It was a moment of chagrin so intense that I could have wept, and probably did use emphatic language. For I had not forgotten the possibility of such a thing happening. It was simply sheer bad luck that, as the Crew had pulled the painter, the heavy rudder had swung round and nipped it against the stern-post, whereupon the reversing propeller in a moment had sucked the slack and coiled it round its shaft as tight as iron.

The fisherman let the chain go and the boat swung round into her original position, for he had not, he said, actually weighed the anchor—for which I inwardly blessed him. We were still afloat.

With a knife lashed to the end of the boat-hook, I tried for a long time to cut the rope clear, but in the heaving sea this was impossible. ‘You will have to beach her’, said the fisherman, ‘when the wind takes off.’

A quiet wise man, to whom the Crew took immediately. But I said I would strip sooner. ‘Are you a good swimmer?’ I had to admit I was not very good. He shook his head and asked us where we had come from and where we were going to. I told him, approximately, for I had private designs on the Outer Hebrides. He stared at me. ‘Are you the only man on board?’ ‘Well, there are two of us,’ I suggested. Whereat he shook his head more profoundly and with not a little wonder. ‘You should have another man,’ he said. When I went forward to get a dram, he repeated this to the Crew in a way that impressed her.

All the same, I made up my mind that I wasn’t going to beach the boat. She had been beached far too often already. It would soon be a bad habit. However, nothing further could be done at the moment and Mr. Macleod went away.

But in the afternoon we saw him return with another man, get into his small boat, and with an oar apiece they pulled out into the wind and then came stern first down on us. Throwing me the end of a rope, he told me to tie all the rope I had to it and then make fast. Out into the wind again, pulling all they were able, for it was now blowing pretty stiff, they paid out rope until they had gone a considerable way. To their end of the rope was an anchor which they dropped overboard; then, tying up astern of us, they came aboard.

All three of us pulling on the chain could not get our light anchor out of the water, it was so foul with weed and stone, and at last Mr. Macleod got into our dinghy and began the laborious and precarious business of clearing it: while we heaved until I thought my heart would burst. When it suddenly came away we both sat heavily on the deck and laughed.

We now lay on the rope and slowly pulled the Thistle away from the shore until she was in the spot where Mr. Macleod wanted her, and then I received my first real lesson in how to let go an anchor. Long after he had carefully got bottom he continued to pay out the chain foot by foot. There could be little doubt but that in my haste in dropping anchor, I had fouled the arms with the chain and gathered half the sea-bottom within the tangled mass. Had there not been such good holding ground, we might well have been in a worse plight than with a fouled propeller. I had learned that lesson, and never again forgot it.