Shipwreck is the ideal of helplessness; to be near land, and unable to reach it; to float, yet not to be able to do so in any desired direction; to rest the foot on what seems firm and is fragile; to be full of life, when o’ershadowed by death; to be the prisoner of space; to be walled in between sky and ocean; to have the infinite overhead like a dungeon; to be encompassed by the eluding elements of wind and waves; and to be seized, bound, paralyzed—­such a load of misfortune stupefies and crushes us.  We imagine that in it we catch a glimpse of the sneer of the opponent who is beyond our reach.  That which holds you fast is that which releases the birds and sets the fishes free.  It appears nothing, and is everything.  We are dependent on the air which is ruffled by our mouths; we are dependent on the water which we catch in the hollow of our hands.  Draw a glassful from the storm, and it is but a cup of bitterness—­a mouthful is nausea, a waveful is extermination.  The grain of sand in the desert, the foam-flake on the sea, are fearful symptoms.  Omnipotence takes no care to hide its atom, it changes weakness into strength, fills naught with all; and it is with the infinitely little that the infinitely great crushes you.  It is with its drops the ocean dissolves you.  You feel you are a plaything.

A plaything—­ghastly epithet!

The Matutina was a little above Aurigny, which was not an unfavourable position; but she was drifting towards its northern point, which was fatal.  As a bent bow discharges its arrow, the nor’-wester was shooting the vessel towards the northern cape.  Off that point, a little beyond the harbour of Corbelets, is that which the seamen of the Norman archipelago call a “singe.”

The “singe,” or race, is a furious kind of current.  A wreath of funnels in the shallows produces in the waves a wreath of whirlpools.  You escape one to fall into another.  A ship caught hold of by the race, winds round and round until some sharp rock cleaves her hull; then the shattered vessel stops, her stern rises from the waves, the stem completes the revolution in the abyss, the stern sinks in, and all is sucked down.  A circle of foam broadens and floats, and nothing more is seen on the surface of the waves but a few bubbles here and there rising from the smothered breathings below.

The three most dangerous races in the whole Channel are one close to the well-known Girdler Sands, one at Jersey between the Pignonnet and the Point of Noirmont, and the race of Aurigny.

Had a local pilot been on board the Matutina, he could have warned them of their fresh peril.  In place of a pilot, they had their instinct.  In situations of extreme danger men are endowed with second sight.  High contortions of foam were flying along the coast in the frenzied raid of the wind.  It was the spitting of the race.  Many a bark has been swamped in that snare.  Without knowing what awaited them, they approached the spot with horror.