It was about opposite Southwold that the danger became intolerable, and that I thought it could only end one way.  Which way?  The way out, my honest Jingoes, which you are more afraid of than of anything else in the world.  We ran before it; we were already over-canvased, and she buried her nose every time, so that I feared I should next be cold in the water, seeing England from the top of a wave.  Every time she rose the jib let out a hundredweight of sea-water; the sprit buckled and cracked, and I looked at the splice in the forestay to see if it yet held.  I looked a thousand times, and a thousand times the honest splice that I had poked together in a pleasant shelter under Bungay Woods (in the old times of peace, before ever the sons of the Achaians came to the land) stood the strain.  The sea roared over the fore-peak, and gurgled out of the scuppers, and still we held on.  Till (AEolus blowing much more loudly, and, what you may think a lie, singing through the rigging, though we were before the wind) opposite Aldeburgh I thought she could not bear it any more.

I turned to my companion and said:  “Let us drive her for the shore and have done with it; she cannot live in this.  We will jump when she touches.”  But he, having a chest of oak, and being bound three times with brass, said:  “Drive her through it. It is not often we have such a fair-wind.”  With these words he went below; I hung on for Orfordness.  The people on the strand at Aldeburgh saw us.  An old man desired to put out in a boat to our aid.  He danced with fear.  The scene still stands in their hollow minds.

As Orfordness came near, the seas that had hitherto followed like giants in battle now took to a mad scrimmage.  They leapt pyramidically, they heaved up horribly under her; she hardly obeyed her helm, and even in that gale her canvas flapped in the troughs.  Then in despair I prayed to the boat itself (since nothing else could hear me), “Oh, Boat,” for so I was taught the vocative, “bear me safe round this corner, and I will scatter wine over your decks.”  She heard me and rounded the point, and so terrified was I that (believe me if you will) I had not even the soul to remember how ridiculous and laughable it was that sailors should call this Cape of Storms “the Onion.”

Once round it, for some reason I will not explain, but that I believe connected with my prayer, the sea grew tolerable.  It still came on to the land (we could sail with the wind starboard), and the wind blew harder yet; but we ran before it more easily, because the water was less steep.  We were racing down the long drear shingle bank of Oxford, past what they call “the life-boat house” on the chart (there is no life-boat there, nor ever was), past the look-out of the coastguard, till we saw white water breaking on the bar of the Alde.

Then I said to my companion, “There are, I know, two mouths to this harbour, a northern and a southern; which shall we take?” But he said, “Take the nearest.”