Put your heart into it, my lads, for the sooner we are there the sooner we shall get back." But they had not taken fifty strokes before Adele gave a sudden scream.
"My God!" she cried, "the ship is going down!" She had settled lower and lower in the water, and suddenly with a sound of rending planks she thrust down her bows like a diving water-fowl, her stern flew up into the air, and with a long sucking noise she shot down swifter and swifter until the leaping waves closed over her high poop lantern.

With one impulse the boat swept round again and made backwards as fast as willing arms could pull it.

But all was quiet at the scene of the disaster.

Not even a fragment of wreckage was left upon the surface to show where the _Golden Rod_ had found her last harbour.
For a long quarter of an hour they pulled round and round in the moonlight, but not a glimpse could they see of the Puritan seaman, and at last, when in spite of the balers the water was washing round their ankles, they put her head about once more, and made their way in silence and with heavy hearts to their dreary island of refuge.
Desolate as it was, it was their only hope now, for the leak was increasing and it was evident that the boat could not be kept afloat long.

As they drew nearer they saw with dismay that the side which faced them was a solid wall of ice sixty feet high without a flaw or crevice in its whole extent.