“Shove her on the deck for a minute,” said Hank, “and have a look with those binoculars. Something funny about that rock, seems to me.”
George placed the cup on the deck, fetched the old binoculars Jake had been using the day before, and leveled them at the rock.
“Ship piled on the north side,” said George. “I can see the masts; some sort of small hooker or another. It’s the Santander rock, can’t be anything else, there’s nothing else of any size marked down just here but the Tres Marias Island, and they are to the south.”
“Well, we’ll have a look at her,” said Hank. “There’s maybe some poor devils on board. She’s flying no signals, is she?”
“No, she’s signal enough in herself.”
Just then Tommie came on deck.
She had a look through the binoculars and then went off to the galley with George to see about breakfast. There were plenty of provisions on the Heart; McGinnis and his crew had evidently plenty of cash or credit, to judge by the condition of the lazarette and store room, and when Tommie and George had satisfied their wants, Hank, giving them the deck, came down.
When he returned on deck, the schooner was closing up with the rock and the wreck was plainly visible to the naked eye, with the gulls shouting around her.
The Santander rock, shaped and spired like a cathedral, runs north and south, three hundred yards long, two hundred feet high, caved here and there by the sea and worn by wind and rain into ledges and depressions where the gulls roost—where they have roosted for ten thousand years.
It is the top of a big submarine mountain that rises gradually from the depth of a mile. Quite in shore, on the northern side, the lead gives a depth of only twenty fathoms, gradually deepening, as you put away, by five fathoms to the hundred yards, till suddenly the lead finds nothing. There must be a sheer, unimaginable cliff just there, some three quarters of a mile high!