But she drew little water?  The devil she did!  There was a legend in the yard where she was built that she drew five feet four, but on a close examination of her (on the third time she was wrecked), I calculated with my companion that she drew little if anything under six feet.  All this I say knowing well that I shall soon put her up for sale; but that is neither here nor there.  I shall not divulge her name.

So we put to sea, intending to run to Harwich.  There was a strong flood down the coast, and the wind was to the north of north-east.  But the wind was with the tide—­to that you owe the lives of the two men and the lection of this delightful story; for had the tide been against the wind and the water steep and mutinous, you would never have seen either of us again:  indeed we should have trembled out of sight for ever.

The wind was with the tide, and in a following lump of a sea, without combers and with a rising glass, we valorously set out, and, missing the South Pier by four inches, we occupied the deep.

For one short half-hour things went more or less well.  I noted a white horse or two to windward, but my companion said it was only the sea breaking over the outer sands.  She plunged a lot, but I flattered myself she was carrying Caesar, and thought it no great harm.  We had started without food, meaning to cook a breakfast when we were well outside:  but men’s plans are on the knees of the gods.  The god called AEolus, that blows from the north-east of the world (you may see him on old maps—­it is a pity they don’t put him on the modern), said to his friends:  “I see a little boat.  It is long since I sank one”; and altogether they gave chase, like Imperialists, to destroy what was infinitely weak.

I looked to windward and saw the sea tumbling, and a great number of white waves.  My heart was still so high that I gave them the names of the waves in the eighteenth Iliad:  The long-haired wave, the graceful wave, the wave that breaks on an island a long way off, the sandy wave, the wave before us, the wave that brings good tidings.  But they were in no mood for poetry.  They began to be great, angry, roaring waves, like the chiefs of charging clans, and though I tried to keep up my courage with an excellent song by Mr. Newbolt, “Slung between the round shot in Nombre Dios Bay,” I soon found it useless, and pinned my soul to the tiller.  Every sea following caught my helm and battered it.  I hung on like a stout gentleman, and prayed to the seven gods of the land.  My companion said things were no worse than when we started.  God forgive him the courageous lie.  The wind and the sea rose.