The castle of Küssnacht lay on the opposite side of the lake, a mass of stone reared on a crag rising sheer out of the waves, which boiled and about its foot. Steep rocks of fantastic shape it in, and many were the which perished on these, driven by the frequent storms that swept over the lake.  
Gessler and his men, Tell in their midst, bound and unarmed, early in the afternoon at Flüelen, which was the name of the harbour where the Governor's ship had been . Flüelen was about two miles from Küssnacht.
 
When they had arrived at the they went on board, and Tell was placed at the bottom of the hold. It was pitch dark, and rats over his body as he lay. The ropes were cast off, the sails filled, and the ship made her way across the lake, aided by a favouring breeze.
 
A large number of the Swiss people had followed Tell and his captors to the harbour, and stood gazing sorrowfully after the ship as it diminished in the distance. There had been whispers of an attempted rescue, but nobody had dared to begin it, and the whispers had led to nothing. Few of the people carried weapons, and the soldiers were clad in , and each bore a long pike or a sharp sword. As Arnold of Sewa would have said if he had been present, what the people wanted was . It was useless to attack men so able to defend themselves.
 
Therefore the people looked on and , but did nothing.
 
For some time the ship sped easily on her way and through a calm sea. Tell lay below, listening to the of the sailors overhead, as they ran about the deck, and gave up all hope of ever seeing his home and his friends again.
 
But soon he began to notice that the ship was rolling and pitching more than it had been doing at first, and it was not long before he realized that a very violent storm had begun. Storms sprung up very suddenly on the lake, and made it unsafe for boats that attempted to cross it. Often the sea was quite unruffled at the beginning of the crossing, and was rough enough at the end to the largest ship.
 
Tell welcomed the storm. He had no wish to live if life meant years of in a dark of Castle Küssnacht. Drowning would be a pleasant fate compared with that. He lay at the bottom of the ship, hoping that the next wave would dash them on to a rock and send them to the bottom of the lake. The tossing became worse and worse.
 
Upon the deck Gessler was beside the helmsman, and gazing anxiously across the waters at the rocks that fringed the narrow entrance to the bay a few hundred yards to the east of Castle Küssnacht. This bay was the only spot for miles along the shore at which it was possible to land safely. For miles on either side the coast was studded with great rocks, which wou............