Chapter Three.

Chapter Three.We start our Voyage in the Gig.The first matter to which I gave consideration, after we were fairly under way, and had parted company with the longboat, was that of food and drink; and I began by taking stock roughly of what we had, and jotting down the items in my pocket-book. To begin with, we had four five-gallon breakers of fresh water—twenty gallons in all. Then we had two sacks of cabin bread, which, by a partial count, I estimated to contain about three hundred biscuits altogether. And in addition to these we had one dozen tins of ox tongue; six small tins of potted meats; four jars of marmalade and two of jam; two bottles of pickles; four bottles of lime juice; one bottle of brandy; and two bottles of rum. When I had jotted everything down I made a few calculations, and then I spoke.“Shipmates,” I said,—“and I include you, Mr Cunningham, in the term, for this misfortune puts us all upon the same footing—you no doubt heard Mr Bligh say, a little while ago, that according to his reckoning we are somewhere about twelve hundred miles from Rio, which is our nearest port. That means a twelve days’ voyage, with a fair wind all the time, blowing fresh enough to keep us going, hour after hour, at the rate of five knots. Now, those of us who have used the sea don’t need to be told that such a favourable condition of affairs is so exceedingly unlikely that it is scarcely worth talking about. To begin with, we are making a bad start, for instead of doing our five knots we are doing little if anything more than half that, with every prospect of a flat calm within the next three or four hours. Therefore I think it will be wise of us to recognise, at the outset, that our voyage is a good deal more likely to take twenty days than it is to be accomplished in ten.“Of course, in saying this I am regarding the matter from its most unfavourable point of view. I remember that we have had easterly winds without a break ever since we crossed the line, and it may be that the Trades are extending unusually far south just now, and that we are still on the southerly fringe of them. If this should prove to be the case we shall be all right, for by steering a west and by no’th course we shall be edging to the nor’ard and working our way back into the permanent trade winds. But, on the other hand, this easterly wind may not be the trade wind at all—and my own opinion is that it is not—in which case we may expect a westerly breeze—that is to say, a foul wind—at any moment; and I think we should only be acting with common prudence to take such a probability into consideration.“Now, this brings me to the question of food and water. As you have seen, I have been taking stock of what we have, and making a few calculations, with the following result. First, with regard to the fresh water. We have just twenty gallons of it, or one hundred and sixty pints. If we could be certain of making our voyage in ten days that amount of water would afford sixteen pints per day to be equally divided between the five of us, which is a fraction over three pints per day per man, or, say, half a pint at each of three meals and another half-pint at three intervals between meals. Little enough, you will say. Very true; yet I think we must endeavour to do with less. We must try to be satisfied with four half-pints per day of twenty-four hours per man, by which means we shall be able to make our water last sixteen days, and in sixteen days many things may happen: we may end our voyage, if we have luck; or we may be picked up; or we may have rain enough to enable us to replenish our water supply. But since neither of these things may happen, we ought, in common prudence, to determine at the outset not to drink more than four half-pints per man per day; and I think we may be able to manage upon that without any very great hardship. What say you?”“I think we can manage it, if we set our minds to do it,” at once answered Mr Cunningham, and after a little further talk the boatswain, carpenter, and sailmaker also agreed to make the attempt. In the same way we arrived at a determination to be satisfied with four biscuits per day each, with a suitable proportion of tongue, potted meat, jam, and what not; and we also agreed upon the quantity of spirits which was to constitute each man’s daily allowance, Cunningham being of opinion that a very small allowance of stimulant would be almost a necessity, seeing that our food was to be so restricted in quantity. And then, having settled this important question, we piped to supper, each man receiving the exact quantity of food agreed upon; and when we had finished we were all of the one opinion, namely, that although our appetites were far from being satisfied, it would be quite possible for us to sustain life under such conditions for a fortnight or three weeks without serious deterioration of either health or strength.By the time supper was over it had fallen dark, and we had lost sight of both the longboat and the barque. It was a magnificent night, the sky a deep indigo cloudless blue, studded with myriads of stars, the water perfectly smooth, save for the long, low undulations of the swell; and the only fault that I had to find with the weather was that there was too little wind, the breeze having died down until we were making scarcely two knots in the hour. Fortunately we had no difficulty in the matter of determining our course, for it happened that Mr Cunningham wore a small compass attached to his watch chain as a charm; and after I had made the necessary allowance for variation we soon managed, with the assistance of this miniature compass and a match, to pick upon a star low down on the horizon by which we could steer a fairly straight course for at least a couple of hours, at the expiration of which it would, of course, be easy to pick another.Then we arranged the matter of watches. There were four of us in the boat who were sailors, and my first proposal was that each of us should take a watch of three hours; but Mr Cunningham would not hear of this. He was, it appeared, a civil engineer by profession, but he had a natural love of the sea and all matters pertaining to sea life, and was quite an enthusiastic amateur yachtsman, with a sufficient knowledge of the way to handle a boat to justify me fully in entrusting him with temporary charge of the gig, at least in fine weather; and he insisted on taking his fair share of whatever work there might be to do. We therefore decided that he also should be allowed to stand a watch. I undertook to stand the first watch, from six o’clock to nine; and, this being arranged, the boatswain, carpenter, and sailmaker at once disposed themselves for sleep, two upon the thwarts and the third coiled up in the eyes of the boat, while Cunningham, who declared that he had no inclination for sleep, placed himself beside me in the sternsheets and began to chat in a low tone of voice, so that he might not disturb the others.Naturally the subject uppermost in our minds was the mutiny, and we began to talk about it. I happened to express some surprise that Bainbridge had allowed the doctor to leave the ship, upon which Cunningham gave vent to a low chuckle of amusement.“My dear chap,” he said, “Bainbridge didn’t dare to keep him. He fully intended to do so at first, and acquainted Morrison with the fact, but the doctor wouldn’t have it at any price—swore that if he were not allowed to leave with the rest of us he would poison all hands within a week! After that, Bainbridge was only too glad to let him go.”We continued to chat for some time upon the subject, wondering what possible motive Bainbridge could have for proceeding to such an extreme as that of capturing the ship; by what means he had contrived to win the men over; and how he had managed to do it without exciting the slightest suspicion, and so on: and then Cunningham began to speak of himself. He was, it appeared, an orphan, twenty-eight years of age, without a single friend in the world who felt enough interest in him to care what might become of him. He had already explained, a little earlier in the evening, that he was by profession a civil engineer; and he now went on to tell me that, entirely without friends or influence as he was, he had found it so difficult to make headway in England that he had at last determined upon going out to Natal, in which colony, it being comparatively speaking a new country, he had hoped to find some scope for his professional knowledge. “But that,” he added, “is all knocked on the head by that young villain, Bainbridge, who has not only prevented me from reaching Natal, but has actually turned me adrift in an open boat to fetch up who knows where, with only the clothes I stand in. And yet, not exactly that either,” he corrected himself with a quiet chuckle of amusement; “for although my expensive surveying instruments and all my kit are on board theZenobia, I contrived to get at my trunks this morning and extract therefrom a bag containing one hundred and forty sovereigns, as well as my telescope and half a dozen sticks of tobacco, all of which I carefully secreted about my person and have with me now.”“Well,” returned I, “if that is the case you may call yourself lucky, for you will find a hundred and forty British sovereigns exceedingly useful when we get ashore; as for your telescope, it may prove of the utmost value to us before this trip is over. You are considerably better off than I am, for I was allowed to leave the ship with literally only the clothes that I am wearing. The remainder of my clothes, together with my sextant, nautical and other books, and some sixteen pounds odd in cash, are still in my berth aboard the barque, if that swab has not already seized them. But of course I am hoping to find a ship at Rio, aboard which I may be able to work my passage home; and once back in London the owners are bound to find me another berth.”“But supposing there shouldn’t happen to be a ship at Rio in which you can work your passage home. What will you do in that case?” asked Cunningham.“Oh,” I said, “I should simply have to take the first berth I could find, irrespective of where the vessel might happen to be bound for! Or, in the last resort, I can place myself in the hands of the British Consul, and be sent home as a shipwrecked seaman.”“I see,” said Cunningham thoughtfully. “But,” he resumed, after a moment’s silence, “there is no need for you to adopt either of these courses, you know, old chap. My hundred and forty sovereigns will be quite sufficient to see us both comfortably home from Rio, and you can repay me whenever you happen to be able.”I very heartily thanked the young civil engineer for his exceedingly generous offer, but protested that I could not possibly accept it—that, in fact, there was not the least likelihood that things would turn out so badly in Rio as to compel me to avail myself of his generosity; but nothing would satisfy my companion short of a definite promise that I would accept his help should matters result awkwardly upon our arrival. Eventually I very reluctantly yielded to his importunities and gave him the required promise, and thus began a sincere friendship between us that was only further strengthened by the long series of remarkable adventures that lay ahead of us both, although at that moment we little dreamed that anything out of the ordinary run of events was to befall either of us.Toward the end of my watch the breeze evinced a slight tendency to freshen, and when at nine o’clock I handed over the charge of the boat to the boatswain, and Cunningham and I disposed ourselves to secure such sleep as might come to us, we were slipping along through the water at the rate of a good honest four knots in the hour.As may be imagined, my sleep that night was of a somewhat intermittent character, for a boat’s thwart is not the most comfortable bed in the world, and I was fully conscious of the responsibility that had been laid upon me to guide the gig, and the lives which had been entrusted to her, over the trackless ocean, without the aid of chart or nautical instruments of any kind save the toy compass attached to Cunningham’s watch chain. I was well aware that my only hope of success lay in the keeping of the most accurate account possible of the boat’s progress and direction, and, therefore, was up and looking about me at least half a dozen times during the night.The fine weather continued all through the hours of darkness, and during the boatswain’s and carpenter’s watches the wind gradually freshened up, until by three o’clock, when Chips called the sailmaker to relieve him, the boat was buzzing merrily along at a speed of between six and seven knots; but after that the wind began to soften rapidly away again, until at length, when the sun swept into view above the eastern horizon, we scarcely had steerage way, and half an hour later it fell a flat calm. We accordingly lowered the sail, and, this done, I directed Simpson, the sailmaker—who was the lightest of us, and therefore the least likely to capsize the boat—to shin up to the masthead and see if he could detect any sign of the longboat or the barque, and incidentally take a good look round the entire horizon upon the off-chance of there being a sail anywhere in sight; but he reported the horizon bare in every direction except in the eastern board, where he fancied he could occasionally detect a faint something that might possibly be the sails of the longboat, although he was by no means sure even as to that, opining that what he had seen, if indeed he had seen anything at all, might be the distant fin of a prowling shark.The mention of sharks gave me an idea, and I asked my companions whether perchance any of them happened to have any small stuff about them out of which we might contrive to make a fishing line; whereupon Chips, with a smile, requested me to vacate my seat in the sternsheets for a moment, and, opening the locker in the after thwart of the boat, produced an excellent cod line, with hooks and sinker all complete, explaining that as soon as he gathered an inkling of what Bainbridge intended on the previous day, he contrived, while engaged in knocking up a temporary pen for the sheep, to filch the said line out of the cook’s galley and to secrete it, afterward seizing an opportunity to transfer it to the gig’s locker when he learned that she was about to be turned over to us. There happened to be a piece of dry shrivelled bait still transfixed upon one of the hooks; we therefore dropped it over the side, paid out the line, made fast the inner end to one of the thwarts, and forthwith forgot all about it in the small bustle of getting breakfast.But while we were still engaged upon the meal we suddenly became aware that our fishing line was being violently agitated, and upon hauling it in found that we had been fortunate enough to hook a young dolphin about two feet long. Now, raw dolphin is not exactly an appetising dish, especially to those who, like ourselves, possessed nothing keener than a really strong, healthy hunger; still, there was the fish, so much to the good as supplementary to our rather meagre breakfast allowance, and—well, in short we—at least the boatswain, carpenter, sailmaker, and myself—managed to eat nearly half of him. Cunningham had not yet arrived at the starvation-point where raw fish could be devoured with a relish, and he declined to share our banquet, for which I did not blame him; but really, after I had succeeded in so far conquering my prejudice against raw food as to nibble cautiously at my portion, I found that it was by no means so repulsive as I had imagined. And although it was certainly not at all inviting it was undoubtedly nutritious; and when at length I finished my breakfast, not only was my hunger completely satisfied, but I felt refreshed and invigorated after my meal.Breakfast disposed of, Simpson once more shinned aloft and took another look round; but there was still nothing in sight—indeed, how should there be, seeing that there was no wind to fan anything into our ken? He could not now even discern the faint appearance to the eastward which he had imagined might indicate the position of the longboat, but that of course might be due to the fact that, like ourselves, they had lowered their now useless canvas. With not a breath of air stirring it was intensely hot, the rays of the unclouded sun beating down upon us fiercely as the breath of a furnace, and I inwardly execrated that scoundrel Bainbridge and his lawless crew as I thought of the crowded longboat and the hapless women and children—to say nothing of the wounded skipper—pent up in her, with nothing to protect them from the pitiless heat and glare.