"Be ready there with your oars, sharp!" In another moment the boat was tossing about in the open sea, the height and force of the waves becoming all the more apparent now that we had lost the protection of the _Esmeralda's_ lee.

The flames just then, as if angry at our having escaped them, darted up the mizzen rigging, and presently enveloped the poop in their blaze, so that the whole ship was now one mass of fire fore and aft, blazing like a tar-barrel.
The skipper would have liked to have lain by and seen the last of the vessel, but there was too much sea on, and the wind seemed getting up again; so, knowing how treacherous the weather was in the vicinity of the Cape of Storms, he determined, for the safety of those under his charge, to make for the land as speedily as possible--an open boat not being the best craft in the world to be in, out on the ocean, when a gale is about! As Captain Billings could see, the wind was blowing on shore, in the very direction for us to go; and, as the rollers were racing towards the same goal, the only way for us to avoid being swamped by them was to travel at a greater rate forwards than they did, or else we would broach-to in the troughs of the waves, when a boat is apt to get for the moment becalmed, from the intervening wall of water on either side stopping the current of air, and taking the breeze out of her sails.
The long-boat was fitted with a couple of masts, carrying a large mainsail and a mizzen, both of which the skipper now ordered to be set, the former close-reefed to half its size.

A bit of a staysail was also hoisted forwards in place of the jib, which was too large for the wind that was on; and then, it was wonderful to see the way the long-boat began to go through the water when the sail was put on her! She fairly raced along, dragging astern the jolly-boat, which we had taken in tow, the little craft leaving a curly wave in front of her cutwater, higher than her bows, and looking as if it were on the point of pouring over on top of those in her.
It was now late in the afternoon of this, our sixty-third day out of port; and, as the sun sank to rest in the west, away in the east, according to our position in the boat, there was another illumination on the horizon.
It was that caused by the burning ship.

But it did not last so long: the fire of coals and wood could not vie with that of the celestial orb.
We could still see the blazing hull, as we rose every now and then on the crest of the rollers; while, when we could not perceive it from the subsidence of the waves under the boat's keel, making us sink down, a pillar of smoke, floating in the air high above the _Esmeralda_ in a long fan-like trail, and stretching out to where sky and sea met in the extreme distance, told us where she was without any fear of mistake.
Soon after we had quitted the vessel the mainmast, when half consumed, tumbled over the side; and, presently, the burning mizzen, which had been standing up for some time like a tall fiery pole, disappeared in a shower of sparks.
The end was not far off now.
As we rose on the send of the next sea, Captain Billings, by whose side I was sitting in the stern-sheets of the long-boat, grasped my arm.
"Look!" he said, half turning round and pointing to where the burning ship had last been seen.
She was gone! The smoke still hung in the air in the distance, like a funeral pall; but the wind was now rapidly dispersing it to leeward, there being no further supply of the columns of cloud-like vapour that had originally composed it.
Soon, too, the smoke had completely disappeared, and the horizon was a blank.
"All's over!" cried the skipper, with a heavy sigh.
All was over, indeed; for, whatever fragments of the ill-fated _Esmeralda_ the remorseless fire may have spared, were now, without doubt, making their way down to the bottom of that wild ocean on which we poor shipwrecked mariners were tossing in a couple of frail boats-- uncertain whether we should ever reach land in safety, or be doomed to follow our vessel's bones down into the depths of the sea! Night fell soon after this; but the long-boat still held her way, running before the wind, and steering a nor'-nor'-west course by compass.

We had now been going in that direction some two hours or more, and the skipper calculated that we were some thirty miles off the Wollaston Islands, which we ought to fetch by daylight next morning.
Fortunately, it was a bright clear night, although there was no moon, only the stars twinkling aloft in the cloudless azure sky; and, thus, we were able to watch the waves so as to prevent them pooping us when two seas ran foul of each other, which they frequently did, racing against the wind, and eager, apparently, to outstrip it.