of silk that made Captain Johannes Maartens' mouth water, came
aboard of us and politely requested us to begone. Under their suave
manners was the iron of a warlike race, and we knew, and went our way.

We crossed the Straits of Japan and were entering the Yellow Sea on our
way to China, when we laid the _Sparwehr_ on the rocks. She was a crazy
tub the old _Sparwehr_, so clumsy and so dirty with whiskered marine-life
on her bottom that she could not get out of her own way. Close-hauled,
the closest she could come was to six points of the wind; and then she
bobbed up and down, without way, like a derelict turnip. Galliots were
clippers compared with her. To tack her about was undreamed of; to wear
her required all hands and half a watch. So situated, we were caught on
a lee shore in an eight-point shift of wind at the height of a hurricane
that had beaten our souls sick for forty-eight hours.

We drifted in upon the land in the chill light of a stormy dawn across a
heartless cross-sea mountain high. It was dead of winter, and between
smoking snow-squalls we could glimpse the forbidding coast, if coast it
might be called, so broken was it. There were grim rock isles and islets
beyond counting, dim snow-covered ranges beyond, and everywhere
upstanding cliffs too steep for snow, outjuts of headlands, and pinnacles
and slivers of rock upthrust from the boiling sea.

There was no name to this country on which we drove, no record of it ever
having been visited by navigators. Its coast-line was only hinted at in
our chart. From all of which we could argue that the inhabitants were as
inhospitable as the little of their land we could see.

The _Sparwehr_ drove in bow-on upon a cliff. There was deep water to its
sheer foot, so that our sky-aspiring bowsprit crumpled at the impact and
snapped short off. The foremast went by the board, with a great snapping
of rope-shrouds and stays, and fell forward against the cliff.

I have always admired old Johannes Maartens. Washed and rolled off the
high poop by a burst of sea, we were left stranded in the waist of the
ship, whence we fought our way for'ard to the steep-pitched forecastle-
head. Others joined us. We lashed ourselves fast and counted noses. We
were eighteen. The rest had perished.

Johannes Maartens touched me and pointed upward through cascading salt-
water from the back-fling of the cliff. I saw what he desired. Twenty
feet below the truck the foremas