But it did not prove so. The gentle breeze was an advantage to light craft, and the dying Proserpine was full of water, and could only crawl.
After a few moments of great anxiety the boats crept up, the cutter on her port and the long-boat on her starboard quarter.
Wylie ran forward, and, hailing Hudson, implored him, in the friendliest tones, to give himself a chance. Then tried him by his vanity, "Come, and command the boats, old fellow. How can we navigate them on the Pacific without you?"
Hudson was now leaning over the taffrail utterly drunk. He made no reply to the mate, but merely waved his cutlass feebly in one hand, and his bottle in the other, and gurgled out, "Duty to m' employers."
Then Cooper, without a word, double reefed the cutter's mainsail and told Welch to keep as close to the ship's quarter as he dare. Wylie instinctively did the same, and the three craft crawled on in solemn and deadly silence, for nearly twenty minutes.
The wounded ship seemed to receive a death-blow. She stopped dead, and shook.
The next moment she pitched gently forward, and her bows went under the water, while her after-part rose into the air, and revealed to those in the cutter two splintered holes in her run, just below the water-line.
The next moment her stern settled down; the sea yawned horribly, the great waves of her own making rushed over her upper deck, and the lofty masts and sails, remaining erect, went down with sad majesty into the deep. And nothing remained but the bubbling and foaming of the voracious water, that had swallowed up the good ship, and her cargo, and her drunken master.
All stood up in the boats, ready to save him. But either his cutlass sunk him, or the suction of so great a body drew him down. He was seen no more in this world.
A loud sigh broke from every living bosom that witnessed that terrible catastrophe.