"He had the first watch. It was one of those typical Pacific nights—a velvet sky, a smooth sea, the air somehow expressing the character of an ocean illimitable and magnificent, an ocean that spreads like the floor of the universe. After the captain had gone below for the night, Devereux cast his imagination adrift to follow those birds, to see the land again. What could their visit have meant? Was there any land nearer than the Marquesas—perhaps an uninhabited island? He promised himself a careful survey of the chart when he went below at midnight.... He’d been thinking in this desultory fashion some time, lost in the dreams of night watches, when a sharp cry from forward struck him like a knife flying through the darkness. "You know those single cries on shipboard, in the dead of night—cries of warning, of apprehension, of impending danger. The heart stops for a moment at the sound. Then a thousand possibilities crowd into the mind at once, a thousand processes of thought leap into action. There can be no indecision; moments are priceless. And there must be no mistake. "The cry met him a second time as he passed the mizzen rigging, running forward. ’_Breakers ahead!_’ Instinctively, he shouted the order over his shoulder as he ran. "’Put the helm down! _Hard down! Hard down!_’ "But it was too late to save her. He told me that he paused at the break of the poop, listening, and in a sudden hush that went over the ship, heard distinctly a low sucking sound under the bows—the horrible gasping of water over rocks awash. He clung to the rail, cowed by the only fear a sailor knows. At that moment, she struck heavily, and stood still. She had been making about five knots, enough to give her plenty of momentum. The shock was terrific: some of the top-hamper crashed to the deck, and the voices of men suddenly broke out in screams of terror. The ship rose a little by the head, seemed to draw back, and surged forward again with a dull, rending, sickening plunge. "But what’s the need to rehearse the details of that oldest tragedy of the sea? There was time enough for them to get out the boats, time enough, even, to fully provision them—and that’s more than some have been allowed. But the ship was dead and done for. Her whole bow must have been stove in under water. Five minutes after they pushed clear of her, she slumped like a rock, and they lost her in the darkness. A whirlpool of foam showed for a while on the surface of the black water. Then that, too, faded; and the wide, open Pacific received them in their three boats as frail as cockle-shells, and the velvet night covered it all.