IN A FIEND'S CAULDRON.

King Country Chronicle, Volume V, Issue 371, 21 June 1911, Page 3

IN A FIEND'S CAULDRON.

OFF THE COAST OF YUCATAN. We hired a small boat in a small port on the south coast of Yucatan, and with a native crew put out into the treacherous Caribbean Sea tc visit the once pirate-haunted island of Cozumel. To approach the island we had to fight our way through a gap in the long coral reef in the teeth of a gale of wind. It was la via angusta, and to us landlubbers it looked like the gate of a water-hell —an ocean fiend's cauldron of bubbling, leaping grey water. As the two lines of rocks closed in on us, the sea roiled down from the seaward reefs in great slate-coloured, foamless rollers. From the level of the little boat they looked like moving hills. The wind was blowing fresh on the quarter, and the skipper had put the boat towards the bigger reef, lest we should be blown clean on the smaller. „ There was not a dog's chance for us if we capsized, and an inch twist wrong of the helm and we must. One sacond we sank low between rollers, looking down a lead-grey allev-way of water. The next we were flung up, light as an egg-shell, on the crest of a wave, balancing there long enough to measure with straining eyes the distance between us and the wall of coral. The next half-hour seemed the longest we had ever lived. It looked as if nothing but a miracle of seamanship could save the boat. We heard the captain mutter a prayer to the Virgin, and the sailors, their yellow faces now ashengrey, crouched for'ard clinging to the shrouds, the spray soaking their thin cottons. When we ran once more into the open Atlantic, we cared not for the fiercer waves which charged us, breaking over the bows and drenching us, for we had faced what was worse than open sea. —"The AmericaD Egypt,"