Galliots were clippers compared with her.

To tack her about was undreamed of; to wear her required all hands and half a watch.

So situated, we were caught on a lee shore in an eight-point shift of wind at the height of a hurricane that had beaten our souls sick for forty-eight hours.
We drifted in upon the land in the chill light of a stormy dawn across a heartless cross-sea mountain high.

It was dead of winter, and between smoking snow-squalls we could glimpse the forbidding coast, if coast it might be called, so broken was it.

There were grim rock isles and islets beyond counting, dim snow-covered ranges beyond, and everywhere upstanding cliffs too steep for snow, outjuts of headlands, and pinnacles and slivers of rock upthrust from the boiling sea.
There was no name to this country on which we drove, no record of it ever having been visited by navigators.