“Where?”
“To your right, old fellow; but, still ahead. Now, we must see whether we can make the boat go our way, instead of her own. Do you think you could manage to haul up the jib by yourself? Take a half-turn round one of the thwarts with the bight of the halliards, so that it shall not slip.”
Fritz did what was requested; when Eric, keeping the boat’s head off the wind, sang out to his brother to “hoist away.”
The effect was instantaneous, for the boat quivered to her keel, as if she had scraped over a rock in the ocean, and then made a frantic plunge forwards that sent her bows under.
“Gently, boat, gently,” said Eric, bringing her head up again to the wind, upon which she heeled over till her gunwale was nearly submerged, but she now raced along more evenly. “Sit over to windward as much as you can,” he called out to Fritz, shifting his own position as he spoke.
Almost before they were aware of it, they were careering past the western headland of the bay, when Eric, by a sudden turn of his steering oar, brought the bows of the whale-boat to bear towards the beach. The little craft partly obeyed the impetus of his nervous arm, veering round in the wished-for direction, in spite of the broken water, which just at that point was in a terrible state of commotion from a cross current that set the tide against the wind.
But, it was not to be.
The doom of the boat was sealed in the very moment of its apparent victory over the elements!
A return wave—curling under from the base of the headland, against whose adamant wall it had hurled itself aloft, in the vain attempt to scale the cliff—falling back angrily in a whirling whish of foam, struck the frail craft fair on the quarter. The shock turned her over instantly, when she rolled bottom upwards over and over again. The sea then hurled her with the force of a catapult upon the rocks that jutted out below the headland; and Fritz and Eric were at once pitched out into the seething surf that eddied around, battling for their lives.
How they managed it, neither could afterwards tell; but they must have struck out so vigorously with their arms and legs at this perilous moment, in the agony of desperation, that, somehow or other, they succeeded in getting beyond the downward suction of the undertow immediately under the overhanging headland. Otherwise, they would have shared the fate of the boat, for their bodies would have been dashed to pieces against the cruel crags.