Story 1 -- Chapter 7.
So rapidly did the final catastrophe take place that it was difficult for the rescued party at first to credit the evidence of their senses. On the spot where the Lapwing had been beating her sides against the cruel walls of the cavern, and where so many hearts had been throbbing wildly between hope and fear, no living creature remained; nothing but a few feet of the shattered masts appearing now and then above the surging waves was left to tell of the terrible tragedy that had been enacted there.
For upwards of an hour the party in the boat hovered about the place, not so much with the hope of rescuing any of their shipmates as on account of the difficulty of tearing themselves away from the fatal spot. Perhaps the natural tendency of man to hope against hope had something to do with it. Then they passed silently out of the cavern and rowed slowly along the base of the tremendous cliffs.
At length the feeling of self-preservation began to assert itself, and Bob Massey was the first to break silence with the question—
“Does any one know if there’s anything to eat aboard?”
“We’d better see to that,” observed Dr Hayward, who was steering.
Bob Massey pulled in his oar, and, without remark, began to search the boat. It was found that all the food they had brought away consisted of nine tins of preserved meat and three pieces of pork, a supply which would not go far among ten persons.
The ten survivors were Dr Hayward and his wife; Massey and Nellie; Joe Slag; John Mitford and his wife Peggy; Terrence O’Connor, the assistant cook; Tomlin, one of the cabin passengers; and Ned Jarring. All the rest, as we have said, had perished with the ill-fated Lapwing.
Little was said at first, for the hopelessness of their condition seemed so obvious that the men shrank from expressing their gloomy fears to the women who sat huddled together, wet and cold, in the bottom of the boat.
As we have said, as far as the eye could see in any direction, the frowning cliffs rose perpendicularly out of deep water. There was not even a strip of sand or a bay into which they could run in case of the wind increasing.