“Well, shipmates,” I said, “we shall do ourselves no good by lying here idly sweltering. This calm may last for a week, for aught that we can tell; there is not the slightest sign of a breeze springing up, so far as I can see. I propose, therefore, that instead of doing nothing we strike the mast, out oars, and go in search of a wind. There is no need,” I continued, seeing signs of a protest on the faces of my companions, “for us to exert ourselves very greatly; and we can scarcely make ourselves hotter than we are, do what we will. I therefore suggest that we throw out the oars and paddle quietly ahead upon our proper course. We ought to be able to get three knots out of the boat with little exertion, and every mile of progress means so much to the good: moreover, I want you all to remember that we cannot afford to lie idly here; our stock of provisions will only last a certain time, and just picture to yourselves what our condition will be if, through suffering ourselves to be delayed by calms, these provisions—and our water—should become exhausted before we reach land or are picked up. My idea is that four of us should pull while the fifth steers, and that at the end of one hour by the watch he who steers should relieve one of us at the oars, so that every four hours each of us will get one hour’s rest. Now, what say you, lads? It is Mr Cunningham’s watch, therefore let him take the first spell at the yoke lines.”It was easy enough to see that the others did not like the idea of working at the oars in that blistering sun, nor was that to be wondered at; but my reminder to them of the possibilities in store for us should our provisions and water be exhausted before relief in some shape or other came to us had its effect. With many grumblings and imprecations at the inopportune calm, they set to work to strike the mast, ship the rowlocks, and get out the oars; and five minutes later, myself pulling stroke, and Cunningham in the sternsheets with the yoke lines in his hands and his compass charm on the seat beside him, we were moving quietly and easily to the westward at a speed of quite three knots.Fortunately for us the gig was a particularly good boat of the whaleboat type, built for speed, long and flat on the floor, with beautiful lines; and apart from the low swell, which did not trouble us at all, the water was smooth as oil. When, therefore, we had once got way upon the boat it was an easy matter to keep her going without very much exertion. But hot! Only those who have been exposed in an open boat at sea in a tropical calm can in the least understand or appreciate what we suffered. The sun’s rays, striking almost vertically down upon our heads, and reflected upward again from the shining surface of the water, scorched us like fire, and before the first hour had passed my face wassopainful that I scarcely dared touch it. And oh, how we perspired! In less than ten minutes my singlet and drawers—which were all that I had on, having like the rest stripped off all the rest of my clothing—were as wet as though I had been overboard. And the natural result of such profuse perspiration was that we soon became intolerably thirsty. I don’t know which of us was the first to suffer from this cause, but I know that I had not been at my oar more than twenty minutes when I began to feel that I would willingly give everything I possessed for a good long cooling draught of spring water. However, I clenched my teeth and said nothing, for I knew perfectly well that if the word “thirst” were once mentioned all hands would instantly begin to clamour for water, and I might have the greatest difficulty in restraining the others from making a raid upon the breakers, regardless of consequences.But, after all, my self-restraint was of little practical value, for presently the carpenter flung the loom of his oar athwart the boat until it rested upon the gunwale, and, tossing his clenched fists above his head, cried in a husky, unnatural tone of voice:“Great jumpin’ Gehosophat, how thirsty I am! Mr Temple, I votes we knock off long enough to have a drink all round. I’m as dry as a limekiln inside; my tongue’s beginnin’ to rattle again’ my teeth, an’—”“The more reason why you should keep it quiet, Chips,” I retorted sharply. “Thirsty! Of course you are; so are we all, for that matter: but there is no reason why we should yelp about it. And as for having a drink, you know as well as I do that, with the small quantity of water which we have in the boat, it has been necessary for us to pledge ourselves solemnly to take no more than a certain quantity daily, and we must wait for our next drink until dinner-time comes along—”“But, Mr Temple,” interrupted the sailmaker, who with the others, myself included, had now cocked his oar, “our proper ’lowance of water is ’alf a pint at each meal, and another ’alf a pint at some other time. Can’t we ’ave that there hextry ’alf pint now?”“No, you certainly cannot,” I answered, as well as I was able to speak for the saliva that gathered in my mouth at the mere thought of that nectar-like half-pint of water. “If you did, you would be as thirsty as ever within the next half-hour, and then you would be sorry enough that there was no more water coming to you, except at meal times, for the rest of the day. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. It is now,” glancing at my watch, “within three minutes of nine o’clock. At ten we will take a spell of ten minutes, and each man shall then have the third part of half a pint of water, with a suspicion of rum in it as a pick-me-up. Then at twelve we shall dine, and each man shall have his half-pint; at three o’clock we will have another third of half a pint; at six we shall have supper; and at nine o’clock, if we find that we really require it, we will have the remaining third of half a pint. Now, that is the best I can do; it is the only thing that we dare do, and we must just make the best of it.”“Yes,” agreed Cunningham, “you are quite right, Mr Temple; we must be satisfied with our strict allowance, and ask for no more. But there is one thing we may do to ease our thirst, and it is wonderfully efficacious. Let each man take off his clothes, saturate them with salt water, and put them on again soaking wet. If we do this, say, once every half-hour, we shall find ourselves marvellously refreshed, and quite able to wait for a drink until the proper time for it arrives.”“Ay,” said I, “I have heard of that trick before, and a splendid one it is, too, I believe, although I have never had occasion to try it until now. Let us test it at once, lads. I remember once hearing a man say that if shipwrecked people would only keep their clothes thoroughly saturated with salt water, they could practically manage to do without drinking at all.” And without further ado I stripped off my singlet and pants, wrung the perspiration out of them, plunged them over the side, and put them on again, my example being immediately followed by the others. Then, the time having arrived for Cunningham to take a spell at the oar, he exchanged places with the sailmaker, and we again proceeded.The sensation of coolness imparted by the contact of our wet clothing with our bodies was very refreshing, and as long as it lasted we were able to pull a quick, steady stroke that put us along at the rate of about three knots with little or no fatigue. The worst of it was that it did not last long, for within ten minutes the sun had dried our clothes again, and we began to perspire once more. But we soon found a simple remedy for this by ceasing work just long enough to enable us to pour two or three buckets of water over each other, and then getting to work again; and although these frequent stoppages no doubt had the effect of retarding our progress to some extent, I do not think our actual loss of speed was very great, for the refreshment derived from these often-repeated sousings was such that we were able to put a good deal more life and vigour into our work than would otherwise have been possible. As regards the alleged abatement of thirst, although I did not experience any perceptible relief during the first half-hour of the experiment, I certainly did afterwards, and so did the others; and although at ten o’clock we each avidly took our third of half a pint of water, there were no further complaints of thirst. And here let me mention, for the benefit of any reader who may be so unfortunate as to find himself at any time in a similar predicament, that I then made the important discovery that the most effectual method of assuaging thirst with a very limited quantity of water is not to gulp it down and have done with it, but to sip it slowly, about a teaspoonful at a time, and retain each sip in the mouth at least half a minute before swallowing it. The amount of comfort—not to say enjoyment—relief, and refreshment thus obtainable is nothing short of marvellous.But, despite every device that we could think of to obtain relief, our sufferings during that day were terrible; for although, by assiduously sousing each other with salt water at frequent intervals, we contrived to avoid the worst torments of thirst, our faces, arms, and hands—in fact all the exposed portions of our bodies, were so frightfully scorched by the sun that even before knocking-off work to take our midday meal we had begun to blister, and by nightfall our faces and arms were covered with blisters. And all through that interminable day we toiled on and on at the oars, with not a shred of cloud to be seen in any direction, the blazing sun scorching us remorselessly, and the sea all round us a polished, shining, gently undulating, colourless plain, unbroken by so much as a solitary ripple, save those created by our oar blades, the passage of the gig through the water, the occasional dash of half a dozen flying-fish out of the sea under the boat’s stem, and once or twice the thin wake cut by the dorsal fin of a cruising shark.But about three-quarters of an hour before sunset the carpenter, who was then steering the boat, shouted: “Hurrah, my bullies, there’s a change of some sort comin’ at last! See the edge of that there cloud liftin’ over the sea line ahead? That means wind, or I’ll eat my hat; ay, and p’rhaps rain too. What do you think, Mr Temple?”With one accord we all cocked our oars, and, standing up, I took a good long look ahead, secretly welcoming, I will confess, the excuse to cease pulling for a minute or two; for my back was by this time aching frightfully, and the skin of my thumbs, just where they joined the hands, was so completely chafed away that the flesh was red, raw, and bleeding. Yes, there was the edge of a cloud, distinct enough, the white, clean-cut, sharp-edged upper portion of a big thunder cloud, unless I was greatly mistaken. And it was rising fast, too, so fast that, even as I stood gazing at it, it fully doubled its area and permitted us a glimpse of the soft, slaty-blue tint merging into the white.“Yes,” I agreed, replying to Parsons’ question, “the change is coming all right, and it will not be very long before it is here. Lay in your oars, men. I think, in prospect of what that cloud promises, that we may venture to spare ourselves any further ash-flourishing to-day, for we shall have a breeze before very long, with thunder, lightning, and rain as well, unless I am greatly mistaken. And we will pipe to supper at once, so that we may be able to get our meal in peace and quietness, and have it over and done with before the breeze comes. We are likely enough to have plenty of other matters than eating and drinking to think about and attend to when that happens.”The oars were laid in, willingly enough, for the other four were in just as bad a plight as I was. Cunningham, indeed, was far worse, for, unlike ours, his hands were soft and tender, and when, after the oars had been laid in, he stretched out his hands, palms upwards, and showed them to me, they presented a positively sickening sight. But when I murmured my regret and commiseration he only smiled and expressed the conviction that they would be all right again in a week, for he was one of the pluckiest men I ever met, grit all through, straight as a die, and with not a bad spot anywhere in him; he was, in fact, everything that we are apt to think a typical Briton should be.We lost no time in getting the meal that we called by courtesy “supper”; and within half an hour had disposed of it, and were waiting patiently for whatever was to come. But while it was still calm and light I had the mast stepped, and sent the sailmaker aloft to take a good, comprehensive look round and see whether he could discover any sign of a sail; and no sooner had he, with much pain and tribulation, climbed to the top of his precarious perch than he sang out that he could just see, in the northern board, what looked like the heads of a ship’s royals. Of course he could not tell in which direction she was bound, for, like ourselves, she was becalmed, and slowly “boxing the compass,” that is to say, her head was pointing first one way and then another; but while he was aloft, clinging to the boat’s masthead, and watching the stranger in the hope of being able to make some further discovery concerning her, her people started to clew up and furl her royals, which circumstance Simpson duly reported. It served as a hint to us in the gig, for if the stranger had detected symptoms that her royals would presently be too much for her, it was high time for us to look after ourselves; and we accordingly proceeded forthwith to close-reef our lug, and otherwise make such preparations as were possible to enable us effectively to meet the onslaught of the threatened squall.

