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| read an excerpt |
As he knelt to unlock us from our place next to the deckhouse, his hands shaking, our ship was only a stone’s throw from the sandbar. At nearly the same instant as the chain connecting all our leg irons released us, a massive wave rose under our stern, tipping the entire vessel up at a surreal angle and us onto the sandbar. In the same instant, we were violently thrown against the bulwarks as a torrent of seawater flooded over us. We then ran aground with an explosion of sound like the discharge of fifty cannons and with such tremendous centrifugal force that our main mast snapped like a brittle twig and crashed into the surf. Moments later, after a brief lull, the next wave pulled the water back from the sandbar, causing the ocean to form a menacing wall of on-rushing water, which then exploded down on us with even greater force.
Just before that wave crashed over us, I looked into my younger brother’s eyes as he clung for dear life to some of the mainmast rigging, scattered across the deck. In the next instant, he was gone, swept overboard. I was washed off the deck into the impact zone of huge waves crashing over the sandbar, where I was held under and thrown into the furious white water. Struggling to hold my breath, every fiber in my body struggled for air. Knowing in just seconds, I would involuntarily suck in saltwater and drown, I opened my eyes and saw brown sand-filled water swirling around my face, with light showing me the way to the surface. When my head popped out of the water, I took a huge gasp of air and felt it rush through my body, all the way down to my toes. For an instant, I could see land, the thin strip of green and light-brown, and beautiful blue sky above.
“I want to live!’ I cried.
I turned around to see another wall of white water rushing toward me, and I was again churned under and tossed about. This time, I opened my eyes quickly to determine the way the surface. Again, I was given only seconds of air at the surface before being tumbled under. Each time I surfaced; the precious narrow strip of land looked smaller. It struck me—I was being carried out to sea, a tiny twig in a huge current.
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