The first step was to anchor.  Fortunately, the foresight of Gardiner had everything ready for this indispensable precaution.  Without anchoring, ten minutes would probably have carried the schooner directly down upon the breakers, leaving no hope for the life of any on board her, and breaking her up into chips.  Both bowers were let go at once, and long ranges of cable given.  The schooner was snubbed without parting anything, and was immediately brought head to sea.  This relieved her at once, and there was a moment that her people fancied she might ride out the gale where she was, could they only get clear of the wreck.  Axes, hatchets, and knives were freely used, and Roswell Gardiner saw the mass of spars and rigging float clear of him with a delight he did not desire to conceal.  As it drove to leeward, he actually cheered.  A lead was instantly dropped alongside, in order to ascertain whether the anchors held.  This infallible test, however, gave the melancholy certainty that the schooner was still drifting her length in rather less than two minutes.

The only hope now was that the flukes of the anchors might catch in better holding ground than they had yet met with.  The bottom was hard sand, however, which never gives a craft the chance that it gets from mud.  By Roswell Gardiner’s calculations, an hour, at the most, would carry them into the breakers; possibly less time.  The Sea Lion, of Holmes’ Hole, was to windward a cable’s length when this accident happened to her consort, and about half a mile to the southward.  Just at that instant the breakers trended seaward, ahead of that schooner, rendering it indispensable for her to ware.  This was done bringing her head to the southward, and she now came struggling directly on towards her consort.  The operation of waring had caused her to lose ground enough to bring her to leeward of the anchored craft, and nearer to the danger.

Roswell Gardiner stood on his own quarter-deck, anxiously watching the drift of the other schooner, as she drew near in her laboured way, struggling ahead through billows that were almost as white as the breakers that menaced them with destruction to leeward.  The anchored vessel, though drifting, had so slow a movement that it served to mark the steady and rapid set of its consort towards its certain fate.  At first, it seemed to Gardiner that Daggett would pass just ahead of him, and he trembled for his cables, which occasionally appeared above water, stretched like bars of iron, for the distance of thirty or forty fathoms.  But, the leeward set of the vessel under way was too fast to give her any chance of bringing this new danger on her consort.  When a cable’s length distant, the Sea Lion, of the Vineyard, did seem as if she might weather her consort; but, ere that short space was passed over, it was found that she fell off so fast, by means of her drift, as to carry her fairly clear of her stern.  The two masters, holding with one hand to some permanent object by which to steady themselves, and each pressing his tarpaulin firmly down on his head with the other, had a minute’s conversation when the schooners were nearest together.