The first matter to which I gave consideration, after we were fairly under way, and had parted company with the longboat, was that of food and drink; and I began by taking stock roughly of what we had, and jotting down the items in my pocket-book. To begin with, we had four five-gallon breakers of fresh water—twenty gallons in all. Then we had two sacks of cabin bread, which, by a partial count, I estimated to contain about three hundred biscuits altogether. And in addition to these we had one dozen tins of ox tongue; six small tins of potted meats; four jars of marmalade and two of jam; two bottles of pickles; four bottles of lime juice; one bottle of brandy; and two bottles of rum. When I had jotted everything down I made a few calculations, and then I spoke.

“Shipmates,” I said,—“and I include you, Mr Cunningham, in the term, for this misfortune puts us all upon the same footing—you no doubt heard Mr Bligh say, a little while ago, that according to his reckoning we are somewhere about twelve hundred miles from Rio, which is our nearest port. That means a twelve days’ voyage, with a fair wind all the time, blowing fresh enough to keep us going, hour after hour, at the rate of five knots. Now, those of us who have used the sea don’t need to be told that such a favourable condition of affairs is so exceedingly unlikely that it is scarcely worth talking about. To begin with, we are making a bad start, for instead of doing our five knots we are doing little if anything more than half that, with every prospect of a flat calm within the next three or four hours. Therefore I think it will be wise of us to recognise, at the outset, that our voyage is a good deal more likely to take twenty days than it is to be accomplished in ten.

“Of course, in saying this I am regarding the matter from its most unfavourable point of view. I remember that we have had easterly winds without a break ever since we crossed the line, and it may be that the Trades are extending unusually far south just now, and that we are still on the southerly fringe of them. If this should prove to be the case we shall be all right, for by steering a west and by no’th course we shall be edging to the nor’ard and working our way back into the permanent trade winds. But, on the other hand, this easterly wind may not be the trade wind at all—and my own opinion is that it is not—in which case we may expect a westerly breeze—that is to say, a foul wind—at any moment; and I think we should only be acting with common prudence to take such a probability into consideration.

“Now, this brings me to the question of food and water. As you have seen, I have been taking stock of what we have, and making a few calculations, with the following result. First, with regard to the fresh water. We have just twenty gallons of it, or one hundred and sixty pints. If we could be certain of making our voyage in ten days that amount of water would afford sixteen pints per day to be equally divided between the five of us, which is a fraction over three pints per day per man, or, say, half a pint at each of three meals and another half-pint at three intervals between meals. Little enough, you will say. Very true; yet I think we must endeavour to do with less. We must try to be satisfied with four half-pints per day of twenty-four hours per man, by which means we shall be able to make our water last sixteen days, and in sixteen days many things may happen: we may end our voyage, if we have luck; or we may be picked up; or we may have rain enough to enable us to replenish our water supply. But since neither of these things may happen, we ought, in common prudence, to determine at the outset not to drink more than four half-pints per man per day; and I think we may be able to manage upon that without any very great hardship. What say you?”

“I think we can manage it, if we set our minds to do it,” at once answered Mr Cunningham, and after a little further talk the boatswain, carpenter, and sailmaker also agreed to make the attempt. In the same way we arrived at a determination to be satisfied with four biscuits per day each, with a suitable proportion of tongue, potted meat, jam, and what not; and we also agreed upon the quantity of spirits which was to constitute each man’s daily allowance, Cunningham being of opinion that a very small allowance of stimulant would be almost a necessity, seeing that our food was to be so restricted in quantity. And then, having settled this important question, we piped to supper, each man receiving the exact quantity of food agreed upon; and when we had finished we were all of the one opinion, namely, that although our appetites were far from being satisfied, it would be quite possible for us to sustain life under such conditions for a fortnight or three weeks without serious deterioration of either health or strength.

By the time supper was over it had fallen dark, and we had lost sight of both the longboat and the barque. It was a magnificent night, the sky a deep indigo cloudless blue, studded with myriads of stars, the water perfectly smooth, save for the long, low undulations of the swell; and the only fault that I had to find with the weather was that there was too little wind, the breeze having died down until we were making scarcely two knots in the hour. Fortunately we had no difficulty in the matter of determining our course, for it happened that Mr Cunningham wore a small compass attached to his watch chain as a charm; and after I had made the necessary allowance for variation we soon managed, with the assistance of this miniature compass and a match, to pick upon a star low down on the horizon by which we could steer a fairly straight course for at least a couple of hours, at the expiration of which it would, of course, be easy to pick another.

Then we arranged the matter of watches. There were four of us in the boat who were sailors, and my first proposal was that each of us should take a watch of three hours; but Mr Cunningham would not hear of this. He was, it appeared, a civil engineer by profession, but he had a natural love of the sea and all matters pertaining to sea life, and was quite an enthusiastic amateur yachtsman, with a sufficient knowledge of the way to handle a boat to justify me fully in entrusting him with temporary charge of the gig, at least in fine weather; and he insisted on taking his fair share of whatever work there might be to do. We therefore decided that he also should be allowed to stand a watch. I undertook to stand the first watch, from six o’clock to nine; and, this being arranged, the boatswain, carpenter, and sailmaker at once disposed themselves for sleep, two upon the thwarts and the third coiled up in the eyes of the boat, while Cunningham, who declared that he had no inclination for sleep, placed himself beside me in the sternsheets and began to chat in a low tone of voice, so that he might not disturb the others.

Naturally the subject uppermost in our minds was the mutiny, and we began to talk about it. I happened to express some surprise that Bainbridge had allowed the doctor to leave the ship, upon which Cunningham gave vent to a low chuckle of amusement.

“My dear chap,” he said, “Bainbridge didn’t dare to keep him. He fully intended to do so at first, and acquainted Morrison with the fact, but the doctor wouldn’t have it at any price—swore that if he were not allowed to leave with the rest of us he would poison all hands within a week! After that, Bainbridge was only too glad to let him go.”

We continued to chat for some time upon the subject, wondering what possible motive Bainbridge could have for proceeding to such an extreme as that of capturing the ship; by what means he had contrived to win the men over; and how he had managed to do it without exciting the slightest suspicion, and so on: and then Cunningham began to speak of himself. He was, it appeared, an orphan, twenty-eight years of age, without a single friend in the world who felt enough interest in him to care what might become of him. He had already explained, a little earlier in the evening, that he was by profession a civil engineer; and he now went on to tell me that, entirely without friends or influence as he was, he had found it so difficult to make headway in England that he had at last determined upon going out to Natal, in which colony, it being comparatively speaking a new country, he had hoped to find some scope for his professional knowledge. “But that,” he added, “is all knocked on the head by that young villain, Bainbridge, who has not only prevented me from reaching Natal, but has actually turned me adrift in an open boat to fetch up who knows where, with only the clothes I stand in. And yet, not exactly that either,” he corrected himself with a quiet chuckle of amusement; “for although my expensive surveying instruments and all my kit are on board theZenobia, I contrived to get at my trunks this morning and extract therefrom a bag containing one hundred and forty sovereigns, as well as my telescope and half a dozen sticks of tobacco, all of which I carefully secreted about my person and have with me now.”

“Well,” returned I, “if that is the case you may call yourself lucky, for you will find a hundred and forty British sovereigns exceedingly useful when we get ashore; as for your telescope, it may prove of the utmost value to us before this trip is over. You are considerably better off than I am, for I was allowed to leave the ship with literally only the clothes that I am wearing. The remainder of my clothes, together with my sextant, nautical and other books, and some sixteen pounds odd in cash, are still in my berth aboard the barque, if that swab has not already seized them. But of course I am hoping to find a ship at Rio, aboard which I may be able to work my passage home; and once back in London the owners are bound to find me another berth.”

“But supposing there shouldn’t happen to be a ship at Rio in which you can work your passage home. What will you do in that case?” asked Cunningham.

“Oh,” I said, “I should simply have to take the first berth I could find, irrespective of where the vessel might happen to be bound for! Or, in the last resort, I can place myself in the hands of the British Consul, and be sent home as a shipwrecked seaman.”

“I see,” said Cunningham thoughtfully. “But,” he resumed, after a moment’s silence, “there is no need for you to adopt either of these courses, you know, old chap. My hundred and forty sovereigns will be quite sufficient to see us both comfortably home from Rio, and you can repay me whenever you happen to be able.”

I very heartily thanked the young civil engineer for his exceedingly generous offer, but protested that I could not possibly accept it—that, in fact, there was not the least likelihood that things would turn out so badly in Rio as to compel me to avail myself of his generosity; but nothing would satisfy my companion short of a definite promise that I would accept his help should matters result awkwardly upon our arrival. Eventually I very reluctantly yielded to his importunities and gave him the required promise, and thus began a sincere friendship between us that was only further strengthened by the long series of remarkable adventures that lay ahead of us both, although at that moment we little dreamed that anything out of the ordinary run of events was to befall either of us.

Toward the end of my watch the breeze evinced a slight tendency to freshen, and when at nine o’clock I handed over the charge of the boat to the boatswain, and Cunningham and I disposed ourselves to secure such sleep as might come to us, we were slipping along through the water at the rate of a good honest four knots in the hour.

As may be imagined, my sleep that night was of a somewhat intermittent character, for a boat’s thwart is not the most comfortable bed in the world, and I was fully conscious of the responsibility that had been laid upon me to guide the gig, and the lives which had been entrusted to her, over the trackless ocean, without the aid of chart or nautical instruments of any kind save the toy compass attached to Cunningham’s watch chain. I was well aware that my only hope of success lay in the keeping of the most accurate account possible of the boat’s progress and direction, and, therefore, was up and looking about me at least half a dozen times during the night.

The fine weather continued all through the hours of darkness, and during the boatswain’s and carpenter’s watches the wind gradually freshened up, until by three o’clock, when Chips called the sailmaker to relieve him, the boat was buzzing merrily along at a speed of between six and seven knots; but after that the wind began to soften rapidly away again, until at length, when the sun swept into view above the eastern horizon, we scarcely had steerage way, and half an hour later it fell a flat calm. We accordingly lowered the sail, and, this done, I directed Simpson, the sailmaker—who was the lightest of us, and therefore the least likely to capsize the boat—to shin up to the masthead and see if he could detect any sign of the longboat or the barque, and incidentally take a good look round the entire horizon upon the off-chance of there being a sail anywhere in sight; but he reported the horizon bare in every direction except in the eastern board, where he fancied he could occasionally detect a faint something that might possibly be the sails of the longboat, although he was by no means sure even as to that, opining that what he had seen, if indeed he had seen anything at all, might be the distant fin of a prowling shark.

The mention of sharks gave me an idea, and I asked my companions whether perchance any of them happened to have any small stuff about them out of which we might contrive to make a fishing line; whereupon Chips, with a smile, requested me to vacate my seat in the sternsheets for a moment, and, opening the locker in the after thwart of the boat, produced an excellent cod line, with hooks and sinker all complete, explaining that as soon as he gathered an inkling of what Bainbridge intended on the previous day, he contrived, while engaged in knocking up a temporary pen for the sheep, to filch the said line out of the cook’s galley and to secrete it, afterward seizing an opportunity to transfer it to the gig’s locker when he learned that she was about to be turned over to us. There happened to be a piece of dry shrivelled bait still transfixed upon one of the hooks; we therefore dropped it over the side, paid out the line, made fast the inner end to one of the thwarts, and forthwith forgot all about it in the small bustle of getting breakfast.

But while we were still engaged upon the meal we suddenly became aware that our fishing line was being violently agitated, and upon hauling it in found that we had been fortunate enough to hook a young dolphin about two feet long. Now, raw dolphin is not exactly an appetising dish, especially to those who, like ourselves, possessed nothing keener than a really strong, healthy hunger; still, there was the fish, so much to the good as supplementary to our rather meagre breakfast allowance, and—well, in short we—at least the boatswain, carpenter, sailmaker, and myself—managed to eat nearly half of him. Cunningham had not yet arrived at the starvation-point where raw fish could be devoured with a relish, and he declined to share our banquet, for which I did not blame him; but really, after I had succeeded in so far conquering my prejudice against raw food as to nibble cautiously at my portion, I found that it was by no means so repulsive as I had imagined. And although it was certainly not at all inviting it was undoubtedly nutritious; and when at length I finished my breakfast, not only was my hunger completely satisfied, but I felt refreshed and invigorated after my meal.

