With afternoon came more snow, hiding all the shores ahead. Crawford was at work in the icy bows, trying to chop loose a spare anchor, when suddenly he and his men were sent all asprawl on the ice, grasping at the handlines, hurled headlong. With a hideous lurch and shudder, the doomed ship struck, lifted, and struck again. Crawford saw the masts topple, heard the crash of splintered wood above the roar of the storm, and then was swept overboard with the tangle of masts and spars and rigging. And this, for the moment, was the end of everything so far as Crawford was concerned. After a little he revived, gasping, and managed to lash himself to the litter of wreckage, but passed again into oblivion. If Crawford was gone, however, Moses Deakin remained; and if ever a man made use of his head with certain death on all sides, that man was the Bostonnais. He had survived a perilous trade these many years by just such ability. He knew well that no mercy awaited him either from French or English--and Deakin acted accordingly. Receiving no mercy, he was not the man to accord mercy. The ship was sogged into the shallows with her bows under water, waist and high stern exposed and beginning to break up fast as the thunderous rollers burst above her. All was confusion, flying spray, screams of the wounded as they washed away. On the poop, Smithsend was knocking together a raft to float some of the hurt men ashore. The land was at least three miles distant, but was quite hidden behind snow and obscurity. So far as Deakin was concerned, the land was as perilous as the bay, but he had no choice and so acted swiftly. His brazen voice gathered three of his surviving men, and with these he made his way to the waist of the ship. There under the flying spray three seamen were at work, desperately trying to loosen the two halves of the broken mainyard, which had smashed through the bulwarks and wedged there. Deakin leaped upon the three and struck them aside, his men knocked them into the surging tide below. Whirling, Deakin spat orders at his own three. “Go get some food, a fusil, and dry powder--sharp about it! Strip some tarpaulin off the guns below and fetch it. Move fast, blast ye! She’s breakin’ up.” Breaking up she was. Wounded men were going to leeward, clinging to bits of wreckage, swimming frantically in the icy water, pulling each other down. The Bostonnais hurled himself at the two fragments of the great spar lodged in the bulwarks. His immense strength prised them free, he tore at other flotsam, stood guard over it all until one by one his three men came staggering back to the spot with their burdens. One bore food and a fusil, another had powder and ball and pistols, the third brought tarred canvas.