constantly. And still my fishermen crew eyed the surf-battered shore and
did nothing.

At last, after many narrow escapes from complete swamping, the fishermen
got into action. All hands tailed on to the anchor and hove it up.
For'ard, as the boat's head paid off, we set a patch of sail about the
size of a flour-sack. And we headed straight for shore. I unlaced my
shoes, unbottoned my great-coat and coat, and was ready to make a quick
partial strip a minute or so before we struck. But we didn't strike,
and, as we rushed in, I saw the beauty of the situation. Before us
opened a narrow channel, frilled at its mouth with breaking seas. Yet,
long before, when I had scanned the shore closely, there had been no such
channel. _I had forgotten the thirty-foot tide_. And it was for this
tide that the Japanese had so precariously waited. We ran the frill of
breakers, curved into a tiny sheltered bay where the water was scarcely
flawed by the gale, and landed on a beach where the salt sea of the last
tide lay frozen in long curving lines. And this was one gale of three in
the course of those eight days in the _sampan_. Would it have been
beaten on a ship? I fear me the ship would have gone aground on the
outlying reef and that its people would have been incontinently and
monotonously drowned.

There are enough surprises and mishaps in a three-days' cruise in a small
boat to supply a great ship on the ocean for a full year. I remember,
once, taking out on her trial trip a little thirty-footer I had just
bought. In six days we had two stiff blows, and, in addition, one proper
southwester and one rip-snorting southeaster. The slight intervals
between these blows were dead calms. Also, in the six days, we were
aground three times. Then, too, we tied up to the bank in the Sacramento
River, and, grounding by an accident on the steep slope on a falling