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His hands were blistered, his breath came in sobs, but he dragged fiercely at the oars. At last he was stemming the strong tide-rip off Brimstone Point. The next ten minutes were worse than all that had gone before. As he surged unevenly backward and forward, the current swung the pea-pod's bow first one way, then the other.
Through the first flowed all the water of Napa River and the great tide-lands; through the second flowed all the water of Suisun Bay and the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. And where such immense bodies of water, flowing swiftly, clashed together, a terrible tide-rip was produced.
How do these thin skin boats escape wreckage on a sea where tide-rip washes over the reefs all summer and ice hummocks sweep out from the shore in winter tempest? To begin with, the frost that creates the ice clears the air of fog, and the steel-shod pole either sheers the bidarka off from the ice, or the ice off from the bidarka.
Wind was followed by dead calm, when the sails literally fell to pieces with rain-rot in the fog; and on the evening of September 8 the becalmed crew were suddenly aroused by the tide-rip of roaring breakers. Heaving out all anchors at once, Chirikoff with difficulty made fast to rocky bottom.
Silently, like sea-birds glorying in the tempest, the canoes bounded from crest to crest of the rolling seas, always taking care not to be caught broadsides by the smashing combers, or swamped between waves in the churning seas. How it happened is not known, but somehow between wind and tide-rip, thirty of the canoes that rode over a billow and swept down to the trough never came up.
To make it worse, the wind howled up San Pablo Bay for fifteen miles and drove in a tremendous sea upon the tide-rip. Conflicting currents tore about in all directions, colliding, forming whirlpools, sucks, and boils, and shooting up spitefully into hollow waves which fell aboard as often from leeward as from windward.
We decided to return home, fearing the boys would murder Belni in an unwatched moment, as they had asked several times, when the sea was high, whether we would not throw Belni into the water now. The passage to Santo was very rough. The waves thundered against the little old cutter, and we had a nasty tide-rip.
The waves were choppy, and threw up small heads of foam like the swirl of cross-currents in a tide-rip. Stuart began to feel a little frightened. "Do you really think it will come here?" "Yes," said the botanist gravely, "I do. In fact I am sure of it. Barbados is full in the hurricane track, you know." "But why?" queried the boy. "I've always heard of West Indian hurricanes.
Up to the northeast end, then, where the tide-rip thunders up the rock wall like an inverted cataract, posts Drusenin where he anchors his ship in Captain Harbor, and has winter quarters built before snow-fall of '63. An odd thing was the Indian chiefs became so very friendly they voluntarily brought hostages of good conduct to Drusenin. Surely Drusenin was in luck!
Steep blue cliffs arose far away out of a white cloud of surf, and, though a strong swimmer, I had little hope of reaching the shore in safety. Fortunately, or rather, I should say, providentially, the current and tide-rip carried me to the mouth of a river, and, with a great effort, I got into the shoal-water, and finally staggered out on shore.
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