There is no need of going into an extended recital of our suffering inthe small boat during the many days we were driven and drifted, here andthere, willy-nilly, across the ocean. The high wind blew from thenorth-west for twenty-four hours, when it fell calm, and in the nightsprang up from the south-west. This was dead in our teeth, but I took inthe sea-anchor and set sail, hauling a course on the wind which took usin a south-south-easterly direction. It was an even choice between thisand the west-north-westerly course which the wind permitted; but the warmairs of the south fanned my desire for a warmer sea and swayed mydecision.

In three hours—it was midnight, I well remember, and as dark as I hadever seen it on the sea—the wind, still blowing out of the south-west,rose furiously, and once again I was compelled to set the sea-anchor.

Day broke and found me wan-eyed and the ocean lashed white, the boatpitching, almost on end, to its drag. We were in imminent danger ofbeing swamped by the whitecaps. As it was, spray and spume came aboardin such quantities that I bailed without cessation. The blankets weresoaking. Everything was wet except Maud, and she, in oilskins, rubberboots, and sou’wester, was dry, all but her face and hands and a straywisp of hair. She relieved me at the bailing-hole from time to time, andbravely she threw out the water and faced the storm. All things arerelative. It was no more than a stiff blow, but to us, fighting for lifein our frail craft, it was indeed a storm.

Cold and cheerless, the wind beating on our faces, the white seas roaringby, we struggled through the day. Night came, but neither of us slept.Day came, and still the wind beat on our faces and the white seas roaredpast. By the second night Maud was falling asleep from exhaustion. Icovered her with oilskins and a tarpaulin. She was comparatively dry,but she was numb with the cold. I feared greatly that she might die inthe night; but day broke, cold and cheerless, with the same clouded skyand beating wind and roaring seas.

I had had no sleep for forty-eight hours. I was wet and chilled to themarrow, till I felt more dead than alive. My body was stiff fromexertion as well as from cold, and my aching muscles gave me the severesttorture whenever I used them, and I used them continually. And all thetime we were being driven off into the north-east, directly away fromJapan and toward bleak Bering Sea.

And still we lived, and the boat lived, and the wind blew unabated. Infact, toward nightfall of the third day it increased a trifle andsomething more. The boat’s bow plunged under a crest, and we camethrough quarter-full of water. I bailed like a madman. The liability ofshipping another such sea was enormously increased by the water thatweighed the boat down and robbed it of its buoyancy. And another suchsea meant the end. When I had the boat empty again I was forced to takeaway the tarpaulin which covered Maud, in order that I might lash it downacross the bow. It was well I did, for it covered the boat fully a thirdof the way aft, and three times, in the next several hours, it flung offthe bulk of the down-rushing water when the bow shoved under the seas.

Maud’s condition was pitiable. She sat crouched in the bottom of theboat, her lips blue, her face grey and plainly showing the pain shesuffered. But ever her eyes looked bravely at me, and ever her lipsuttered brave words.

The worst of the storm must have blown that night, though little Inoticed it. I had succumbed and slept where I sat in the stern-sheets.The morning of the fourth day found the wind diminished to a gentlewhisper, the sea dying down and the sun shining upon us. Oh, the blessedsun! How we bathed our poor bodies in its delicious warmth, revivinglike bugs and crawling things after a storm. We smiled again, saidamusing things, and waxed optimistic over our situation. Yet it was, ifanything, worse than ever. We were farther from Japan than the night weleft the _Ghost_. Nor could I more than roughly guess our latitude andlongitude. At a calculation of a two-mile drift per hour, during theseventy and odd hours of the storm, we had been driven at least onehundred and fifty miles to the north-east. But was such calculated driftcorrect? For all I knew, it might have been four miles per hour insteadof two. In which case we were another hundred and fifty miles to thebad.

