er in front of me gave a violent yaw, turning,
perhaps, through twenty degrees; and almost at the same moment one shout
followed another from on board; I could hear feet pounding on the
companion ladder; and I knew that the two drunkards had at last been
interrupted in their quarrel and awakened to a sense of their disaster.

I lay down flat in the bottom of that wretched skiff, and devoutly
recommended my spirit to its Maker. At the end of the straits, I made
sure we must fall into some bar of raging breakers, where all my
troubles would be ended speedily; and though I could, perhaps, bear to
die, I could not bear to look upon my fate as it approached.

So I must have lain for hours, continually beaten to and fro upon the
billows, now and again wetted with flying sprays, and never ceasing to
expect death at the next plunge. Gradually weariness grew upon me; a
numbness, an occasional stupor, fell upon my mind even in the midst of
my terrors; until sleep at last supervened, and in my sea-tossed coracle
I lay and dreamed of home and the old tavern "Benbow."

It was broad day when I awoke, and found myself tossing at the southwest
end of Treasure Island. The sun was up, but was still hid from me behind
the great bulk of the Spyglass, which on this side descended almost to
the sea in formidable cliffs.

Haulbowline Head and Mizzenmast Hill were at my elbow; the hill bare and
dark, the head bound with cliffs forty or fifty feet high, and fringed
with great masses of fallen rock. I was scarce a quarter of a mile to
seaward, and it was my first thought to paddle in and land.

That notion was soon given over. Among the fallen rocks the breakers
spouted and bellowed; loud reverberations, heavy sprays flying and
falling, succeeded one another from second to second; and I saw myself,
if I ventured nearer, dashed to death upon the rough shore, or spending
my strength in vain to scale the beetling crags.

Nor was that all; for crawling together on flat tables of rock, or
letting themselves drop into the sea with loud reports, I beheld huge
slimy monsters--soft snails, as it were, of incredible bigness--two or
three score of them together, making the rocks to echo with their
barkings.

I have understood since that they were sea lions, and entirely harmless.
But the look of them added to the difficulty of the shore and the high
running of the surf, was more than enough to disgust me of that landing
place. I felt willing rather