By instinct, I suppose, I struggled so to climb upon the floating wreck as to get my head and shoulders above water. Then I saw that I was alone in my misery. I have said that my station was at the outer end of the yard, and I conceive that my shipmates must have gained the top, and from thence, I hoped, the deck. But as for me, I saw nought but speedy drowning for my fate. The seas rose in great foaming peaks and pyramids around me, and the wind drove drenching showers from the crests of the waves down into the hollows. All around gloomy clouds passed swiftly, torn by the squall, but the pitchy darkness which showed where its strength lay, was far down to leeward, and looking thereat as I rose upon a higher sea than common, I faintly descried the ship in a crippled plight, but having managed to put her helm up so as to scud before the storm. She was already near a league away, and leaving me fast; so that the bitterness of death rose up in my very heart. For a moment I thought I might as well die at once, and letting go my hold of the spars, I allowed myself to sink backward into the sea. But God has wisely made man to love life with a clinging love, and to grapple with death as with a grim enemy. Therefore, as the water closed above me, and I felt suffocating, I could not help making a struggle, which soon replaced me on my desolate seat on the floating wreck. I looked at the spars, and saw that the topmast had broken only about a foot beneath the place to which the yard had been lowered. Nearly the whole of the foretop and the top-gallant masts of the Golden Grove, with the fragments of the foretopsail, which had been rent almost into ribbons, and the yard to which they were fastened lay therefore in the sea. I clambered in from the end of the yard, and took up my position where the mast and it crossed each other; making myself fast thereto with one of the numerous ends of broken rope which abounded, and for near an hour sat dismal and almost broken-hearted, unheedful of how the waves tossed me to and fro, or how they sometimes burst over and almost stifled me. I was somewhat roused by a feeling of warmth, and looking abroad saw that the clouds had broken, and that the sun was shining brightly on the sea. The wind was also abated, and the waves not combing so violently, I was more at ease. Then I heard that terrible sound—the sound of the sea alone—which no one who has listened to save he who has swam far from any vessel, or who, like myself, has clung to a driving spar. On the beach you hear the surf, where the waves burst upon rock or sand; on shipboard you hear the dashing of the billows on counter and prow; and, above them all, the sigh of the wind and the groaning of timbers and masts. But to hear the sea alone, you must be alone upon the sea. I will tell you of the noise: it is as of a great multitudinous hiss, rising universally about you—the buzz of the fermenting and yeasty waves.