It was still very dark, and seen under the night from the little boat, the ocean and the sky seemed immense and terrible; the great waves grew out of the obscurity ahead of them, rushing down upon the boat, big, swelling, silent, their crests occasionally hissing and breaking into irruptions of cold white froth.  As one of them would draw near, the boat would rise upon it as though it would never stop, would hang a moment upon its summit and then topple into the black gulf that followed, sending the bitter icy spray high into the air.  The wind blew steadily.  Suddenly toward three o’clock it began to rain.

Vandover, the engineer, all the five sailors, and two of the passengers were clothed.  The rest of the passengers were little better than naked.  Here and there a man had snatched a blanket from his berth, and one or two of them were wearing their trousers, but the rest were clothed for the most part only with their shirts and drawers.  There were eighteen women and five little girls in the boat.  The little girls were well looked after.  Two were wrapped in Vandover’s travelling-rug and a couple of men had put their coats around the third.  But there were not wraps enough to go around among the women, by far the larger part of them were covered only by their night-dresses or their bed-gowns.

It was abominably cold; the rain fell continually, and the wind blew in long gusts, piercing, cutting.  Every plunge of the boat threw icy bullets of spray into the air, which the wind caught up and flung down broad upon the boat.  Sometimes even a huge wave would break just upon their quarter, and then great torrents of bitter, freezing water would fall over them in a deluge, leaving a sediment of salt that cracked the skin.  The women were huddled upon the bottom of the boat near the waist, where they had been placed for greater safety.  They were fouled with the muddy water that gathered there, their long hair dishevelled, dripping with sleet, clinging to their wet cheeks and throats, their bodies showing pink with cold, through their thin, soaked coverings, their limbs racked with long incessant shudderings, a wretched group, miserable beyond words.  One of them close by Vandover’s feet, he noticed particularly, had but a single garment to cover her.  She was drenched through and through, her bare feet were blue with the cold, her head was thrown back, her eyes closed.  She was silent except when an unusual gust of wind whipped the rain and spray across her body like the long, fine lash of a whip.  Then with every breath she moaned, drawing in her breath between her teeth with a little whistling gasp, too weak, too exhausted, too nearly unconscious to attempt to shield herself in any way.

Vandover could do nothing; he had almost stripped himself to help clothe the others.  Nothing more could be done.  The suffering had to go on, and he began to wonder how human beings could endure such stress and yet live.