I knew the No Name would have trouble, being half swamped and far to the right.  Howland was standing in the stern, his flowing beard blowing up into his face, trying to steer with the big sweep oar, while Seneca rowed at the forward oars and Frank Goodman at the aft pair, though Frank was flailing more than rowing, looking over his shoulder, saying something I couldn’t hear.

When we'd beached the Maid next to the Emma Dean, I looked back to see Oramel with the steering oar hard over to turn to the left and the other two men pulling with all their might trying to get the No Name across the strengthening tide.  They got her bow turned at last but now she was broadside and the tide snatched her.  I was yelling and beckoning, Dunn was yelling and waving his flag, and Howland was yelling, “Good Christ in heaven, row!”

When Sister came around the bend, Andy started to yell too.  If yelling helped, we would have rescued her, but the No Name broached and began to move sideways downstream, ever faster.  Frank stood as if to jump out of the boat, but Oramel pushed him down just as the boat struck a rock and they were both tumbled into the boat’s bottom.  In the moment that her forward motion was arrested by the rock, the water rushed in from behind, totally swamping her.  The boat pivoted on the rock then, giving Frank and Oramel time to get back to their oars, but the long steering oar snagged on another rock and was yanked out of Oramel’s hands.

The boat headed bow first downstream and dove over a short fall near the clift on the right, and I saw the oars get ripped from Frank's hands and then from Seneca's, the oarlocks torn from the hull.  The spray and foam made it hard to see but I could make out that Seneca and Frank were hanging onto the gunwales for dear life while Oramel clung to the stern.  Totally helpless, they entered the next fall, which was longer, maybe forty feet long, narrow and filled with rocks.  The No Name struck a boulder with her port bow so hard she was stove in, the solid oak plank reduced to splinters.  She spun around in a half circle, then struck another rock amidships on the starboard side with such force the boat broke in two, plunging Seneca and Frank into the freezing water.

They somehow clambered back in and the three of them were huddled in the stern section which was mostly submerged from their combined weight.  They clung to the boat’s remnant as it was knocked from rock to rock like a caroming billiard ball, the waves washing over them again and again.  I kept losing sight of them but they continued to be battered that way for two hundred yards or so when the boat collided with another boulder and Frank and Seneca were again thrown into the water.  I thought they were done for, but somehow they hauled themselves aboard again, just before the wreck plunged over a six foot fall that would surely have drowned them had they been in the water.

The water pooled briefly at the foot of the fall and there was a sandy island shoal on the left, a sea of spray and foam beyond.  Howland yelled something, and Frank dove overboard.  The pool was deep, and he sank from sight.  Oramel jumped next and in a few strokes made the little island and pulled himself onto the beach.  Seneca clung to the hull until he was only thirty feet from a big, boiling fall and certain death.  Oramel was yelling and motioning for Seneca to jump.  Seneca made what Jack later said was “the best leap I ever saw by a two-legged animal."  He said Seneca made the shoal just at its bottom tip only seconds before the remains of the No Name dashed against a massive boulder, broke into a dozen pieces and disappeared in the maelstrom below.

When I looked to see what happened to Frank, I saw that the river had carried him to a whirlpool near the clift on the right.  He was circling around in it, bobbing up and down in a fashion that would have been comical if it wasn’t so serious.  Finally he was thrust against a barrel-sized rock not far from the island and got his arms around it, the waters of the whirlpool smashing against the clift and circling back around him like a coiling rattlesnake.

Seeing Seneca was safe, Howland ran to the upstream end of the island, nearest Frank, who was suffering from the cold and seeming like he was about to be torn from the rock into the stream.  Howland found a long pine root in a pile of driftwood and pushed it acrost to Frank who let go the rock and grabbed it, and Oramel pulled him in like he was a snagged log.