After a few moments of great anxiety the boats crept up, the cutter on
her port and the long-boat on her starboard quarter.

Wylie ran forward, and, hailing Hudson, implored him, in the friendliest
tones, to give himself a chance. Then tried him by his vanity, "Come, and
command the boats, old fellow. How can we navigate them on the Pacific
without _you?"_

Hudson was now leaning over the taffrail utterly drunk. He made no reply
to the mate, but merely waved his cutlass feebly in one hand, and his
bottle in the other, and gurgled out, "Duty to m' employers."

Then Cooper, without a word, double reefed the cutter's mainsail and told
Welch to keep as close to the ship's quarter as he dare. Wylie
instinctively did the same, and the three craft crawled on in solemn and
deadly silence, for nearly twenty minutes.

The wounded ship seemed to receive a death-blow. She stopped dead, and
shook.

The next moment she pitched gently forward, and her bows went under the
water, while her after-part rose into the air, and revealed to those in
the cutter two splintered holes in her run, just below the water-line.

The next moment her stern settled down; the sea yawned horribly, the
great waves of her own making rushed over her upper deck, and the lofty
masts and sails, remaining erect, went down with sad majesty into the
deep. And nothing remained but the bubbling and foaming of the voracious
water, that had swallowed up the good ship, and her cargo, and her
drunken master.