and the Ter Schilling flew before the gale; the fore-staysail being the only sail set, checking her as she yawed to starboard or to port.  Philip remained on deck by the poop-ladder.  “Strange,” thought he, “that I should stand here, the only one left now capable of acting,—­that I should be fated to look by myself upon this scene of horror and disgust—­should here wait the severing of this vessel’s timbers,—­the loss of life which must accompany it,—­the only one calm and collected, or aware of what must soon take place.  God forgive me, but I appear, useless and impotent as I am, to stand here like the master of the storm,—­separated as it were from my brother mortals by my own peculiar destiny.  It must be so.  This wreck then must not be for me,—­I feel that it is not,—­that I have a charmed life, or rather a protracted one, to fulfil the oath I registered in heaven.  But the wind is not so loud, surely the water is not so rough:  my forebodings may be wrong, and all may yet be saved.  Heaven grant it!  For how melancholy, how lamentable is it, to behold men created in God’s own image, leaving the world, disgraced below the brute creation!”

Philip was right in supposing that the wind was not so strong, nor the sea so high.  The vessel, after running to the southward till past Table Bay, had, by the alteration made in her course, entered into False Bay, where, to a certain degree, she was sheltered from the violence of the winds and waves.  But, although the water was smoother, the waves were still more than sufficient to beat to pieces any vessel that might be driven on shore at the bottom of the bay, to which point the Ter Schilling was now running.  The bay so far offered a fair chance of escape, as, instead of the rocky coast outside (against which, had the vessel run, a few seconds would have insured her destruction), there was a shelving beach of loose sand.  But of this Philip could, of course, have no knowledge, for the land at the entrance of the Bay had been passed unperceived in the darkness of the night.  About twenty minutes more had elapsed, when Philip observed that the whole sea around them was one continued foam.  He had hardly time for conjecture before the ship struck heavily on the sands, and the remaining masts fell by the board.

The crash of the falling masts, the heavy beating of the ship on the sands, which caused many of her timbers to part, with a whole sea which swept clean over the fated vessel, checked the songs and drunken revelry of the crew.  Another minute, and the vessel was swung round on her broadside to the sea, and lay on her beam ends.  Philip, who was to windward, clung to the bulwark, while the intoxicated seamen floundered in the water to leeward, and attempted to gain the other side of the ship.  Much to Philip’s horror, he perceived the body of Mynheer Kloots sink down in the water (which now was several feet deep on the lee side of the deck) without any apparent effort