Illness, contrary winds, and business delays postponed the return journey until October, and they made sail with every expectation of a good passage. Off Cape Cod one heavy gale after another drove the ketch far offshore. The experience must have been terribly severe, for after eleven days of it the eldest son died, and the other son died soon after. It was too much for young Caleb Jones also, and he followed the others over the side, stitched up in a piece of canvas. Poor Ephraim How had lost his crew as by a visitation of God, and it seems as though some contagious disease must have ravaged the little ketch. The passenger, Mr. Augur, was no sailor at all, and Mr. How lashed himself to the helm for thirty-six hours at a stretch. In this situation the two men cast lots whether to try to struggle back to the New England coast or to bear away with the wind and hope to reach the West Indies. The gambler’s choice decreed New England, but the weather decided otherwise. For more than two months the distressed ketch tossed about and drifted, and was beaten to and fro without a glimpse of landfall. It was late in November when she was wrecked on a ledge of rock, but Ephraim How had not the slightest idea of where it was. He later learned that he had driven as far to the eastward as Nova Scotia, and the ketch had smashed herself upon a desolate island near Cape Sable. For Ephraim How it was a long, long way from Boston to New Haven. Cape Sable in the winter time is even now a wicked refuge for shipwrecked mariners. Fortunately, there drifted ashore from the ketch the following list of essentials: “A cask of gunpowder, which received no damage from the water; a barrel of wine, half a barrel of molasses, several useful articles towards building a tent; besides which they had firearms and shot, a pot for boiling, and most probably other things not mentioned.” Ephraim How, Mr. Augur, and the cabin boy prepared to make a winter of it in their flimsy shelter of a canvas tent amid the rocks and snow-drifts. They shot crows, ravens, and sea-gulls, and warded off starvation with an uncomplaining heroism which expressed itself in these words: “Once they lived five days without any sustenance but did not feel themselves pinched with hunger at other times, which they esteemed a special favor of heaven unto them.” The dear friend and companion, Mr. Augur, died after three months of this ordeal, and the cabin boy lived until the middle of February. Thereafter Ephraim How was a solitary castaway. He somehow survived the winter, and notched a stick to keep the tally of the days and weeks as they brought the milder airs of spring. Fishing-vessels may have sighted his signals, but they passed unheeding, afraid of some Indian stratagem to lure them inshore.