“Tis a fine speed for enterin’ Paradise, Master Sydney!”
All the night long we stood there, having now and then a relief of four men upon the tackles, the officers for the most part moving at their places of duty and saying what they could of good cheer to the men. The Sieur de la Notte came up toward dawn and asked Captain Bourdelais what the chances were. He being a person of few words replied shortly, “The ship will be upon the beach in three hours.”
Never had I seen the ocean wear so frightful a mien as when the long night came at last to an end. There was a gray waste about us and one could see no color anywhere; the ocean was like the dead ashes of a fire. At night we had not been able to see; we could only feel the great motion, and accustom ourselves. But by light of day the Trinity seemed but a speck upon those waves. At one moment, high as our top-hamper was, upon all sides we could see nothing but great walls of water, tumbling down upon us; the next we would look over abysses which were bottomless, out across a waste of foam which seemed to mingle and war with the cloud flakes that fell down upon it.
Among the soldiers there was great fear; for they had no stomach for such business as this. Even the seamen, many of them hardy in service, had lost their wits completely. Once when a wave had come aboard an old boatswain dashed terror-stricken into the half-deck and fore-castle shouting,
“The cabin is stove in,—we are sinking!” and three arquebusiers crazy with fear jumped overboard. One of the fine gentry of the cabin, with a satin coat, came running wild-eyed from below and falling upon his knees threw his hands in the air raving that should he reach land he would be no more a Lutheran, but a good Catholic, as he always was.
Providence intervened, for a sea struck him fairly in the face and he, having no hold—by reason of his hands being up—was overset backwards and vanished with a shriek. Salvation Smith disappeared, and came upon deck again dressed in a suit of black which he had taken from some half-dead gentleman in the cabin, “to go before the Holy Trinity in a fitting manner,” as he solemnly said. Another seaman, getting most drunk upon eau de vie ran amuck with a pike, maiming and hurting several.
It was about two hours of the morning watch when the waves seemed to grow suddenly less in length; and though the wind still roared as fiercely as ever, and the foam flew by us in scattering flakes or lashed furiously against the masts and shrouds, it was plain to be seen we were coming into the shallows. The Trinity moved more steadily, and that showed the better the great speed at which we were making for the beach. The wrack and the spume hid everything ahead, but I thought in a moment I could mark a white jet here and there which showed where the breakers were. Bourdelais saw them too, for he rushed to the tiller-tackles. The Admiral stood at the break of the poop, calm and quiet as though at a sailing drill, ready to set the bows straight for the beach when the end was near. The tackle crew were straining at the tiller watching the yawing of the ship and the motions of the hands of Bourdelais as he gave the course.
Suddenly out of the mist ahead I saw a line of white, leaping and writhing as far as the eye could reach to starboard and larboard; and then another beyond it, rolling onward. We came up to them and were soon in the midst of the seething, churning mass of white as the Trinity went pounding over the outer bar. She hung there a moment, reluctant; and then dashed forward again like a poor desperate creature hunted by the hounds, with a great straining leap. Everything was white about us now, and we had barely time to note the yellow strip of the beach under the bows, when with pitiful tremble and a quiver that went through her, bow and stern, the poor ship took her death blow with a dreadful crash and brought up hard and fast upon the sands.
The white tongues of surf licked her sides greedily, and sea after sea made clean breaches over bows and waist as though impatient to engulf her. So fairly and fast had we struck that the waves which followed us did not at first swing her broadside to the beach. But at last the drag of the wreck of the spars to larboard, added to the stress of the wind, pulled her around and we swung high up completely wrecked.