“She feels the under-tow, Stephen,” he said, in a voice so compressed as to seem to come out of the depths of his chest, “and is breasted up to windward!”

“What means that sudden luff, sir?  Mr. Hazard must keep a good full, or we shall have no chance.”

Gardiner looked aft, and saw that the mate was bearing the helm well up, as if he met with much resistance.  The truth then flashed upon him, and he shouted out—­“All’s well, boys!  God be praised, we have caught the ebb-tide, under our lee-bow!”

These few words explained the reason of the change.  Instead of setting to leeward, the schooner was now meeting a powerful tide of some four or five knots, which hawsed her up to windward with irresistible force.  As if conscious of the danger she was in, the tight little craft receded from the rocks as she shot ahead, and rounded that second point, which, a minute before, had appeared to be placed there purposely to destroy her.  It was handsomely doubled, at the safe distance of a hundred fathoms, Roswell believed he might now beat his schooner off the land far enough to double the cape altogether, could he but keep her in that current.  It doubtless expended itself, however, a short distance in the offing, as its waters diffused themselves on the breast of the ocean; and it was this diffusion of the element that produced the eddy which had proved so nearly fatal.

In ten minutes after striking the tide, the schooner opened the passage fairly, and was kept away to enter it.  Notwithstanding it blew so heavily, the rate of sailing, by the land, did not exceed five knots.  This was owing to the great strength of the tide, which sometimes rises and falls thirty feet, in high latitudes and narrow waters.  Stimson now showed he was a man to be relied on.  Conning the craft intelligently, he took her in behind the island on which the cape stands, luffed her up into a tiny cove, and made a cast of the lead.  There were fifty fathoms of water, with a bottom of mud.  With the certainty that there was enough of the element to keep him clear of the ground at low water, and that his anchors would hold, Roswell made a flying moor, and veered out enough cable to render his vessel secure.

Here, then, was the Sea Lion of Oyster Pond, that craft which the reader had seen lying at Deacon Pratt’s wharf, only three short months before, safely anchored in a nook of the rocks behind Cape Horn.  No navigator but a sealer would have dreamed of carrying his vessel into such a place, but it is a part of their calling to poke about in channels and passages where no one else has ever been.  It was in this way that Stimson had learned to know where to find his present anchorage.  The berth of the schooner was perfectly snug, and entirely land-locked.  The tremendous swell that was rolling in on the outside, caused the waters to rise and fall a little within the passage, but there was no strain upon the cables in consequence.  Neither did the rapid tides affect the craft, which lay in an eddy that merely kept her steady.  The gale came howling over the Hermits, but was so much broken by the rocks as to do little more than whistle through the cordage and spars aloft.