“The water between the ice and the rocks is a much narrower strip than I had thought,” said Roswell, to his constant attendant, Stimson.  “Here, it does not appear to be a hundred yards in width!”

“Nor is it, sir—­whew—­this trotting in so cold a climate makes a man puff like a whale blowing—­but, Captain Gar’ner, that schooner will be cut in two before we can get to her.  Look, sir; the floe has reached the rocks already, quite near her; and it does not stop the drift at all, seemingly.”

Roswell made no reply; the state of the Vineyard Lion did appear to be much more critical than he had previously imagined.  Until he came nearer to the land, he had formed no notion of the steady power with which the field was setting down on the rocks on which the broken fragments were now creeping like creatures endowed with life.  Occasionally, there would be loud disruptions, and the movement of the floe would become more rapid; then, again, a sort of pause would succeed, and for a moment the approaching party felt a gleam of hope.  But all expectations of this sort were doomed to be disappointed.

“Look, sir!” exclaimed Stimson—­“she went down afore it twenty fathoms at that one set.  She must be awful near the rocks, sir!”

All the men now stopped.  They knew they were powerless:  and intense anxiety rendered them averse to move.  Attention appeared to interfere with their walking on the ice; and each held his breath in expectation.  They saw that the schooner, then less than a cable’s length from them, was close to the rocks; and the next shock, if anything like the last, must overwhelm her.  To their astonishment, instead of being nipped, the schooner rose by a stately movement that was not without grandeur, upheld by broken cakes that had got beneath her bottom, and fairly reached the shelf of rocks almost unharmed.  Not a man had left her; but there she was, placed on the shore, some twenty feet above the surface of the sea, on rocks worn smooth by the action of the waves!  Had the season been propitious, and did the injury stop here, it might have been possible to get the craft into the water again, and still carry her to America.

But the floe was not yet arrested.  Cake succeeded cake, one riding over another, until a wall of ice rose along the shore, that Roswell and his companions, with all their activity and courage, had great difficulty in crossing.  They succeeded in getting over it, however; but when they reached the unfortunate schooner, she was literally buried.  The masts were broken, the sails torn, rigging scattered, and sides stove.  The Sea Lion of Martha’s Vineyard was a worthless wreck—­worthless as to all purposes but that of being converted into materials for a smaller craft, or to be used as fuel.

All this had been done in ten minutes!  Then it was that the vast superiority of nature over the resources of man made itself apparent.  The people of the two vessels stood aghast with this sad picture of their own insignificance before their eyes.  The crew of the wreck, it is true, had escaped without difficulty; the movement having been as slow and steady as it was irresistible.  But there they were, in the clothes they had on, with all their effects buried under piles of ice that were already thirty or forty feet in height.