Where we were I did not know, though there was quite a likelihood that wewere in the vicinity of the _Ghost_. There were seals about us, and Iwas prepared to sight a sealing-schooner at any time. We did sight one,in the afternoon, when the north-west breeze had sprung up freshly oncemore. But the strange schooner lost itself on the sky-line and we aloneoccupied the circle of the sea.

Came days of fog, when even Maud’s spirit drooped and there were no merrywords upon her lips; days of calm, when we floated on the lonelyimmensity of sea, oppressed by its greatness and yet marvelling at themiracle of tiny life, for we still lived and struggled to live; days ofsleet and wind and snow-squalls, when nothing could keep us warm; or daysof drizzling rain, when we filled our water-breakers from the drip of thewet sail.

And ever I loved Maud with an increasing love. She was so many-sided, somany-mooded—“protean-mooded” I called her. But I called her this, andother and dearer things, in my thoughts only. Though the declaration ofmy love urged and trembled on my tongue a thousand times, I knew that itwas no time for such a declaration. If for no other reason, it was notime, when one was protecting and trying to save a woman, to ask thatwoman for her love. Delicate as was the situation, not alone in this butin other ways, I flattered myself that I was able to deal delicately withit; and also I flattered myself that by look or sign I gave noadvertisement of the love I felt for her. We were like good comrades,and we grew better comrades as the days went by.

One thing about her which surprised me was her lack of timidity and fear.The terrible sea, the frail boat, the storms, the suffering, thestrangeness and isolation of the situation,—all that should havefrightened a robust woman,—seemed to make no impression upon her who hadknown life only in its most sheltered and consummately artificialaspects, and who was herself all fire and dew and mist, sublimatedspirit, all that was soft and tender and clinging in woman. And yet I amwrong. She _was_ timid and afraid, but she possessed courage. The fleshand the qualms of the flesh she was heir to, but the flesh bore heavilyonly on the flesh. And she was spirit, first and always spirit,etherealized essence of life, calm as her calm eyes, and sure ofpermanence in the changing order of the universe.

Came days of storm, days and nights of storm, when the ocean menaced uswith its roaring whiteness, and the wind smote our struggling boat with aTitan’s buffets. And ever we were flung off, farther and farther, to thenorth-east. It was in such a storm, and the worst that we hadexperienced, that I cast a weary glance to leeward, not in quest ofanything, but more from the weariness of facing the elemental strife, andin mute appeal, almost, to the wrathful powers to cease and let us be.What I saw I could not at first believe. Days and nights ofsleeplessness and anxiety had doubtless turned my head. I looked back atMaud, to identify myself, as it were, in time and space. The sight ofher dear wet cheeks, her flying hair, and her brave brown eyes convincedme that my vision was still healthy. Again I turned my face to leeward,and again I saw the jutting promontory, black and high and naked, theraging surf that broke about its base and beat its front high up withspouting fountains, the black and forbidden coast-line running toward thesouth-east and fringed with a tremendous scarf of white.

“Maud,” I said. “Maud.”

She turned her head and beheld the sight.

“It cannot be Alaska!” she cried.

“Alas, no,” I answered, and asked, “Can you swim?”

She shook her head.

“Neither can I,” I said. “So we must get ashore without swimming, insome opening between the rocks through which we can drive the boat andclamber out. But we must be quick, most quick—and sure.”

I spoke with a confidence she knew I did not feel, for she looked at mewith that unfaltering gaze of hers and said:

“I have not thanked you yet for all you have done for me but—”

She hesitated, as if in doubt how best to word her gratitude.

“Well?” I said, brutally, for I was not quite pleased with her thankingme.

“You might help me,” she smiled.

“To acknowledge your obligations before you die? Not at all. We are notgoing to die. We shall land on that island, and we shall be snug andsheltered before the day is done.”

I spoke stoutly, but I did not believe a word. Nor was I prompted to liethrough fear. I felt no fear, though I was sure of death in that boilingsurge amongst the rocks which was rapidly growing nearer. It wasimpossible to hoist sail and claw off that shore. The wind wouldinstantly capsize the boat; the seas would swamp it the moment it fellinto the trough; and, besides, the sail, lashed to the spare oars,dragged in the sea ahead of us.

