There was no name to this country on which we drove, no record of it ever having been visited by navigators.  Its coast-line was only hinted at in our chart.  From all of which we could argue that the inhabitants were as inhospitable as the little of their land we could see.

The Sparwehr drove in bow-on upon a cliff.  There was deep water to its sheer foot, so that our sky-aspiring bowsprit crumpled at the impact and snapped short off.  The foremast went by the board, with a great snapping of rope-shrouds and stays, and fell forward against the cliff.

I have always admired old Johannes Maartens.  Washed and rolled off the high poop by a burst of sea, we were left stranded in the waist of the ship, whence we fought our way for’ard to the steep-pitched forecastle-head.  Others joined us.  We lashed ourselves fast and counted noses.  We were eighteen.  The rest had perished.

Johannes Maartens touched me and pointed upward through cascading salt-water from the back-fling of the cliff.  I saw what he desired.  Twenty feet below the truck the foremast ground and crunched against a boss of the cliff.  Above the boss was a cleft.  He wanted to know if I would dare the leap from the mast-head into the cleft.  Sometimes the distance was a scant six feet.  At other times it was a score, for the mast reeled drunkenly to the rolling and pounding of the hull on which rested its splintered butt.

I began the climb.  But they did not wait.  One by one they unlashed themselves and followed me up the perilous mast.  There was reason for haste, for at any moment the Sparwehr might slip off into deep water.  I timed my leap, and made it, landing in the cleft in a scramble and ready to lend a hand to those who leaped after.  It was slow work.  We were wet and half freezing in the wind-drive.  Besides, the leaps had to be timed to the roll of the hull and the sway of the mast.

The cook was the first to go.  He was snapped off the mast-end, and his body performed cart-wheels in its fall.  A fling of sea caught him and crushed him to a pulp against the cliff.  The cabin boy, a bearded man of twenty-odd, lost hold, slipped, swung around the mast, and was pinched against the boss of rock.  Pinched?  The life squeezed from him on the instant.  Two others followed the way of the cook.  Captain Johannes Maartens was the last, completing the fourteen of us that clung on in the cleft.  An hour afterward the Sparwehr slipped off and sank in deep water.

Two days and nights saw us near to perishing on that cliff, for there was way neither up nor down.  The third morning a fishing-boat found us.  The men were clad entirely in dirt white, with their long hair done up in a curious knot on their pates—­the marriage knot, as I was afterward to learn, and also, as I was to learn, a handy thing to clutch hold of with one hand whilst you clouted with the other when an argument went beyond words.