We ran more and more lines, and more and more lines continued to part, and more and more the pretty boat went over on her side.  We bent all our spare lines; we unrove sheets and halyards; we used our two-inch hawser; we fastened lines part way up the mast, half way up, and everywhere else.  We toiled and sweated and enounced our mutual and sincere conviction that God’s grudge still held against us.  Country yokels came down on the wharf and sniggered at us.  When Cloudesley let a coil of rope slip down the inclined deck into the vile slime and fished it out with seasick countenance, the yokels sniggered louder and it was all I could do to prevent him from climbing up on the wharf and committing murder.

By the time the sloop’s deck was perpendicular, we had unbent the boom-lift from below, made it fast to the wharf, and, with the other end fast nearly to the mast-head, heaved it taut with block and tackle.  The lift was of steel wire.  We were confident that it could stand the strain, but we doubted the holding-power of the stays that held the mast.

The tide had two more hours to ebb (and it was the big run-out), which meant that five hours must elapse ere the returning tide would give us a chance to learn whether or not the sloop would rise to it and right herself.

The bank was almost up and down, and at the bottom, directly beneath us, the fast-ebbing tide left a pit of the vilest, illest-smelling, illest-appearing muck to be seen in many a day’s ride.  Said Cloudesley to me gazing down into it: 

“I love you as a brother.  I’d fight for you.  I’d face roaring lions, and sudden death by field and flood.  But just the same, don’t you fall into that.”  He shuddered nauseously.  “For if you do, I haven’t the grit to pull you out.  I simply couldn’t.  You’d be awful.  The best I could do would be to take a boat-hook and shove you down out of sight.”

We sat on the upper side-wall of the cabin, dangled our legs down the top of the cabin, leaned our backs against the deck, and played chess until the rising tide and the block and tackle on the boom-lift enabled us to get her on a respectable keel again.  Years afterward, down in the South Seas, on the island of Ysabel, I was caught in a similar predicament.  In order to clean her copper, I had careened the Snark broadside on to the beach and outward.  When the tide rose, she refused to rise.  The water crept in through the scuppers, mounted over the rail, and the level of the ocean slowly crawled up the slant of the deck.  We battened down the engine-room hatch, and the sea rose to it and over it and climbed perilously near to the cabin companion-way and skylight.  We were all sick with fever, but we turned out in the blazing tropic sun and toiled madly for several hours.  We carried our heaviest lines ashore from our mast-heads and heaved with our heaviest purchase until everything crackled including ourselves.  We would spell off and lie down like dead men, then get up and heave and crackle again.  And in the end, our lower rail five feet under water and the wavelets lapping the companion-way combing, the sturdy little craft shivered and shook herself and pointed her masts once more to the zenith.