Breakfast disposed of, Simpson once more shinned aloft and took another look round; but there was still nothing in sight—indeed, how should there be, seeing that there was no wind to fan anything into our ken? He could not now even discern the faint appearance to the eastward which he had imagined might indicate the position of the longboat, but that of course might be due to the fact that, like ourselves, they had lowered their now useless canvas. With not a breath of air stirring it was intensely hot, the rays of the unclouded sun beating down upon us fiercely as the breath of a furnace, and I inwardly execrated that scoundrel Bainbridge and his lawless crew as I thought of the crowded longboat and the hapless women and children—to say nothing of the wounded skipper—pent up in her, with nothing to protect them from the pitiless heat and glare.

“Well, shipmates,” I said, “we shall do ourselves no good by lying here idly sweltering. This calm may last for a week, for aught that we can tell; there is not the slightest sign of a breeze springing up, so far as I can see. I propose, therefore, that instead of doing nothing we strike the mast, out oars, and go in search of a wind. There is no need,” I continued, seeing signs of a protest on the faces of my companions, “for us to exert ourselves very greatly; and we can scarcely make ourselves hotter than we are, do what we will. I therefore suggest that we throw out the oars and paddle quietly ahead upon our proper course. We ought to be able to get three knots out of the boat with little exertion, and every mile of progress means so much to the good: moreover, I want you all to remember that we cannot afford to lie idly here; our stock of provisions will only last a certain time, and just picture to yourselves what our condition will be if, through suffering ourselves to be delayed by calms, these provisions—and our water—should become exhausted before we reach land or are picked up. My idea is that four of us should pull while the fifth steers, and that at the end of one hour by the watch he who steers should relieve one of us at the oars, so that every four hours each of us will get one hour’s rest. Now, what say you, lads? It is Mr Cunningham’s watch, therefore let him take the first spell at the yoke lines.”

It was easy enough to see that the others did not like the idea of working at the oars in that blistering sun, nor was that to be wondered at; but my reminder to them of the possibilities in store for us should our provisions and water be exhausted before relief in some shape or other came to us had its effect. With many grumblings and imprecations at the inopportune calm, they set to work to strike the mast, ship the rowlocks, and get out the oars; and five minutes later, myself pulling stroke, and Cunningham in the sternsheets with the yoke lines in his hands and his compass charm on the seat beside him, we were moving quietly and easily to the westward at a speed of quite three knots.

Fortunately for us the gig was a particularly good boat of the whaleboat type, built for speed, long and flat on the floor, with beautiful lines; and apart from the low swell, which did not trouble us at all, the water was smooth as oil. When, therefore, we had once got way upon the boat it was an easy matter to keep her going without very much exertion. But hot! Only those who have been exposed in an open boat at sea in a tropical calm can in the least understand or appreciate what we suffered. The sun’s rays, striking almost vertically down upon our heads, and reflected upward again from the shining surface of the water, scorched us like fire, and before the first hour had passed my face wassopainful that I scarcely dared touch it. And oh, how we perspired! In less than ten minutes my singlet and drawers—which were all that I had on, having like the rest stripped off all the rest of my clothing—were as wet as though I had been overboard. And the natural result of such profuse perspiration was that we soon became intolerably thirsty. I don’t know which of us was the first to suffer from this cause, but I know that I had not been at my oar more than twenty minutes when I began to feel that I would willingly give everything I possessed for a good long cooling draught of spring water. However, I clenched my teeth and said nothing, for I knew perfectly well that if the word “thirst” were once mentioned all hands would instantly begin to clamour for water, and I might have the greatest difficulty in restraining the others from making a raid upon the breakers, regardless of consequences.

But, after all, my self-restraint was of little practical value, for presently the carpenter flung the loom of his oar athwart the boat until it rested upon the gunwale, and, tossing his clenched fists above his head, cried in a husky, unnatural tone of voice:

“Great jumpin’ Gehosophat, how thirsty I am! Mr Temple, I votes we knock off long enough to have a drink all round. I’m as dry as a limekiln inside; my tongue’s beginnin’ to rattle again’ my teeth, an’—”

“The more reason why you should keep it quiet, Chips,” I retorted sharply. “Thirsty! Of course you are; so are we all, for that matter: but there is no reason why we should yelp about it. And as for having a drink, you know as well as I do that, with the small quantity of water which we have in the boat, it has been necessary for us to pledge ourselves solemnly to take no more than a certain quantity daily, and we must wait for our next drink until dinner-time comes along—”

“But, Mr Temple,” interrupted the sailmaker, who with the others, myself included, had now cocked his oar, “our proper ’lowance of water is ’alf a pint at each meal, and another ’alf a pint at some other time. Can’t we ’ave that there hextry ’alf pint now?”

“No, you certainly cannot,” I answered, as well as I was able to speak for the saliva that gathered in my mouth at the mere thought of that nectar-like half-pint of water. “If you did, you would be as thirsty as ever within the next half-hour, and then you would be sorry enough that there was no more water coming to you, except at meal times, for the rest of the day. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. It is now,” glancing at my watch, “within three minutes of nine o’clock. At ten we will take a spell of ten minutes, and each man shall then have the third part of half a pint of water, with a suspicion of rum in it as a pick-me-up. Then at twelve we shall dine, and each man shall have his half-pint; at three o’clock we will have another third of half a pint; at six we shall have supper; and at nine o’clock, if we find that we really require it, we will have the remaining third of half a pint. Now, that is the best I can do; it is the only thing that we dare do, and we must just make the best of it.”

“Yes,” agreed Cunningham, “you are quite right, Mr Temple; we must be satisfied with our strict allowance, and ask for no more. But there is one thing we may do to ease our thirst, and it is wonderfully efficacious. Let each man take off his clothes, saturate them with salt water, and put them on again soaking wet. If we do this, say, once every half-hour, we shall find ourselves marvellously refreshed, and quite able to wait for a drink until the proper time for it arrives.”

“Ay,” said I, “I have heard of that trick before, and a splendid one it is, too, I believe, although I have never had occasion to try it until now. Let us test it at once, lads. I remember once hearing a man say that if shipwrecked people would only keep their clothes thoroughly saturated with salt water, they could practically manage to do without drinking at all.” And without further ado I stripped off my singlet and pants, wrung the perspiration out of them, plunged them over the side, and put them on again, my example being immediately followed by the others. Then, the time having arrived for Cunningham to take a spell at the oar, he exchanged places with the sailmaker, and we again proceeded.

The sensation of coolness imparted by the contact of our wet clothing with our bodies was very refreshing, and as long as it lasted we were able to pull a quick, steady stroke that put us along at the rate of about three knots with little or no fatigue. The worst of it was that it did not last long, for within ten minutes the sun had dried our clothes again, and we began to perspire once more. But we soon found a simple remedy for this by ceasing work just long enough to enable us to pour two or three buckets of water over each other, and then getting to work again; and although these frequent stoppages no doubt had the effect of retarding our progress to some extent, I do not think our actual loss of speed was very great, for the refreshment derived from these often-repeated sousings was such that we were able to put a good deal more life and vigour into our work than would otherwise have been possible. As regards the alleged abatement of thirst, although I did not experience any perceptible relief during the first half-hour of the experiment, I certainly did afterwards, and so did the others; and although at ten o’clock we each avidly took our third of half a pint of water, there were no further complaints of thirst. And here let me mention, for the benefit of any reader who may be so unfortunate as to find himself at any time in a similar predicament, that I then made the important discovery that the most effectual method of assuaging thirst with a very limited quantity of water is not to gulp it down and have done with it, but to sip it slowly, about a teaspoonful at a time, and retain each sip in the mouth at least half a minute before swallowing it. The amount of comfort—not to say enjoyment—relief, and refreshment thus obtainable is nothing short of marvellous.

But, despite every device that we could think of to obtain relief, our sufferings during that day were terrible; for although, by assiduously sousing each other with salt water at frequent intervals, we contrived to avoid the worst torments of thirst, our faces, arms, and hands—in fact all the exposed portions of our bodies, were so frightfully scorched by the sun that even before knocking-off work to take our midday meal we had begun to blister, and by nightfall our faces and arms were covered with blisters. And all through that interminable day we toiled on and on at the oars, with not a shred of cloud to be seen in any direction, the blazing sun scorching us remorselessly, and the sea all round us a polished, shining, gently undulating, colourless plain, unbroken by so much as a solitary ripple, save those created by our oar blades, the passage of the gig through the water, the occasional dash of half a dozen flying-fish out of the sea under the boat’s stem, and once or twice the thin wake cut by the dorsal fin of a cruising shark.

But about three-quarters of an hour before sunset the carpenter, who was then steering the boat, shouted: “Hurrah, my bullies, there’s a change of some sort comin’ at last! See the edge of that there cloud liftin’ over the sea line ahead? That means wind, or I’ll eat my hat; ay, and p’rhaps rain too. What do you think, Mr Temple?”

With one accord we all cocked our oars, and, standing up, I took a good long look ahead, secretly welcoming, I will confess, the excuse to cease pulling for a minute or two; for my back was by this time aching frightfully, and the skin of my thumbs, just where they joined the hands, was so completely chafed away that the flesh was red, raw, and bleeding. Yes, there was the edge of a cloud, distinct enough, the white, clean-cut, sharp-edged upper portion of a big thunder cloud, unless I was greatly mistaken. And it was rising fast, too, so fast that, even as I stood gazing at it, it fully doubled its area and permitted us a glimpse of the soft, slaty-blue tint merging into the white.

“Yes,” I agreed, replying to Parsons’ question, “the change is coming all right, and it will not be very long before it is here. Lay in your oars, men. I think, in prospect of what that cloud promises, that we may venture to spare ourselves any further ash-flourishing to-day, for we shall have a breeze before very long, with thunder, lightning, and rain as well, unless I am greatly mistaken. And we will pipe to supper at once, so that we may be able to get our meal in peace and quietness, and have it over and done with before the breeze comes. We are likely enough to have plenty of other matters than eating and drinking to think about and attend to when that happens.”

The oars were laid in, willingly enough, for the other four were in just as bad a plight as I was. Cunningham, indeed, was far worse, for, unlike ours, his hands were soft and tender, and when, after the oars had been laid in, he stretched out his hands, palms upwards, and showed them to me, they presented a positively sickening sight. But when I murmured my regret and commiseration he only smiled and expressed the conviction that they would be all right again in a week, for he was one of the pluckiest men I ever met, grit all through, straight as a die, and with not a bad spot anywhere in him; he was, in fact, everything that we are apt to think a typical Briton should be.

We lost no time in getting the meal that we called by courtesy “supper”; and within half an hour had disposed of it, and were waiting patiently for whatever was to come. But while it was still calm and light I had the mast stepped, and sent the sailmaker aloft to take a good, comprehensive look round and see whether he could discover any sign of a sail; and no sooner had he, with much pain and tribulation, climbed to the top of his precarious perch than he sang out that he could just see, in the northern board, what looked like the heads of a ship’s royals. Of course he could not tell in which direction she was bound, for, like ourselves, she was becalmed, and slowly “boxing the compass,” that is to say, her head was pointing first one way and then another; but while he was aloft, clinging to the boat’s masthead, and watching the stranger in the hope of being able to make some further discovery concerning her, her people started to clew up and furl her royals, which circumstance Simpson duly reported. It served as a hint to us in the gig, for if the stranger had detected symptoms that her royals would presently be too much for her, it was high time for us to look after ourselves; and we accordingly proceeded forthwith to close-reef our lug, and otherwise make such preparations as were possible to enable us effectively to meet the onslaught of the threatened squall.

