The Japanese crawled under a communal rice mat and went to sleep.  I joined them, and for several hours we dozed fitfully.  Then a sea deluged us out with icy water, and we found several inches of snow on top the mat.  The reef to windward was disappearing under the rising tide, and moment by moment the seas broke more strongly over the rocks.  The fishermen studied the shore anxiously.  So did I, and with a sailor’s eye, though I could see little chance for a swimmer to gain that surf-hammered line of rocks.  I made signs toward the headlands on either flank.  The Japanese shook their heads.  I indicated that dreadful lee shore.  Still they shook their heads and did nothing.  My conclusion was that they were paralysed by the hopelessness of the situation.  Yet our extremity increased with every minute, for the rising tide was robbing us of the reef that served as buffer.  It soon became a case of swamping at our anchor.  Seas were splashing on board in growing volume, and we baled constantly.  And still my fishermen crew eyed the surf-battered shore and did nothing.

At last, after many narrow escapes from complete swamping, the fishermen got into action.  All hands tailed on to the anchor and hove it up.  For’ard, as the boat’s head paid off, we set a patch of sail about the size of a flour-sack.  And we headed straight for shore.  I unlaced my shoes, unbottoned my great-coat and coat, and was ready to make a quick partial strip a minute or so before we struck.  But we didn’t strike, and, as we rushed in, I saw the beauty of the situation.  Before us opened a narrow channel, frilled at its mouth with breaking seas.  Yet, long before, when I had scanned the shore closely, there had been no such channel. I had forgotten the thirty-foot tide.  And it was for this tide that the Japanese had so precariously waited.  We ran the frill of breakers, curved into a tiny sheltered bay where the water was scarcely flawed by the gale, and landed on a beach where the salt sea of the last tide lay frozen in long curving lines.  And this was one gale of three in the course of those eight days in the sampan.  Would it have been beaten on a ship?  I fear me the ship would have gone aground on the outlying reef and that its people would have been incontinently and monotonously drowned.

There are enough surprises and mishaps in a three-days’ cruise in a small boat to supply a great ship on the ocean for a full year.  I remember, once, taking out on her trial trip a little thirty-footer I had just bought.  In six days we had two stiff blows, and, in addition, one proper southwester and one rip-snorting southeaster.  The slight intervals between these blows were dead calms.  Also, in the six days, we were aground three times.  Then, too, we tied up to the bank in the Sacramento River, and, grounding by an accident on the steep slope on a falling tide, nearly turned a side somersault down the bank.