As I say, I was not afraid to meet my own death, there, a few hundredyards to leeward; but I was appalled at the thought that Maud must die.My cursed imagination saw her beaten and mangled against the rocks, andit was too terrible. I strove to compel myself to think we would makethe landing safely, and so I spoke, not what I believed, but what Ipreferred to believe.

I recoiled before contemplation of that frightful death, and for a momentI entertained the wild idea of seizing Maud in my arms and leapingoverboard. Then I resolved to wait, and at the last moment, when weentered on the final stretch, to take her in my arms and proclaim mylove, and, with her in my embrace, to make the desperate struggle anddie.

Instinctively we drew closer together in the bottom of the boat. I felther mittened hand come out to mine. And thus, without speech, we waitedthe end. We were not far off the line the wind made with the westernedge of the promontory, and I watched in the hope that some set of thecurrent or send of the sea would drift us past before we reached thesurf.

“We shall go clear,” I said, with a confidence which I knew deceivedneither of us.

“By God, we _will_ go clear!” I cried, five minutes later.

The oath left my lips in my excitement—the first, I do believe, in mylife, unless “trouble it,” an expletive of my youth, be accounted anoath.

“I beg your pardon,” I said.

“You have convinced me of your sincerity,” she said, with a faint smile.“I do know, now, that we shall go clear.”

I had seen a distant headland past the extreme edge of the promontory,and as we looked we could see grow the intervening coastline of what wasevidently a deep cove. At the same time there broke upon our ears acontinuous and mighty bellowing. It partook of the magnitude and volumeof distant thunder, and it came to us directly from leeward, rising abovethe crash of the surf and travelling directly in the teeth of the storm.As we passed the point the whole cove burst upon our view, a half-moon ofwhite sandy beach upon which broke a huge surf, and which was coveredwith myriads of seals. It was from them that the great bellowing wentup.

“A rookery!” I cried. “Now are we indeed saved. There must be men andcruisers to protect them from the seal-hunters. Possibly there is astation ashore.”

But as I studied the surf which beat upon the beach, I said, “Still bad,but not so bad. And now, if the gods be truly kind, we shall drift bythat next headland and come upon a perfectly sheltered beach, where wemay land without wetting our feet.”

And the gods were kind. The first and second headlands were directly inline with the south-west wind; but once around the second,—and we wentperilously near,—we picked up the third headland, still in line with thewind and with the other two. But the cove that intervened! Itpenetrated deep into the land, and the tide, setting in, drifted us underthe shelter of the point. Here the sea was calm, save for a heavy butsmooth ground-swell, and I took in the sea-anchor and began to row. Fromthe point the shore curved away, more and more to the south and west,until at last it disclosed a cove within the cove, a little land-lockedharbour, the water level as a pond, broken only by tiny ripples wherevagrant breaths and wisps of the storm hurtled down from over thefrowning wall of rock that backed the beach a hundred feet inshore.

Here were no seals whatever. The boat’s stern touched the hard shingle.I sprang out, extending my hand to Maud. The next moment she was besideme. As my fingers released hers, she clutched for my arm hastily. Atthe same moment I swayed, as about to fall to the sand. This was thestartling effect of the cessation of motion. We had been so long uponthe moving, rocking sea that the stable land was a shock to us. Weexpected the beach to lift up this way and that, and the rocky walls toswing back and forth like the sides of a ship; and when we bracedourselves, automatically, for these various expected movements, theirnon-occurrence quite overcame our equilibrium.

“I really must sit down,” Maud said, with a nervous laugh and a dizzygesture, and forthwith she sat down on the sand.

I attended to making the boat secure and joined her. Thus we landed onEndeavour Island, as we came to it, land-sick from long custom of thesea.