"As dawn broke, I was on deck with the rest, the excitement of the occasion, or something else, having put new life into me, and I cared nothing for the sheets of spray and foam that, flying over the rails, drenched us all to the skin every minute.
"Before us, half a mile distant, was a low, white coast, covered with sand hills, and a few cocoa palms, their long, slender leaves thrashing about in the wind like a lot of enormous feather dusters.
"The sea about us was churned into a mass of foam as the incoming waves were broken in pieces on the coral reefs, whose sharp, jagged tops of honeycomb rock rose here and there above the surface like the brown teeth of some marine monster.
"Between the coral reefs and the shore there was a stretch of smoother water, in marked contrast with the tumbling sea outside.
"It was a perfect caldron of foaming water close about us, in which no boat could live a second, and so we waited as patiently as we could for the going down of the adjacent sea.
"Half an hour thereafter, to our great relief, we beheld a stanch little schooner rounding a point well inside the reefs, and making for us; and as she drew nearer we saw that her decks were full of men, white and black, clad in such a variety of costumes, with such diversity of loud colors, as at once suggested a piratical band of the seventeenth century.
"But appearances were deceptive, for instead of freebooters bent on plunder, the strangers were good Samaritans coming to our rescue—a lot of Bahamian wreckers—men ever ready to save life and property for a consideration.
"The captain of the little craft, which rejoiced in the highly appropriate name of the Fearless, a sturdy, square-built man of fifty, with light hair and bluish eyes, and a salty air about him, balancing himself with the skill of an acrobat on the port rail, and making a trumpet of his hands, began a shouting conversation with us, in which he informed us that he wouldn't give a penny for our lives if we weren't ashore mighty soon, as the wind, backing to the northwest, would blow great guns again in a few hours, when our brig would probably go to pieces.
"As the result of this confab, the wreckers began to make preparations to get us off the brig, which they accomplished in a skillful and courageous manner, running a line from the Fearless to our vessel, over which we were hauled in turn, though we were sorely battered and drenched by the angry sea that leaped up furiously, as if loath to lose its prey.
"It was well they worked so rapidly, for we were scarcely ashore, and the schooner anchored behind a point, when the storm began to rage again with great fury, burying the old brig in mountains of foaming water.