagara, both bigger and newer than the expedition's other cable ship, Agamemnon, did not suffer as badly from the storm. But she still rolled thirty degrees constantly, requiring Field to keep clinging to the poop rail for dear life--literally. He understood that there would be no turning Niagara for any man washed or blown overboard, not even the expedition's master and commander himself. 

     After countless hours of this, drenched, wind-chilled, with muscles burning and stomach rebelling, Field finally headed below for a brief respite. Men hugged masts and pillars and lashed themselves into bunks. Crockery shattered, pots dumped scalding soup and coffee, ankle-deep water rushed back and forth across the decks.  Dodging massive chairs, tables, and kegs all on the loose, Field reached his cabin and hung deperately onto his bunk.

   Agamemnon was still afloat but in grave trouble, burying her overburdenred bow in wave after wave. The ship's master (who today would be called the "first mate"), a sailor named Moriarty, thought that Agamemnon had been unseaworthy under normal circumstances and was a deathtrap in such a storm as they now battled. Electrician James Burn Russell agreed, recording in his diary,

     "The scene was alarming and beyond my power to describe. She lurched her gunnels under. All the windows on the weather side were smashed. The sea came gushing in like a torrent and over the deck and through each door. In the cabin next our room, three clerks sleep. One of them was in bed in the topmost of two bunks. The sea cleared both away and landed poor Lundy down amid the wreck."  The inrushing water, in other words, was powerful enough to blast a fully grown man clean out of his upper bunk.

     After days of such battering, embedded Times of London reporter Nicholas Woods had abandoned hope, concluding that "the chances were strongtly in favour of her going to the bottom with all on board."   

 

     Little refreshed, Field clambered back to Niagara's main deck by ten a.m. A heavy spar snapped with a cannon-shot crack. Another crashed to the deck in a massive tangle of sails, lines, shrouds, and seamen.  A lifeboat washed from some other ship rushed by on the foaming waves. Field could only hang on, soaked, chilled, skin cracking from days of saltwater soaking, eyes burning, throat hoarse from yelling over the hurricane. The temperature was plunging, making it harder for crewmen to hang on aloft as they trimmed sails with bloodied hands and to stay aboard the reeling decks flooded with rushing water.

     Then a deck officer shouted, pointing forward. Field saw giant waves, ship-killing rogues bigger than any that had come before, rolling out of the distance and building into towering black vertical walls. The first wave arrived. Niagara began rising, gently for a moment, and then it felt like she was snatched up by the hand of God.