The Pilot and His Wife

by Jonas Lie

The crew were silent, and looked anxiously over towards the land. But when Nils Buvaagen declared himself a supporter of the captain's plan by crossing over the deck to him, all the others followed.

Salvé went himself to the wheel, and gave the order to "Ease off the sheet."

"Ease it is," was the answer; and that was the last order ever given on board the Apollo.

Running now before the wind, they rapidly approached the land. Salvé stood at the wheel, resting his knee from time to time on one of the spokes, with a concentrated look on his dark keen face, and his eye searching like a kite's along the coast for the place they were to make for. A couple of times he took up the glass and directed it towards the downs, where a group of people were moving about.

The chalk-white wall of water, rising and falling, grew higher and higher as they approached it; the noise and the dull roar of the breakers became more and more deafening, and a feeling of faintness crept over Elizabeth as she looked towards the land, and began to realise their danger.

The suspense was so painfully prolonged, a mist was coming before her eyes, so that she could scarcely see Salvé over at the wheel; and she tried, in her terror, to keep them fixed upon the child in her arms. The seething, hissing sound in the air around her kept increasing, and made her giddy; a confusion of wild sounds, that grew louder and ever louder, seemed to fill her brain; and before her eyes there was nothing but a whirl of scudding flakes of white. A mass of sand-laden foaming water appeared then suddenly to rise before her with a towering crest; she heard one loud cry of terror from different voices; the brig seemed lifted high in the air; the mainmast tottered; and a suffocating deluge of water came crashing down upon her, nearly carrying her with it down the cabin stairs, where she was clinging. Again and again it came, and her one thought now was to hold fast.

When she returned to consciousness again, Salvé was by her side. They were fastened to the same rope, and all the crew had come aft, and lashed themselves there. The brig lay over on her side upon the inner bank, with her stern up, and with the mainmast lying over the side. She kept lifting and striking heavily against the bottom, while heavy seas, one after another, swept her forward.

"The rigging to leeward must be cleared away, and we shall get off, lads!" shouted Salvé, through his hollowed hand; and he sprang over with an axe to do it. Nils Buvaagen came to his assistance, and Elizabeth, in intense anxiety, watched the two men while they cut away rope after rope, holding on by the rigging all the time, the sea breaking over them, so that sometimes they were hardly visible through the drench of water. After one last stroke, which freed them from the mast, Salvé was by her side again.

The next moment they were carried over the bank by the yellow churning surge, and with a succession of jerks and bumps, over to the shoal inside, where the bow-timbers were stove in—"the best thing that could have happened to them," Salvé said, coolly, "as it would relieve the vessel of the weight of water in the hold, and they might now be washed up nearer to the beach."

At length, after a couple of long and terrible hours, as twilight was coming on, and the face of the downs was becoming darker in the gloomy atmosphere, it seemed as if the vessel had finally settled. The waves now broke less frequently over her, but left a heavy deposit of sand upon the deck when they did break. It seemed likely that she would go to pieces, plank by plank, if they remained as they were through the night, or else perhaps they would be buried in sand.