Dunburne was a most excellent and practised swimmer.  That evening, when the dusk had pretty well fallen, he jumped overboard, dived under the brig, and came up on the other side.  Thus leaving all hands aboard looking for him or for his dead body at the starboard side of the Prophet Daniel, he himself swam slowly away to the larboard.  Now partly under water, now floating on his back, he directed his course towards a point of land about a mile away, whereon, as he had observed before the dark had settled down, there stood an old wooden building resembling a church, and a great brick house with tall, lean chimneys at a little farther distance inland.

The intemperate cold of the water of those parts of America was so much more excessive than Dunburne had been used to swim in that when he dragged himself out upon the rocky, bowlder-strewn beach he lay for a considerable time more dead than alive.  His limbs appeared to possess hardly any vitality, so benumbed were they by the icy chill that had entered into the very marrow of his bones.  Nor did he for a long while recover from this excessive rigor; his limbs still continued at intervals to twitch and shudder as with a convulsion, nor could he at such times at all control their trembling.  At last, however, with a huge sigh, he aroused himself to some perception of his surroundings, which he acknowledged were of as dispiriting a sort as he could well have conceived of.  His recovering senses were distracted by a ceaseless watery din, for the breaking waves, rushing with a prodigious swiftness from the harbor to the shore before the driving wind, fell with uproarious crashing into white foam among the rocks.  Above this watery tumult spread the wet gloom of the night, full of the blackness and pelting chill of a fine slanting rain.

Through this shroud of mist and gloom Dunburne at last distinguished a faint light, blurred by the sheets of rain and darkness, and shining as though from a considerable distance.  Cheered by this nearer presence of human life, our young gentleman presently gathered his benumbed powers together, arose, and after a while began slowly and feebly to climb a stony hill that lay between the rocky beach and that faint but encouraging illumination.

So, sorely buffeted by the tempest, he at last reached the black, square form of that structure from which the light shone.  The building he perceived to be a little wooden church of two stories in height.  The shutters of the lower story were tight fastened, as though bolted from within.  Those above were open, and from them issued the light that had guided him in his approach from the beach.  A tall flight of wooden steps, wet in the rain, reached to a small, enclosed porch or vestibule, whence a door, now tight shut, gave ingress into the second story of the church.