The storm which overwhelmed the brig _Polly_ came out of the southeast, when she was less than a week on the road to Santa Cruz. To be dismasted and waterlogged was no uncommon fate. It happens often nowadays, when the little schooners creep along the coast, from Maine and Nova Scotia ports, and dare the winter blows to earn their bread. Men suffer in open boats, as has been the seafarer’s hard lot for ages, and they drown with none to hear their cries, but they are seldom adrift more than a few days. The story of the _Polly_ deserves to be rescued from oblivion because, so far as I am able to discover, it is unique in the spray-swept annals of maritime disaster. Seamanship was helpless to ward off the attack of the storm that left the brig a sodden hulk. Courageously her crew shortened sail and made all secure when the sea and sky presaged a change of weather. These were no green hands, but men seasoned by the continual hazards of their calling. The wild gale smote them in the darkness of night. They tried to heave the vessel to, but she was battered and wrenched without mercy. Stout canvas was whirled away in fragments. The seams of the hull opened as she labored, and six feet of water flooded the hold. Leaking like a sieve, the _Polly_ would never see port again. Worse was to befall her. At midnight she was capsized, or thrown on her beam-ends, as the sailor’s lingo has it. She lay on her side while the clamorous seas washed clean over her. The skipper, the mate, the four seamen, and the cook somehow clung to the rigging and grimly refused to be drowned. They were of the old breed, “every hair a rope-yarn and every finger a fish-hook.” They even managed to find an ax and grope their way to the shrouds in the faint hope that the brig might right if the masts went overside. They hacked away, and came up to breathe now and then, until foremast and mainmast fell with a crash, and the wreck rolled level. Then they slashed with their knives at the tangle of spars and ropes until they drifted clear. As the waves rush across a half-tide rock, so they broke over the shattered brig, but she no longer wallowed on her side.