The danger was acute. Would it be possible to sustain the boat against the shocks which were rolling it from one side to the other? If it were broken up, how would Captain Gould and his companions be able to get away from this coast before the winter?
All five stood by, and when the sea came farther up and lifted the boat, they hung on to its sides trying to steady it.
Soon the storm was at its height. From twenty places at once tremendous flashes of lightning burst. When they struck the bastions they tore off fragments which could be heard crashing upon the heaps of sea-weed.
An enormous wave, twenty-five or thirty feet high at least, was lifted up by the hurricane and dashed upon the shore like a huge waterspout.
Caught in its grip Captain Gould and his companions were swept right up to the heaps of sea-weed, and it was only by a miracle that the enormous wave did not carry them back with it as it drew again to the sea!
The disaster feared so much had befallen them!
The boat, torn from its bed, swept up to the top of the beach and then carried down again to the rocks at the end of the promontory, was smashed, and its fragments, after floating for a moment in the creaming foam of the backwater, disappeared from view round the bend of the bluff!
CHAPTER VII
THE COMING OF THE ALBATROSS
The situation seemed worse than ever. While they were in the boat, exposed to all the perils of the sea, Captain Gould and his passengers at least had a chance of being picked up by some ship, or of reaching land. They had not fallen in with a ship. And although they had reached land, it was practically uninhabitable, yet it seemed they must give up all hope of ever leaving it.
“Still,” said John Block to Fritz, “if we had run into a storm like that out at sea, our boat would have gone to the bottom and taken us with it!”