Chapter Four.At the Mercy of Wind and Sea.That a squall was indeed brewing was by this time perfectly evident; for while we had been getting our supper the cloud which had made its appearance on the western horizon had rapidly risen, and now hung, an enormous lowering mass of livid purple vapour, in the western heavens, covering an arc of the horizon of fully a hundred degrees, completely hiding the setting sun, and towering aloft until its upper edge was nearly overhead. Yet so far there was not a breath of wind, and the surface of the sea remained an unbroken, polished mirror, perfectly reflecting the hues of the overhanging cloud to the westward and the deep rich azure of the sky away down toward the east; and when Simpson again climbed the boat’s mast to take a final look at the stranger, he reported her naked mastheads as standing up black, sharp, and motionless against the soft primrose tones of the northern sky.Some ten minutes later, and just as the brief twilight of that region had begun to veil the scene, we saw a faint glimmer of lightning in the heart of the now slowly advancing cloud, and a few seconds after the low mutter of thunder reached our ears. And before the rumble of this had died away there suddenly darted from the bosom of the cloud a long, vivid, baleful, sun-bright flash that seemed to strike into the sea within a quarter of a mile of us, immediately followed by so stupendous a crash that it caused the very timbers of our boat to vibrate and tremble—or so I verily believed. And as though that flash had been a signal, the great cloud seemed suddenly to burst apart, and the next moment we were enveloped in a very deluge of rain, which fairly roared as it threshed the surface of the sea all round us.“The bread! the bread!” I shouted. “Cover it with the tarpaulin and keep it dry. If we let it get wet it will be spoiled,” and immediately we all made a dash for the two bags of biscuits and hastily enveloped them in a small sheet of tarpaulin that Chips had had the forethought to toss into the gig while she was being lowered from the davits.“Now,” said I, as soon as we had taken such precautions as were possible for the preservation of our bread, “spread out the sail, from gunwale to gunwale, right across the boat. This rain is far too precious to be wasted. That’s your sort, bos’n, make a good deep sag in the middle of the sail—it will soon fill at this rate; and then we can all drink as much as we please, and put what more we can catch into the broached breaker, filling it until it overflows. Find the pannikin, one of you; there is enough for a drink round already.”The hollow sail filled with the sweet, tepid rainwater faster than we could drink it; and before the rain ceased we had each emptied the pint pannikin twice and had filled the broached breaker right up to the edge of its bung-hole. Then we had another drink all round, after which we bathed our smarting, blistered hands in the cooling liquid before emptying it into the sea. The downpour lasted for perhaps twelve minutes; then it ceased as suddenly as it had begun—as suddenly as though a tap had been turned off up aloft—and we had an opportunity once more to look around us. And, glancing instinctively to the westward in the first instance—for that was where we expected the wind to come from—the first thing we saw, in the fast-deepening twilight, was a broad belt of dark water, flecked here and there with white, about a mile distant, and advancing in our direction.“Hurrah, lads!” I exclaimed, “here comes the breeze—a foul one it is true, but even a foul wind, so long as there is not too much of it, is better than none at all. Set the lug for a board on the port tack; since we can’t go straight to our port I’ll make a board to the nor’ard, which will at least be going in the right direction. Yes, bos’n,” in reply to a question from that functionary, “keep the sail close-reefed; we shall have all the wind we want, and a little over, before very long, unless I am greatly mistaken.”The wind swooped down upon us in a fierce little flurry that careened the gig to her gunwale, despite the careful tending of the sheet by the boatswain; then, with all hands of us sitting well up to windward, the boat gathered way and darted off upon a course that was as nearly as might be due north-west, lying well down to it, with the spray from the short, choppy seas that the squall instantly whipped up showering in over her sharp weather bow at every plunge, and quickly drenching us to the skin. But there was worse to come, for the wind was freshening every moment and rapidly kicking up a short, steep, choppy sea, the surges of which smothered us with spray as the gig leaped viciously at them under the steadily increasing pressure of the wind upon her close-reefed lugsail; so that within a very few minutes it was taking one hand all his time to keep the boat free of water by continually baling with the bucket, although we eased the craft as much as possible by keeping the weather-leech of the sail ashiver most of the time.“Just our luck!” growled the boatswain, as he slacked the sheet to a still fiercer puff. “If this had been a fair wind, now, we could have shown whole canvas to it, and would have been reelin’ off our seven, or even eight knots as easily as possible. But, as it is, we can’t make no headway agin it; and the time ain’t far off, in my opinion, when we’ll have to up stick and run afore it.”“We’ll not do that until we are obliged,” said I. “I don’t feel at all like losing, in the course of two or three hours, the ground that we have made by the hardest day’s work that I ever did in my life. No, Murdock, when we can’t face it any longer we will lash the oars together and ride to them as a sea anchor at the full scope of our painter. They will keep the boat head-on to wind and sea, and we shall ride as comfortably that way as any other; while, although our drift will probably amount to as much as three knots every hour, we shall not lose nearly as much ground as we should by scudding before—”I was interrupted by the sailmaker, who was sitting far enough forward to be able to see some distance past the luff of the sail. Seaman-like, he was instinctively keeping a lookout, and he now suddenly turned and yelled:“Sail ho! close aboard on the lee bow. Hard up, Mr Temple; hard up, sir, and keep her broad away, or that chap’ll run us down.”There was an urgency and imperativeness in the man’s tones which made it clear enough that there was no time for investigation. I therefore did the only thing that remained to be done under the circumstances, namely, trusted to the correctness of Sails’s judgment and implicitly followed his directions, dragging the tiller hard up, and at the same time calling upon the boatswain to ease off the sheet still further. Under the pressure of her weather helm the boat at once fell broad off; and as she did so I saw, through the rapidly deepening darkness, a great black blotch swing into view past the luff of our sail, which the next instant resolved itself into the shape of a big, hulking brigantine, wallowing along down toward us with her topsail-yard down on the cap, her reef tackles bowsed up, and eight men on her yard busily engaged in reefing her topsail. It was not yet so dark but that those men must have seen us distinctly—in fact one of them paused in his work to flourish his hand at us; yet, but for the sailmaker’s watchfulness, the craft would have driven right over us! There could be no doubt of the fact that her crew had seen us, for, in addition to the man who waved to us from the yard, there were two men pacing her monkey poop aft who paused in their march to look at us as we drove past each other; yet, although we yelled to them frantically to heave-to and pick us up, they made no movement to do anything of the sort, and ten minutes later the craft vanished in the darkness. The light was too poor to enable us to read the name on her stern as she swept past us, but she had all the look of a Portuguese-built craft; and, justly or unjustly, the Portuguese have gained rather a sinister reputation for callousness and inhumanity in their behaviour toward people circumstanced as we were at that moment.“I s’pose they thinks we’re out here in a hopen boat for pleasure and the fun o’ the thing,” was the boatswain’s sarcastic comment upon their behaviour, prefaced by a stream of profanity, as the vessel disappeared from our view.As soon as we realised that the crew of the brigantine had no intention of heaving-to and picking us up we again brought the gig to the wind. But we soon found that this would not do: the wind and sea were both rapidly becoming too much for us, and to continue fighting against them meant the speedy swamping or capsizal of the boat. We therefore adopted the plan which I had been expounding to the boatswain when the brigantine hove into view, securely lashing the four oars of the boat together in a bundle, bending the extreme end of our painter to the middle of the bundle, and launching the whole overboard, at the same time lowering the sail and striking the mast, when the drag of the boat upon the oars brought her head to wind and sea, and enabled her to ride in comparative safety and comfort, although a breaking sea occasionally slopped in over her bows, necessitating the frequent employment of the bucket as a baler.There was very little sleep for any of us that night, for within an hour it was blowing really hard, with a heavy, steep sea that frequently broke aboard us, causing us intense discomfort as the water rushed aft and surged about our feet and legs to the wild plunging of the boat, and keeping one or another of us constantly busy baling to prevent the boat from being swamped. We were thankful that we had not the added discomfort of cold to contend with, for, hard though it blew, the wind was quite warm; yet, even so, it was unpleasant enough, since we were in the greatest peril every moment of that long, weary night, our utmost efforts being continually required to keep the boat above water. But, notwithstanding everything, it was a fine, exhilarating experience; for, added to the joy of battle with the elements, there was the wild grandeur of the scene, the great masses of black cloud scurrying athwart the sky, with little patches of starlit blue winking in and out between, the roar and swoop of the wind, and the menacing hiss of the phosphorescent foam-caps as they came rushing down upon the boat in endless succession, all combining together to form a picture the like of which, as viewed from a wildly leaping, half-swamped, spray-smothered open boat, it is given to comparatively few men to look upon.The gale lasted all through the night, breaking at sunrise; but although the sky cleared with the coming of the dawn, the wind continued to blow so strongly that it was not until the sun had crossed the meridian that it again became possible for us to make sail upon the boat: and meanwhile we found that during the night it had hauled round from the north-west, and was therefore still practically dead in our teeth. But the moment that the sea had gone down enough to render sailing once more possible, we got under way and headed westward close-hauled upon the starboard tack, under a double-reefed sail; and I took fresh heart when presently I saw that, even under the exceedingly unfavourable conditions then prevailing—and they were about as unfavourable as they could possibly be—the boat was keeping a good luff, hanging well to windward, thanks to an exceptionally deep keel, and making about four knots of headway every hour.My hopes rose high that even yet, despite the delays which we had already experienced, we might be able to cover the distance to the coast before our provisions gave out; for if we were doing well under almost the worst conditions that could possibly befall us, what might we not do when those conditions improved? And they certainly did improve as the afternoon wore on, for the wind eventually dropped sufficiently to permit us to shake out our reefs and sail the boat under whole canvas, while with the moderating of the wind the sea also went down and ceased to break, although the swell still ran very high. But it was only the heavily breaking seas that were really dangerous to us; and now that we no longer had them to fear we drove the gig for all that she was worth, luffing her through the fresher puffs, hawsing her up to windward fathom by fathom, and generally handling her as though we were sailing her in a race, as indeed we were in a sense—a race against time.We continued to do exceedingly well all through that afternoon, and indeed up to about midnight; but the wind was softening all the time, and shortly after midnight our speed began to slacken, until by daylight of the next morning it had once more fallen to less than three knots. Moreover, the weather was by no means satisfactory in appearance; there were no actual clouds to be seen in the sky, but instead of being a clear, deep, rich blue, as it ought to have been, and as it no doubt would have been had there been fine weather in prospect, the entire vault of heaven was veiled in a thick, steamy, colourless haze, through which the sun showed as a feeble, shapeless blotch of white. There was barely enough wind, still dead against us, to fan us along at a bare two knots; but I did not like the look of the sea, which, despite the almost total absence of wind, was in a strange state of unrest, the long heave of the swell being overrun by small, short, choppy miniature seas, which seemed to leap up at brief intervals without visible cause, and then curled over and fell in a casual, sloppy manner that suggested the idea that they would have liked to break but could not summon up the energy to do so.But whatever else they may have failed to do, these sloppy seas managed to retard the way of the boat through the water very considerably, and to fill our souls with exasperation; for they were distinctly hindering our progress, while we could see no valid reason why they should exist at all. They had the appearance of having sprung up solely to delay us, and for no other purpose whatever. More than once, when I felt exceptionally impatient at our miserably slow rate of progress, I had it on the tip of my tongue to propose that we should again take to the oars; but I did not actually speak the words, for in the first place I doubted whether the gain in speed would be sufficient to justify the expenditure of strength, and in the next place our hands were by this time in such a frightful condition of rawness that the idea of proposing what would make them very much worse seemed to smack of downright cruelty, unless I could urge some more valid reason than the mere desire to get ahead a little faster. And our situation just then was scarcely desperate enough for that.It was very shortly after midday, and we were all gathered aft partaking of the meal that we dignified with the name of dinner, when the boatswain, who was sitting on the after thwart, facing me, suddenly paused in the act of conveying a piece of biscuit to his mouth, stared intently over my shoulder for a moment, and then sprang to his feet, shading his eyes with his hand.“What is it, Murdock?” I asked, turning as I spoke in the direction toward which he was gazing, “do you—?”“Sail ho!” interrupted the boatswain, pointing eagerly with his hand. “Do ye see her, Mr Temple, sir?”“Ay, I do,” I answered, as I caught sight of a faint pearly gleam afar off on the north-eastern horizon. “Mr Cunningham, will you kindly lend me your telescope for a moment?”