A Fight With A Cannon

La vieuville was suddenly cut short by a cry of despair, and a the same
time a noise was heard wholly unlike any other sound. The cry and sounds
came from within the vessel.

The captain and lieutenant rushed toward the gun-deck but could not get
down. All the gunners were pouring up in dismay.

Something terrible had just happened.

One of the carronades of the battery, a twenty-four pounder, had broken
loose.

This is the most dangerous accident that can possibly take place on
shipboard. Nothing more terrible can happen to a sloop of was in open sea
and under full sail.

A cannon that breaks its moorings suddenly becomes some strange,
supernatural beast. It is a machine transformed into a monster. That short
mass on wheels moves like a billiard-ball, rolls with the rolling of the
ship, plunges with the pitching goes, comes, stops, seems to meditate,
starts on its course again, shoots like an arrow from one end of the
vessel to the other, whirls around, slips away, dodges, rears, bangs,
crashes, kills, exterminates. It is a battering ram capriciously
assaulting a wall. Add to this the fact that the ram is of metal, the wall
of wood.

It is matter set free; one might say, this eternal slave was avenging
itself; it seems as if the total depravity concealed in what we call
inanimate things has escaped, and burst forth all of a sudden; it appears
to lose patience, and to take a strange mysterious revenge; nothing more
relentless than this wrath of the inanimate. This enraged lump leaps like
a panther, it has the clumsiness of an elephant, the nimbleness of a
mouse, the obstinacy of an ox, the uncertainty of the billows, the zigzag
of the lightning, the deafness of the grave. It weighs ten thousand
pounds, and it rebounds like a child's ball. It spins and then abruptly
darts off at right angles.

And what is to be done? How put an end to it? A tempest ceases, a cyclone
passes over, a wind dies down, a broken mast can be replaced, a leak can
be stopped, a fire extinguished, but what will become of this enormous
brute of bronze. How can it be captured? You can reason with a bulldog,
astonish a bull, fascinate a boa, frighten a tiger, tame a lion; but you
have no resource against this monster, a loose cannon. You can not kill
it, it is dead; and at the same time it lives. It lives with a sinister
life which comes to it from the infinite. The deck beneath it gives it
full swing. It is moved by the ship, which is moved by the sea, which is
moved by the wind. This destroyer is a toy. The ship, the waves, the
winds, all play with it, hence its frightful animation. What is to be done
with this apparatus? How fetter this stupendous engine of destruction? How
anticipate its comings