It was a longish beam of heart of oak, sound and strong, useful either as a support or as an engine of attack—­a lever for a burden, a ram against a tower.

“Ready!” shouted the chief.

All six, getting foothold on the stump of the mast, threw their weight on the spar projecting over the side, straight as a lance towards a projection of the cliff.

It was a dangerous manoeuvre.  To strike at a mountain is audacity indeed.  The six men might well have been thrown into the water by the shock.

There is variety in struggles with storms.  After the hurricane, the shoal; after the wind, the rock.  First the intangible, then the immovable, to be encountered.

Some minutes passed, such minutes as whiten men’s hair.

The rock and the vessel were about to come in collision.  The rock, like a culprit, awaited the blow.

A resistless wave rushed in; it ended the respite.  It caught the vessel underneath, raised it, and swayed it for an instant as the sling swings its projectile.

“Steady!” cried the chief; “it is only a rock, and we are men.”

The beam was couched, the six men were one with it, its sharp bolts tore their arm-pits, but they did not feel them.

The wave dashed the hooker against the rock.

Then came the shock.

It came under the shapeless cloud of foam which always hides such catastrophes.

When this cloud fell back into the sea, when the waves rolled back from the rock, the six men were tossing about the deck, but the Matutina was floating alongside the rock—­clear of it.  The beam had stood and turned the vessel; the sea was running so fast that in a few seconds she had left the Caskets behind.

Such things sometimes occur.  It was a straight stroke of the bowsprit that saved Wood of Largo at the mouth of the Tay.  In the wild neighbourhood of Cape Winterton, and under the command of Captain Hamilton, it was the appliance of such a lever against the dangerous rock, Branodu-um, that saved the Royal Mary from shipwreck, although she was but a Scotch built frigate.  The force of the waves can be so abruptly discomposed that changes of direction can be easily managed, or at least are possible even in the most violent collisions.  There is a brute in the tempest.  The hurricane is a bull, and can be turned.

The whole secret of avoiding shipwreck is to try and pass from the secant to the tangent.

Such was the service rendered by the beam to the vessel.  It had done the work of an oar, had taken the place of a rudder.  But the manoeuvre once performed could not be repeated.  The beam was overboard; the shock of the collision had wrenched it out of the men’s hands, and it was lost in the waves.  To loosen another beam would have been to dislocate the hull.

The hurricane carried off the Matutina.  Presently the Caskets showed as a harmless encumbrance on the horizon.  Nothing looks more out of countenance than a reef of rocks under such circumstances.  There are in nature, in its obscure aspects, in which the visible blends with the invisible, certain motionless, surly profiles, which seem to express that a prey has escaped.