Then, in solid green sheets, it leaped up over the bulwarks, and for a moment the long flush deck was a boiling cauldron with a bloody scum, in which twirled and twisted dead men and living, and fragments of the ship and rigging.
When I came up through the roaring green water I found myself within arm's length of the foretopsailyard, to which a strip of ragged sail still hung.
I hooked my arm over it and looked round for my comrades.

About a score of heads floated in the belching bubbles of the sunken ship, but even as I looked the number lessened, for the Island men of those days were no swimmers.

A burly body swung past me.

I grabbed it, dragged it to the spar and hoisted its arm over it.

It was John Ozanne, and presently he recovered sufficiently to get his other arm up and draw himself chest-high to look about him.