“Certainly, with pleasure,” answered Cunningham, producing the instrument from his pocket. It was not a very big affair, being only about six inches long by perhaps an inch and a half in diameter, but it was a three-draw tube, measuring about one foot nine inches long when fully extended, and, for its size, was the most splendid instrument I had ever used. I quickly brought it to bear upon the distant gleam, which the lenses instantly resolved into the heads of the fore and main royals of a craft—either a barque or a brig—standing to the southward. When I had finished with the instrument the boatswain took a squint through it, and after him the carpenter and the sailmaker; and when they had had their turn Cunningham applied it to his eye. As the boatswain passed the telescope over to Chips he turned to me eagerly and looked at me hard withsoexpressive an eye that I instantly read what was in his mind. I shook my head.“We could never do it, Murdock,” I said. “She’s too far to the south’ard. Had she borne three, or even a couple of points farther to the nor’ard I might have felt inclined to risk it; but—”“What are you talking about?” demanded Cunningham. “Is it a question of whether we can or cannot intercept that ship? Because if it is, I am most emphatically in favour of our making the attempt. Mind you, I do not say that we can actually intercept her; but I believe we might manage to get close enough to her to be seen, for she is almost certain to have a man or two aloft at work upon her rigging.”“Yes, ye’re right, Mr Cunnin’ham; that’s exactly my notion,” eagerly agreed the boatswain. “I believe that by runnin’ away off in about this here direction,” pointing away toward the south—east, “we ought to lift her pretty nigh to her rail by the time that she draws up abreast of us; and if we can do that we stands a very good chance of bein’ seen. I haven’t no great faith in our prospec’s of fetchin’ Rio; and if we gets half a chance of bein’ picked up by a ship, we ought to take it. Moreover than that, I don’t like the look of the weather none too well; and I’d a deal rather spend the comin’ night aboard that ship than in this here gig.”There was certainly good, sound reason and common sense in Murdock’s words, and particularly in what he said about the weather; so I turned to the carpenter, to ascertain his view of the matter.“What do you say, Chips?” I asked. “Are you of opinion that we shall be justified in losing ten or fifteen miles of ground upon the off-chance of being able to close with yonder craft near enough to be seen?”“Why, yes, Mr Temple, I certainly am,” answered Chips. “I won’t go so far as to say that we’ll be actually able to manage it; but I think it’s our dooty to have a good try for it. I’m like the bos’n, I’ve got a sort of feelin’ that we ain’t goin’ to fetch Rio this trip—”“All right, then,” I said; “you three constitute the majority, even if Sails happens to think as I do—”“Ah, but I don’t, Mr Temple!” interrupted Simpson. “I agrees with the bos’n—”“Then round we go,” I interrupted in my turn; and, putting the helm hard up, I bore away, the sail jibed over, and off we went almost dead before the wind, heading about south-east, and bringing the stranger about a point and a half abaft our port beam.Sailing before the wind was a very different matter from plugging to windward with the sheet flattened well in, and although our shift of helm had the effect of making it seem that the wind had suddenly died away almost to nothing, there was no longer that heart-breaking smack-smack of the small seas against our weather bow which had seemed to retard our way in such an exasperating fashion. On the contrary, with the sheet eased well off and the lug boomed out with the boathook so that the yard swung square across the length of the boat, we went sliding smoothly away to leeward with a long, easy, buoyant motion, a pleasant, musical gurgling of water along our bottom planking, and a swift gliding past us of tiny air bubbles and occasional morsels of weed that told us we were now travelling at the rate of quite four knots.For the first half-hour the stranger did not appreciably alter her bearing relative to the boat, which seemed to indicate that we were practically holding our own with her, and our hopes soared high, especially as within that brief period we had raised her royals and the heads of her topgallantsails above the horizon. But when this latter circumstance enabled us to see that she had her starboard topgallant studdingsails set, my enthusiasm flagged again, for I argued that she must be a slow-coach indeed if, with the breeze then blowing and studdingsails set, she could not do any better than four knots. I held my peace, however, for there was no use in damping the hopes of the others, while there was always the possibility that if any of her hands happened to be employed aloft, the eye of one or another of them might chance upon our sail, which, small though it was, ought to be perfectly visible at a distance of five or six miles, even in that somewhat hazy atmosphere. But by the end of the first hour after we had begun our chase it became apparent that she had the heels of us, for although we were still steering exactly the same course as at first, she had drawn up square abeam of us. And there it was imperatively necessary that we should keep her if we did not wish her to slip past us, even although the keeping of her there should entail upon us the necessity to edge gradually away, thus bringing our own course ever more nearly parallel to hers, instead of causing the two steadily to converge. Then, about the end of the second hour of the chase, by which time we had lifted the stranger’s main topsail-yard above the horizon, and had discovered that she was barque-rigged, the breeze suddenly freshened up sufficiently to add an extra knot and a half to our speed. But this was a misfortune rather than otherwise for us: for although it increased our speed, it also increased that of the stranger, when it reached her, which it did about ten minutes later; and whereas it added only about a knot and a half to our rate of travel, it probably quickened up her pace by more than double that amount, as was painfully apparent from the increased frequency with which we were obliged to edge away to keep her square abeam. And now the anxiety which I had all along felt began to be shared by the others, one or another of whom kept Cunningham’s telescope continually bearing upon the barque. They began to fidget where they sat, to mutter and grumble under their breath, and to cast frequent looks at the sky astern, which had not materially altered its aspect since the morning, except that the haze had thickened somewhat. At last the boatswain could restrain himself no longer.“If this here humbuggin’ breeze’d only drop,” he grumbled, “we’d out oars and pull to her. But it ain’t goin’ to drop, that’s the worst of it, it’s agoin’ to freshen still furder; and that cussed old hooker’s goin’ to run away from us, that’s what she’s agoin’ to do. Let’s have a look at that there glass again, Mr Cunnin’ham,” he continued. “I can’t make out what they’re a-thinkin’ about aboard her. It’s fine weather, and surely there ought to be some work to be done aloft.” Here he got the telescope to bear upon her for at least the tenth time since the chase had begun, and relapsed into temporary silence, while he subjected every visible part of her to a most searching scrutiny. Presently he resumed, with animation: “Ah! I thought it’d be strange if her bos’n couldn’t find somethin’ that wanted doin’ aloft in such fine weather as this. Just you take this here glass, Mr Temple—Chips’ll catch hold of the tiller for a minute or two—and see if there ain’t a man sittin’ astride of her weather main tawps’l-yardarm doin’ somethin’ or other.”I handed over the tiller to Chips, took the telescope, and raised the eyepiece to my eye. Instantly I had a small but exquisitely clear picture of the three masts of the distant barque, from the level of the second reef-band of her main topsail upward, with every rope and piece of rigging and gear, even to the reef-points of the topsail, rising and falling upon the horizon line with the lift of the ship upon the swell. And there, sure enough, at the point named by the boatswain, but tucked away in the shadow of the weather clew of the topgallantsail, so that it was not very easy to make him out, I saw what I certainly took to be the figure of a man. And that the boatswain and I were not mistaken presently became apparent, for, while I still looked, the fellow leisurely swung himself on to the foot rope and began to lay in along the yard.“Quick!” I exclaimed, “we must attract his attention somehow, for he has finished his job and is laying in off the yard. Off with your jacket, Sails, and jump up on the thwart and wave it for all you are worth!”The sailmaker tore off his white canvas jacket, and, grasping it by one arm, sprang up on the mast thwart and waved it furiously, while I kept the telescope focused upon the slowly moving figure of the distant seaman. But the man worked his way steadily in, swung himself off the yard to the topmast rigging, and, with the merchant sailor’s usual deliberation, descended until he vanished below the horizon line, seemingly without giving a single glance at the widespreading surface of sea that stretched away for miles on either side of him.“That will do, Sails,” I said; “you may belay your flourishing, and get down off the thwart. That shellback has gone down on deck without so much as a glance in our direction.”“Laid down, have he, without stoppin’ so much as to take a look round?” snarled the boatswain savagely, dashing his clenched fist down on the gunwale. “I’ll be jiggered if I can understan’ what’s comin’ to the sailorman as sails these here seas. Fust there was that there Portugee, as went past without stoppin’ to pick us up, although they see’d us, and must ’ave knowed that we was castaways; and now here’s this here bloomin’ barque, manned by chaps as don’t seem to think it worth while to give a look round while they’re aloft, to see whether there’s any poor sailormen washin’ about in distress. But she ain’t British, I’ll take my Bible oath o’ that; the British shellback don’t do that there sort o’ thing. Why, when I first went to sea we was never ordered aloft but what the skipper used to say: ‘Take a good look round, men, afore you comes down again. We never knows when we may be passin’ within sight of some poor unfortunate, perishin’ of hunger and thirst, and prayin’ to be sighted and picked up!’”“Well,” said I, “I am afraid it is all up with us, so far as that barque is concerned. Nevertheless, we will stick to her as long as she remains in sight. Another hand may be sent aloft aboard her before she disappears; or the wind may drop—although I confess I see no sign of it at present. And in any case it is comforting, in a way, to know that we are in the track of the south-bound ships; we are certain to sight others within the next day or two, and it will be pretty poor luck if we cannot intercept one or another of them.”But although I spoke so confidently I am afraid that I was not very successful in cheering up my companions in misfortune. This second disappointment was producing its effect upon them; they were becoming depressed and pessimistic; and although they all agreed that the proper thing to do was to hang on to the distant barque, in the hope of eventually attracting the attention of somebody aboard her, I could see that we were all fully convinced that the attempt would result in failure.And so it did. We chased that barque until the sun set and the shades of night hid her from our sight; and although about mid-afternoon we got so close to her that her lower yards showed above the horizon when she lifted on the swell, and kept the telescope bearing upon her all the time, no more hands were sent aloft, and as the afternoon progressed she steadily drew away from us again, until when at length we lost sight of her in the gathering darkness only her royals and the upper halves of her topgallantsails were showing above the horizon. And all this time so absorbed were we in the chase that we were scarcely conscious of the fact that the wind was steadily freshening every minute, the result being that, when at length we were compelled to abandon the hope of being seen and picked up, we suddenly awoke to the fact that it was blowing quite a strong breeze, and that it had kicked up such a high, steep sea that it was no longer possible for us to round-to and ride to a sea anchor as we had done on the night but one before. We were therefore obliged to scud before the wind all night under whole canvas, to avoid being pooped and swamped by the breaking seas that remorselessly chased us.That was a harassing, anxious night for all hands of us, for by midnight it was blowing what is generally termed a fresh gale, that is, a breeze strong enough to compel a ship of, say, a thousand tons to reduce canvas to single-reefed topsails; and that, to us, in a small open boat, was about equivalent to what a hurricane would be to the bigger craft. There was no sleep for any of us, for we were in constant, imminent danger, and it taxed the resources of all hands to their utmost limit all through the night to keep the boat from being overwhelmed. The chief danger to an open boat under such circumstances arises from the fact that, lying so low in the water as she does, her sail becomes becalmed every time that she settles into the trough of a sea, and she gradually loses way. Then, as she is hove up on the breast of the next following sea, her sail suddenly fills again, and those in her have to be careful that, in filling, it does not jibe over, for if it did so it would certainly capsize the boat. But in guarding against that danger another of equal magnitude is incurred, for unless the boat is kept dead stern-on to the sea the chances are that she will broach-to and be filled by the breaking head of the sea when it overtakes her. When it comes to be remembered that this twofold peril threatens an open boat about twice a minute hour after hour, as long as the gale continues, some faint idea may be gained of the anxiety and discomfort we were called upon to endure on the occasion which I am now attempting to describe. And while the anxiety of all is sufficiently acute, the man who is most worried is the one who is at the helm, for the behaviour of a craft under such circumstances is in one respect distinctly and harassingly peculiar: at the most perilous moment of all, which is the moment before she is actually overtaken by the breaking crest of the wave, she is apt to refuse to answer her helm, and he who is steering her loses all control over her; she seems to be seized with a perverse determination to take a broad sheer one way or the other, with disastrous results, despite a hard-over helm, and then the only thing to be done to retrieve the situation is to effect a lightning shift of helm against all your past experience and your better judgment. But notwithstanding this, it generally has the desired effect, the reason commonly assigned being that, contrary to what is usually supposed, the body of water constituting the head of a sea actually has a quick forward motion, and when this overtakes a craft, large or small, which is only beginning to gather fresh headway, the result is practically the same as though she were going astern instead of ahead, and the helm must be manipulated accordingly. Whether this is really the true explanation of the curiously awkward phenomenon of which I have spoken I cannot say; but I know that the phenomenon occurs, and that it placed us in the direst peril at least half a hundred times during that never-to-be-forgotten night, a peril from which, it appeared to me, we each time escaped by the very skin of our teeth, and by what seemed to be nothing short of a series of miracles. True, we are told that the days of miracles are long past; but, after all, who knows?

