‘It is coming now,’ Elzevir said; and I could see dim figures moving in the misty glare from the blue light; and then, just as the Aurungzebe was making fair for the signal, a monstrous combing sea pooped her and washed us both from the wheel, forward in a swirling flood.  We grasped at anything we could, and so brought up bruised and half-drowned in the fore-chains; but as the wheel ran free, another sea struck her and slewed her round.  There was a second while the water seemed over, under, and on every side, and then the Aurungzebe went broadside on Moonfleet beach, with a noise like thunder and a blow that stunned us.

I have seen ships come ashore in that same place before and since, and bump on and off with every wave, till the stout balks could stand the pounding no more and parted.  But ’twas not so with our poor brig, for after that first fearful shock she never moved again, being flung so firm upon the beach by one great swamping wave that never another had power to uproot her.  Only she careened over beachwards, turning herself away from the seas, as a child bows his head to escape a cruel master’s ferule, and then her masts broke off, first the fore and then the main, with a splitting crash that made itself heard above all.

We were on the lee side underneath the shelter of the deckhouse clinging to the shrouds, now up to our knees in water as the wave came on, now left high and dry when it went back.  The blue light was still burning, but the ship was beached a little to the right of it, and the dim group of fishermen had moved up along the beach till they were opposite us.  Thus we were but a hundred feet distant from them, but ’twas the interval of death and life, for between us and the shore was a maddened race of seething water, white foaming waves that leapt up from all sides against our broken bulwarks, or sucked back the pebbles with a grinding roar till they left the beach nearly dry.

We stood there for a minute hanging on, and waiting for resolution to come back to us after the shock of grounding.  On the weather side the seas struck and curled over the brig with a noise like thunder, and the force of countless tons.  They came over the top of the deck-house in a cataract of solid water, and there was a crash, crash, crash of rending wood, as plank after plank gave way before that stern assault.  We could feel the deck-house itself quiver, and shake again as we stood with our backs against it, and at last it moved so much that we knew it must soon be washed over on us.

The moment had come.  ‘We must go after the next big wave runs back,’ Elzevir shouted.  ’Jump when I give the word, and get as far up the pebbles as you can before the next comes in:  they will throw us a rope’s-end to catch; so now good-bye, John, and God save us both!’

I wrung his hand, and took off my convict clothes, keeping my boots on to meet the pebbles, and was so cold that I almost longed for the surf.  Then we stood waiting side by side till a great wave came in, turning the space ’twixt ship and shore into a boiling caldron:  a minute later ’twas all sucked back again with a roar, and we jumped.