Schriften, the pilot, appeared to be the leader of the ship's company. With the can of liquor in his hand, he danced and sang, snapped his fingers, and, like a demon, peered with his one eye upon Philip; and then would he fall and roll with screams of laughter in the scuppers. More liquor was handed up as fast as it was called for. Oaths, shrieks, laughter, were mingled together; the men at the helm lashed it amidships, and hastened to join their companions, and the _Ter Schilling_ flew before the gale; the fore-staysail being the only sail set, checking her as she yawed to starboard or to port. Philip remained on deck by the poop-ladder. "Strange," thought he, "that I should stand here, the only one left now capable of acting,--that I should be fated to look by myself upon this scene of horror and disgust--should here wait the severing of this vessel's timbers,--the loss of life which must accompany it,--the only one calm and collected, or aware of what must soon take place. God forgive me, but I appear, useless and impotent as I am, to stand here like the master of the storm,--separated as it were from my brother mortals by my own peculiar destiny. It must be so. This wreck then must not be for me,--I feel that it is not,--that I have a charmed life, or rather a protracted one, to fulfil the oath I registered in heaven. But the wind is not so loud, surely the water is not so rough: my forebodings may be wrong, and all may yet be saved. Heaven grant it! For how melancholy, how lamentable is it, to behold men created in God's own image, leaving the world, disgraced below the brute creation!" Philip was right in supposing that the wind was not so strong, nor the sea so high. The vessel, after running to the southward till past Table Bay, had, by the alteration made in her course, entered into False Bay, where, to a certain degree, she was sheltered from the violence of the winds and waves. But, although the water was smoother, the waves were still more than sufficient to beat to pieces any vessel that might be driven on shore at the bottom of the bay, to which point the _Ter Schilling_ was now running. The bay so far offered a fair chance of escape, as, instead of the rocky coast outside (against which, had the vessel run, a few seconds would have insured her destruction), there was a shelving beach of loose sand. But of this Philip could, of course, have no knowledge, for the land at the entrance of the Bay had been passed unperceived in the darkness of the night. About twenty minutes more had elapsed, when Philip observed that the whole sea around them was one continued foam. He had hardly time for conjecture before the ship struck heavily on the sands, and the remaining masts fell by the board.