That a squall was indeed brewing was by this time perfectly evident; for while we had been getting our supper the cloud which had made its appearance on the western horizon had rapidly risen, and now hung, an enormous lowering mass of livid purple vapour, in the western heavens, covering an arc of the horizon of fully a hundred degrees, completely hiding the setting sun, and towering aloft until its upper edge was nearly overhead. Yet so far there was not a breath of wind, and the surface of the sea remained an unbroken, polished mirror, perfectly reflecting the hues of the overhanging cloud to the westward and the deep rich azure of the sky away down toward the east; and when Simpson again climbed the boat’s mast to take a final look at the stranger, he reported her naked mastheads as standing up black, sharp, and motionless against the soft primrose tones of the northern sky.

Some ten minutes later, and just as the brief twilight of that region had begun to veil the scene, we saw a faint glimmer of lightning in the heart of the now slowly advancing cloud, and a few seconds after the low mutter of thunder reached our ears. And before the rumble of this had died away there suddenly darted from the bosom of the cloud a long, vivid, baleful, sun-bright flash that seemed to strike into the sea within a quarter of a mile of us, immediately followed by so stupendous a crash that it caused the very timbers of our boat to vibrate and tremble—or so I verily believed. And as though that flash had been a signal, the great cloud seemed suddenly to burst apart, and the next moment we were enveloped in a very deluge of rain, which fairly roared as it threshed the surface of the sea all round us.

“The bread! the bread!” I shouted. “Cover it with the tarpaulin and keep it dry. If we let it get wet it will be spoiled,” and immediately we all made a dash for the two bags of biscuits and hastily enveloped them in a small sheet of tarpaulin that Chips had had the forethought to toss into the gig while she was being lowered from the davits.

“Now,” said I, as soon as we had taken such precautions as were possible for the preservation of our bread, “spread out the sail, from gunwale to gunwale, right across the boat. This rain is far too precious to be wasted. That’s your sort, bos’n, make a good deep sag in the middle of the sail—it will soon fill at this rate; and then we can all drink as much as we please, and put what more we can catch into the broached breaker, filling it until it overflows. Find the pannikin, one of you; there is enough for a drink round already.”

The hollow sail filled with the sweet, tepid rainwater faster than we could drink it; and before the rain ceased we had each emptied the pint pannikin twice and had filled the broached breaker right up to the edge of its bung-hole. Then we had another drink all round, after which we bathed our smarting, blistered hands in the cooling liquid before emptying it into the sea. The downpour lasted for perhaps twelve minutes; then it ceased as suddenly as it had begun—as suddenly as though a tap had been turned off up aloft—and we had an opportunity once more to look around us. And, glancing instinctively to the westward in the first instance—for that was where we expected the wind to come from—the first thing we saw, in the fast-deepening twilight, was a broad belt of dark water, flecked here and there with white, about a mile distant, and advancing in our direction.

“Hurrah, lads!” I exclaimed, “here comes the breeze—a foul one it is true, but even a foul wind, so long as there is not too much of it, is better than none at all. Set the lug for a board on the port tack; since we can’t go straight to our port I’ll make a board to the nor’ard, which will at least be going in the right direction. Yes, bos’n,” in reply to a question from that functionary, “keep the sail close-reefed; we shall have all the wind we want, and a little over, before very long, unless I am greatly mistaken.”

The wind swooped down upon us in a fierce little flurry that careened the gig to her gunwale, despite the careful tending of the sheet by the boatswain; then, with all hands of us sitting well up to windward, the boat gathered way and darted off upon a course that was as nearly as might be due north-west, lying well down to it, with the spray from the short, choppy seas that the squall instantly whipped up showering in over her sharp weather bow at every plunge, and quickly drenching us to the skin. But there was worse to come, for the wind was freshening every moment and rapidly kicking up a short, steep, choppy sea, the surges of which smothered us with spray as the gig leaped viciously at them under the steadily increasing pressure of the wind upon her close-reefed lugsail; so that within a very few minutes it was taking one hand all his time to keep the boat free of water by continually baling with the bucket, although we eased the craft as much as possible by keeping the weather-leech of the sail ashiver most of the time.

“Just our luck!” growled the boatswain, as he slacked the sheet to a still fiercer puff. “If this had been a fair wind, now, we could have shown whole canvas to it, and would have been reelin’ off our seven, or even eight knots as easily as possible. But, as it is, we can’t make no headway agin it; and the time ain’t far off, in my opinion, when we’ll have to up stick and run afore it.”

“We’ll not do that until we are obliged,” said I. “I don’t feel at all like losing, in the course of two or three hours, the ground that we have made by the hardest day’s work that I ever did in my life. No, Murdock, when we can’t face it any longer we will lash the oars together and ride to them as a sea anchor at the full scope of our painter. They will keep the boat head-on to wind and sea, and we shall ride as comfortably that way as any other; while, although our drift will probably amount to as much as three knots every hour, we shall not lose nearly as much ground as we should by scudding before—”

I was interrupted by the sailmaker, who was sitting far enough forward to be able to see some distance past the luff of the sail. Seaman-like, he was instinctively keeping a lookout, and he now suddenly turned and yelled:

“Sail ho! close aboard on the lee bow. Hard up, Mr Temple; hard up, sir, and keep her broad away, or that chap’ll run us down.”

There was an urgency and imperativeness in the man’s tones which made it clear enough that there was no time for investigation. I therefore did the only thing that remained to be done under the circumstances, namely, trusted to the correctness of Sails’s judgment and implicitly followed his directions, dragging the tiller hard up, and at the same time calling upon the boatswain to ease off the sheet still further. Under the pressure of her weather helm the boat at once fell broad off; and as she did so I saw, through the rapidly deepening darkness, a great black blotch swing into view past the luff of our sail, which the next instant resolved itself into the shape of a big, hulking brigantine, wallowing along down toward us with her topsail-yard down on the cap, her reef tackles bowsed up, and eight men on her yard busily engaged in reefing her topsail. It was not yet so dark but that those men must have seen us distinctly—in fact one of them paused in his work to flourish his hand at us; yet, but for the sailmaker’s watchfulness, the craft would have driven right over us! There could be no doubt of the fact that her crew had seen us, for, in addition to the man who waved to us from the yard, there were two men pacing her monkey poop aft who paused in their march to look at us as we drove past each other; yet, although we yelled to them frantically to heave-to and pick us up, they made no movement to do anything of the sort, and ten minutes later the craft vanished in the darkness. The light was too poor to enable us to read the name on her stern as she swept past us, but she had all the look of a Portuguese-built craft; and, justly or unjustly, the Portuguese have gained rather a sinister reputation for callousness and inhumanity in their behaviour toward people circumstanced as we were at that moment.

“I s’pose they thinks we’re out here in a hopen boat for pleasure and the fun o’ the thing,” was the boatswain’s sarcastic comment upon their behaviour, prefaced by a stream of profanity, as the vessel disappeared from our view.

As soon as we realised that the crew of the brigantine had no intention of heaving-to and picking us up we again brought the gig to the wind. But we soon found that this would not do: the wind and sea were both rapidly becoming too much for us, and to continue fighting against them meant the speedy swamping or capsizal of the boat. We therefore adopted the plan which I had been expounding to the boatswain when the brigantine hove into view, securely lashing the four oars of the boat together in a bundle, bending the extreme end of our painter to the middle of the bundle, and launching the whole overboard, at the same time lowering the sail and striking the mast, when the drag of the boat upon the oars brought her head to wind and sea, and enabled her to ride in comparative safety and comfort, although a breaking sea occasionally slopped in over her bows, necessitating the frequent employment of the bucket as a baler.

There was very little sleep for any of us that night, for within an hour it was blowing really hard, with a heavy, steep sea that frequently broke aboard us, causing us intense discomfort as the water rushed aft and surged about our feet and legs to the wild plunging of the boat, and keeping one or another of us constantly busy baling to prevent the boat from being swamped. We were thankful that we had not the added discomfort of cold to contend with, for, hard though it blew, the wind was quite warm; yet, even so, it was unpleasant enough, since we were in the greatest peril every moment of that long, weary night, our utmost efforts being continually required to keep the boat above water. But, notwithstanding everything, it was a fine, exhilarating experience; for, added to the joy of battle with the elements, there was the wild grandeur of the scene, the great masses of black cloud scurrying athwart the sky, with little patches of starlit blue winking in and out between, the roar and swoop of the wind, and the menacing hiss of the phosphorescent foam-caps as they came rushing down upon the boat in endless succession, all combining together to form a picture the like of which, as viewed from a wildly leaping, half-swamped, spray-smothered open boat, it is given to comparatively few men to look upon.

The gale lasted all through the night, breaking at sunrise; but although the sky cleared with the coming of the dawn, the wind continued to blow so strongly that it was not until the sun had crossed the meridian that it again became possible for us to make sail upon the boat: and meanwhile we found that during the night it had hauled round from the north-west, and was therefore still practically dead in our teeth. But the moment that the sea had gone down enough to render sailing once more possible, we got under way and headed westward close-hauled upon the starboard tack, under a double-reefed sail; and I took fresh heart when presently I saw that, even under the exceedingly unfavourable conditions then prevailing—and they were about as unfavourable as they could possibly be—the boat was keeping a good luff, hanging well to windward, thanks to an exceptionally deep keel, and making about four knots of headway every hour.

My hopes rose high that even yet, despite the delays which we had already experienced, we might be able to cover the distance to the coast before our provisions gave out; for if we were doing well under almost the worst conditions that could possibly befall us, what might we not do when those conditions improved? And they certainly did improve as the afternoon wore on, for the wind eventually dropped sufficiently to permit us to shake out our reefs and sail the boat under whole canvas, while with the moderating of the wind the sea also went down and ceased to break, although the swell still ran very high. But it was only the heavily breaking seas that were really dangerous to us; and now that we no longer had them to fear we drove the gig for all that she was worth, luffing her through the fresher puffs, hawsing her up to windward fathom by fathom, and generally handling her as though we were sailing her in a race, as indeed we were in a sense—a race against time.

We continued to do exceedingly well all through that afternoon, and indeed up to about midnight; but the wind was softening all the time, and shortly after midnight our speed began to slacken, until by daylight of the next morning it had once more fallen to less than three knots. Moreover, the weather was by no means satisfactory in appearance; there were no actual clouds to be seen in the sky, but instead of being a clear, deep, rich blue, as it ought to have been, and as it no doubt would have been had there been fine weather in prospect, the entire vault of heaven was veiled in a thick, steamy, colourless haze, through which the sun showed as a feeble, shapeless blotch of white. There was barely enough wind, still dead against us, to fan us along at a bare two knots; but I did not like the look of the sea, which, despite the almost total absence of wind, was in a strange state of unrest, the long heave of the swell being overrun by small, short, choppy miniature seas, which seemed to leap up at brief intervals without visible cause, and then curled over and fell in a casual, sloppy manner that suggested the idea that they would have liked to break but could not summon up the energy to do so.

