Before it regained the ship, Underhill felt a light puff of wind from the south-west.  Lifting a megaphone, he roared to the men to pull for their lives.  The boat came alongside; it had scarcely received its load when the hurricane once more burst upon them, this time from the opposite quarter.  Underhill leapt down among his men, and ordered them to give way.  Before they had pulled a dozen strokes the storm was at its height, but the force of the wind was now somewhat broken by the trees and rocks of the island.  Even so it was hard work, rowing in the teeth of the blast, the boat being every moment in danger of swamping by the tremendous seas.  Underhill, at the tiller, set his teeth, and anxiously watched the advancing cliffs, at the foot of which the remainder of his company stood.  The boat was within twenty yards of them when a huge wave fell on it as it were out of the sky.  It sank like lead.  Thanks to the lifebuoys Underhill and the men rose quickly to the surface.  Two of them, who could not swim, cried out despairingly for help.  Underhill seized one and held him up; the other was saved by the promptitude of young Smith.  Seeing their plight, he caught up a rope which had been brought ashore, and flung it among the group of men struggling in the water.  The drowning man clutched it, the others swam to it, and by its aid all were drawn ashore, gasping for breath, and sorely battered by the jagged rocks.

“All safe, thank heaven!” said Underhill, as he joined the others; “but I’m sorry we’ve lost the boat.”

The shipwrecked party found themselves on a narrow beach, behind which rose steep cliffs, rugged and difficult to climb.  Against these they crouched to find some shelter from the storm, and watch the gradual dismemberment of the ill-fated Albatross.  Wave after wave broke over her, the spray dashing so high that even her funnel sometimes disappeared from view.  The spectators held their breath:  could she live out the storm?  At last a tremendous sea swept her from the hollow in which she was wedged, and she plunged beneath the waters.

CHAPTER I

THE CABLEGRAM

“Tenez! up! up!  Ah ca!  A clean shave, mister, hein?”

A touch on the lever had sent the aeroplane soaring aloft at a steep angle, and she cleared by little more than a hair’s breadth the edge of a thick plantation of firs.

“A close shave, as you say, Roddy,” came the answer.  And then the speaker let forth a gust of wrathful language which his companion heard in sympathetic silence.

Lieutenant Charles Thesiger Smith, of H.M.S. Imperturbable, was normally a good-tempered fellow, and his outburst would have deceived nobody who knew him so well as Laurent Rodier.