To Tack Was Impossible, We Could Only Wear, - And To Wear In Such A Sea Was No Very Pleasant Operation. But The Little Ship Seemed To Know What She Was About, As Well As Any Of Us:

Up went the helm, round came the schooner into the trough of the sea, - high over her quarter toppled

An enormous sea, built up of I know not how many tons of water, and hung over the deck, - by some unaccountable wriggle, an instant ere it thundered down she had twisted her stern on one side, and the waves passed underneath. In another minute her head was to the sea, the mainsail was eased over, and all danger was past.

What was now to be done? That the land we had seen was the coast of Norway I could not believe. Wrong as our dead reckoning evidently was, it could not be so wrong as that. Yet only one other supposition was possible, viz., that we had not come so far south as we imagined, and that we had stumbled upon Roost - a little rocky island that lies about twenty miles to the southward of the Loffoden Islands. Whether this conjecture was correct or not, did not much matter; to go straight away to sea, and lie to until we could get an observation, was the only thing to be done. Away then we went, struggling against a tremendous sea for a good nine hours, until we judged ourselves to be seventy or eighty miles from where we had sighted the breakers, - when we lay to, not in the best of tempers.

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