Our three Frenchmen, fancying themselves now certainly bound to la belle France, were as active as cats.  Neb and Diogenes throwing their powerful force on the braces with a good-will, too, we soon had the Dawn braced sharp up, heading well to windward of the passage.  Monsieur Le Gros was delighted.  Apparently, he thought all was right, again; and he led the way, flourishing both hands, while all in the boat, fishermen inclusive, were bawling, and shouting, and gesticulating, in a way that would certainly have confused us, had I cared a straw about them.  I thought it well enough to follow the boat; but, as for their cries, they were disregarded.  Had Monsieur Le Gros seen fit to wait for the ship in the narrowest part of the inlet, he might have embarrassed us; but, so far from this, he appeared to be entirely carried away by the excitement of the chase, and was as eager to push ahead, as a boy who was struggling to be first in at the goal.

It was a nervous instant when the Dawn’s bow first entered the narrow passage.  The width, from rock to rock, speaking only of visible things, might have been thirty fathoms; and this strait narrowed, rather than widened, for several hundred feet, until it was reduced fully one-third.  The tide ran like a mill-tail, and it was, perhaps, lucky for us that there was no time for reflection or irresolution; the aspect of things being so serious as might well have thrown the most decided man into uncertainty and doubt.  The current sucked the vessel in, like the Maelstrom, and we were whirling ahead at a rate that would have split the ship from her keel to her top-timbers, had we come upon a sunken rock.  The chances were about even; for I regarded the pilotage as a very random sort of an affair.  We glanced on in breathless expectation, therefore; not knowing but each instant would involve us in ruin.

This jeopardy endured about five minutes.  At the end of that brief space, the ship had run the gauntlet for the distance of a mile, driven onward by the current rather than by the wind.  So tremendous was our velocity in the narrowest part, that I actually caught myself grasping the rail of the ship, as we glanced past the rocks, as if to keep myself from a fall.  The French gave a loud and general shout just as the boat issued out of this race-way into a wide capacious bay, within the group of islands, which had the appearance of forming a roadstead of some note.  There was a battery on the end of the last island, a light-house and a cluster of fishermen’s huts; all indicating that the place was one of considerable resort.