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But when the poor Mexican peons set out, they had nothing behind them but the branding iron, or slavery in the mines, if they failed. Yet they sang as they sailed their rickety death-traps, and they laughed as they rowed; and when the tide-rip caught them, they sank without a cry to any but the Virgin. Look at a map of the west coast of the Pacific from the Horn to Sitka.
When the tide-rip came through the reefs from the north along the line of the Aleutian Islands with the swiftness of a mill-race, the men had literally to be held to the rudder at pistol point and beaten up the masts with the flat of the officers' swords. But while they skulked, a hurricane rolled up the fog; and the ship could but scud under bare poles before the wind.
Officers rushed on deck to be swept from their feet by blasts of salt spray, and just ahead, through the moonlight, could be seen the sharp edge of a long reef where the beach combers ran with the tide-rip of a whirlpool. There is something inexpressibly terrifying even from a point of safety in these beach combers, clutching their long arms hungrily for prey.
By this time we had got into a bad tide-rip, which, combined with the heavy, lumpy sea, made it almost impossible to keep the 'Dudley Docker' from swamping.
But sharks were sharks, and he had known of more than one good swimmer drowned in a tide-rip. The squall blackened the sky, beat the ocean white where he had last seen the three heads, and then blotted out sea and sky and everything with its deluge of rain. It passed on, and Berande emerged in the bright sunshine as the three swimmers emerged from the sea.
The tide-rip was mistaken for earthquake; and when the lurid glare of volcanic smoke came through the fog, the sailors huddled panic-stricken below-decks and refused to obey orders. Every man became his own master; and if that ever works well on land, it means disaster at sea.
The surface current at the Golden Gate runs six miles per hour and the tide-rip is often troublesome; but there is ample room for sport, and very wild sport at times. The total area of the bay is four hundred and eighty square miles, and there are hundreds of miles of navigable sloughs, rivers, and creeks.
Barely had the ships passed up the sound, when they were enshrouded in a fog that wiped out every outline; otherwise, the high coast of glacial palisades two hundred feet in places and four miles broad might have been seen landlocked by mountains; but Mr. Gore launched out in a small boat steering north through haze and tide-rip.
"It's on account of the young lady that I am going there tonight. I have reason to fear that she may be in danger." "That so?" The boat-man's comfortably slouched shoulders squared. He leaned over and did something to his engine. "In that case we'll take a chance or two. Hold tight, we're bucking the tide-rip. Lucky we've got the moon!" Yes, they had the moon!
The ride back to the ship was a long one, and we struck a tide-rip half-way there, which drenched us all to the skin and tossed the staunch little craft back and forth, as if she had been a chip on the water. But at eleven o'clock we climbed aboard the Burnside, after having given the Powers-that-Be and our many friends a fright which made them threaten us with the brig if it ever happened again.
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