on an island a long way off, the sandy wave,
the wave before us, the wave that brings good tidings. But they were in
no mood for poetry. They began to be great, angry, roaring waves, like
the chiefs of charging clans, and though I tried to keep up my courage
with an excellent song by Mr. Newbolt, "Slung between the round shot in
Nombre Dios Bay," I soon found it useless, and pinned my soul to the
tiller. Every sea following caught my helm and battered it. I hung on
like a stout gentleman, and prayed to the seven gods of the land. My
companion said things were no worse than when we started. God forgive
him the courageous lie. The wind and the sea rose.

It was about opposite Southwold that the danger became intolerable, and
that I thought it could only end one way. Which way? The way out, my
honest Jingoes, which you are more afraid of than of anything else in
the world. We ran before it; we were already over-canvased, and she
buried her nose every time, so that I feared I should next be cold in
the water, seeing England from the top of a wave. Every time she rose
the jib let out a hundredweight of sea-water; the sprit buckled and
cracked, and I looked at the splice in the forestay to see if it yet
held. I looked a thousand times, and a thousand times the honest splice
that I had poked together in a pleasant shelter under Bungay Woods (in
the old times of peace, before ever the sons of the Achaians came to the
land) stood the strain. The sea roared over the fore-peak, and gurgled
out of the scuppers, and still we held on. Till (AEolus blowing much more
loudly, and, what you may think a lie, singing through the rigging,
though we were before the wind) opposite Aldeburgh I thought she could
not bear it any more.

I turned to my companion and said: "Let us drive her for the shore and
have done with it; she cannot live in this. We will jump when she
touches." But he, having a chest of oak, and being bound three times
with brass, said: "Drive her through it. _It is not often we have such a
fair-wind_." With these words he went below; I hung on for Orfordness.
The people on the strand at Aldeburgh saw us. An old man desired to put
out in a boat to our aid. He danced with fear. The scene still stands in
their hollow minds.

As Orfordness came near, the seas that had hitherto followed like giants
in battle now took to a mad scrimmage. They leapt pyramidically, they
heaved up horribly under her; she hardly obeyed her helm, and