But whatever else they may have failed to do, these sloppy seas managed to retard the way of the boat through the water very considerably, and to fill our souls with exasperation; for they were distinctly hindering our progress, while we could see no valid reason why they should exist at all. They had the appearance of having sprung up solely to delay us, and for no other purpose whatever. More than once, when I felt exceptionally impatient at our miserably slow rate of progress, I had it on the tip of my tongue to propose that we should again take to the oars; but I did not actually speak the words, for in the first place I doubted whether the gain in speed would be sufficient to justify the expenditure of strength, and in the next place our hands were by this time in such a frightful condition of rawness that the idea of proposing what would make them very much worse seemed to smack of downright cruelty, unless I could urge some more valid reason than the mere desire to get ahead a little faster. And our situation just then was scarcely desperate enough for that.

It was very shortly after midday, and we were all gathered aft partaking of the meal that we dignified with the name of dinner, when the boatswain, who was sitting on the after thwart, facing me, suddenly paused in the act of conveying a piece of biscuit to his mouth, stared intently over my shoulder for a moment, and then sprang to his feet, shading his eyes with his hand.

“What is it, Murdock?” I asked, turning as I spoke in the direction toward which he was gazing, “do you—?”

“Sail ho!” interrupted the boatswain, pointing eagerly with his hand. “Do ye see her, Mr Temple, sir?”

“Ay, I do,” I answered, as I caught sight of a faint pearly gleam afar off on the north-eastern horizon. “Mr Cunningham, will you kindly lend me your telescope for a moment?”

“Certainly, with pleasure,” answered Cunningham, producing the instrument from his pocket. It was not a very big affair, being only about six inches long by perhaps an inch and a half in diameter, but it was a three-draw tube, measuring about one foot nine inches long when fully extended, and, for its size, was the most splendid instrument I had ever used. I quickly brought it to bear upon the distant gleam, which the lenses instantly resolved into the heads of the fore and main royals of a craft—either a barque or a brig—standing to the southward. When I had finished with the instrument the boatswain took a squint through it, and after him the carpenter and the sailmaker; and when they had had their turn Cunningham applied it to his eye. As the boatswain passed the telescope over to Chips he turned to me eagerly and looked at me hard withsoexpressive an eye that I instantly read what was in his mind. I shook my head.

“We could never do it, Murdock,” I said. “She’s too far to the south’ard. Had she borne three, or even a couple of points farther to the nor’ard I might have felt inclined to risk it; but—”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Cunningham. “Is it a question of whether we can or cannot intercept that ship? Because if it is, I am most emphatically in favour of our making the attempt. Mind you, I do not say that we can actually intercept her; but I believe we might manage to get close enough to her to be seen, for she is almost certain to have a man or two aloft at work upon her rigging.”

“Yes, ye’re right, Mr Cunnin’ham; that’s exactly my notion,” eagerly agreed the boatswain. “I believe that by runnin’ away off in about this here direction,” pointing away toward the south—east, “we ought to lift her pretty nigh to her rail by the time that she draws up abreast of us; and if we can do that we stands a very good chance of bein’ seen. I haven’t no great faith in our prospec’s of fetchin’ Rio; and if we gets half a chance of bein’ picked up by a ship, we ought to take it. Moreover than that, I don’t like the look of the weather none too well; and I’d a deal rather spend the comin’ night aboard that ship than in this here gig.”

There was certainly good, sound reason and common sense in Murdock’s words, and particularly in what he said about the weather; so I turned to the carpenter, to ascertain his view of the matter.

“What do you say, Chips?” I asked. “Are you of opinion that we shall be justified in losing ten or fifteen miles of ground upon the off-chance of being able to close with yonder craft near enough to be seen?”

“Why, yes, Mr Temple, I certainly am,” answered Chips. “I won’t go so far as to say that we’ll be actually able to manage it; but I think it’s our dooty to have a good try for it. I’m like the bos’n, I’ve got a sort of feelin’ that we ain’t goin’ to fetch Rio this trip—”

“All right, then,” I said; “you three constitute the majority, even if Sails happens to think as I do—”

“Ah, but I don’t, Mr Temple!” interrupted Simpson. “I agrees with the bos’n—”

“Then round we go,” I interrupted in my turn; and, putting the helm hard up, I bore away, the sail jibed over, and off we went almost dead before the wind, heading about south-east, and bringing the stranger about a point and a half abaft our port beam.

Sailing before the wind was a very different matter from plugging to windward with the sheet flattened well in, and although our shift of helm had the effect of making it seem that the wind had suddenly died away almost to nothing, there was no longer that heart-breaking smack-smack of the small seas against our weather bow which had seemed to retard our way in such an exasperating fashion. On the contrary, with the sheet eased well off and the lug boomed out with the boathook so that the yard swung square across the length of the boat, we went sliding smoothly away to leeward with a long, easy, buoyant motion, a pleasant, musical gurgling of water along our bottom planking, and a swift gliding past us of tiny air bubbles and occasional morsels of weed that told us we were now travelling at the rate of quite four knots.

For the first half-hour the stranger did not appreciably alter her bearing relative to the boat, which seemed to indicate that we were practically holding our own with her, and our hopes soared high, especially as within that brief period we had raised her royals and the heads of her topgallantsails above the horizon. But when this latter circumstance enabled us to see that she had her starboard topgallant studdingsails set, my enthusiasm flagged again, for I argued that she must be a slow-coach indeed if, with the breeze then blowing and studdingsails set, she could not do any better than four knots. I held my peace, however, for there was no use in damping the hopes of the others, while there was always the possibility that if any of her hands happened to be employed aloft, the eye of one or another of them might chance upon our sail, which, small though it was, ought to be perfectly visible at a distance of five or six miles, even in that somewhat hazy atmosphere. But by the end of the first hour after we had begun our chase it became apparent that she had the heels of us, for although we were still steering exactly the same course as at first, she had drawn up square abeam of us. And there it was imperatively necessary that we should keep her if we did not wish her to slip past us, even although the keeping of her there should entail upon us the necessity to edge gradually away, thus bringing our own course ever more nearly parallel to hers, instead of causing the two steadily to converge. Then, about the end of the second hour of the chase, by which time we had lifted the stranger’s main topsail-yard above the horizon, and had discovered that she was barque-rigged, the breeze suddenly freshened up sufficiently to add an extra knot and a half to our speed. But this was a misfortune rather than otherwise for us: for although it increased our speed, it also increased that of the stranger, when it reached her, which it did about ten minutes later; and whereas it added only about a knot and a half to our rate of travel, it probably quickened up her pace by more than double that amount, as was painfully apparent from the increased frequency with which we were obliged to edge away to keep her square abeam. And now the anxiety which I had all along felt began to be shared by the others, one or another of whom kept Cunningham’s telescope continually bearing upon the barque. They began to fidget where they sat, to mutter and grumble under their breath, and to cast frequent looks at the sky astern, which had not materially altered its aspect since the morning, except that the haze had thickened somewhat. At last the boatswain could restrain himself no longer.

“If this here humbuggin’ breeze’d only drop,” he grumbled, “we’d out oars and pull to her. But it ain’t goin’ to drop, that’s the worst of it, it’s agoin’ to freshen still furder; and that cussed old hooker’s goin’ to run away from us, that’s what she’s agoin’ to do. Let’s have a look at that there glass again, Mr Cunnin’ham,” he continued. “I can’t make out what they’re a-thinkin’ about aboard her. It’s fine weather, and surely there ought to be some work to be done aloft.” Here he got the telescope to bear upon her for at least the tenth time since the chase had begun, and relapsed into temporary silence, while he subjected every visible part of her to a most searching scrutiny. Presently he resumed, with animation: “Ah! I thought it’d be strange if her bos’n couldn’t find somethin’ that wanted doin’ aloft in such fine weather as this. Just you take this here glass, Mr Temple—Chips’ll catch hold of the tiller for a minute or two—and see if there ain’t a man sittin’ astride of her weather main tawps’l-yardarm doin’ somethin’ or other.”

I handed over the tiller to Chips, took the telescope, and raised the eyepiece to my eye. Instantly I had a small but exquisitely clear picture of the three masts of the distant barque, from the level of the second reef-band of her main topsail upward, with every rope and piece of rigging and gear, even to the reef-points of the topsail, rising and falling upon the horizon line with the lift of the ship upon the swell. And there, sure enough, at the point named by the boatswain, but tucked away in the shadow of the weather clew of the topgallantsail, so that it was not very easy to make him out, I saw what I certainly took to be the figure of a man. And that the boatswain and I were not mistaken presently became apparent, for, while I still looked, the fellow leisurely swung himself on to the foot rope and began to lay in along the yard.

“Quick!” I exclaimed, “we must attract his attention somehow, for he has finished his job and is laying in off the yard. Off with your jacket, Sails, and jump up on the thwart and wave it for all you are worth!”

The sailmaker tore off his white canvas jacket, and, grasping it by one arm, sprang up on the mast thwart and waved it furiously, while I kept the telescope focused upon the slowly moving figure of the distant seaman. But the man worked his way steadily in, swung himself off the yard to the topmast rigging, and, with the merchant sailor’s usual deliberation, descended until he vanished below the horizon line, seemingly without giving a single glance at the widespreading surface of sea that stretched away for miles on either side of him.

“That will do, Sails,” I said; “you may belay your flourishing, and get down off the thwart. That shellback has gone down on deck without so much as a glance in our direction.”

“Laid down, have he, without stoppin’ so much as to take a look round?” snarled the boatswain savagely, dashing his clenched fist down on the gunwale. “I’ll be jiggered if I can understan’ what’s comin’ to the sailorman as sails these here seas. Fust there was that there Portugee, as went past without stoppin’ to pick us up, although they see’d us, and must ’ave knowed that we was castaways; and now here’s this here bloomin’ barque, manned by chaps as don’t seem to think it worth while to give a look round while they’re aloft, to see whether there’s any poor sailormen washin’ about in distress. But she ain’t British, I’ll take my Bible oath o’ that; the British shellback don’t do that there sort o’ thing. Why, when I first went to sea we was never ordered aloft but what the skipper used to say: ‘Take a good look round, men, afore you comes down again. We never knows when we may be passin’ within sight of some poor unfortunate, perishin’ of hunger and thirst, and prayin’ to be sighted and picked up!’”

“Well,” said I, “I am afraid it is all up with us, so far as that barque is concerned. Nevertheless, we will stick to her as long as she remains in sight. Another hand may be sent aloft aboard her before she disappears; or the wind may drop—although I confess I see no sign of it at present. And in any case it is comforting, in a way, to know that we are in the track of the south-bound ships; we are certain to sight others within the next day or two, and it will be pretty poor luck if we cannot intercept one or another of them.”

But although I spoke so confidently I am afraid that I was not very successful in cheering up my companions in misfortune. This second disappointment was producing its effect upon them; they were becoming depressed and pessimistic; and although they all agreed that the proper thing to do was to hang on to the distant barque, in the hope of eventually attracting the attention of somebody aboard her, I could see that we were all fully convinced that the attempt would result in failure.

And so it did. We chased that barque until the sun set and the shades of night hid her from our sight; and although about mid-afternoon we got so close to her that her lower yards showed above the horizon when she lifted on the swell, and kept the telescope bearing upon her all the time, no more hands were sent aloft, and as the afternoon progressed she steadily drew away from us again, until when at length we lost sight of her in the gathering darkness only her royals and the upper halves of her topgallantsails were showing above the horizon. And all this time so absorbed were we in the chase that we were scarcely conscious of the fact that the wind was steadily freshening every minute, the result being that, when at length we were compelled to abandon the hope of being seen and picked up, we suddenly awoke to the fact that it was blowing quite a strong breeze, and that it had kicked up such a high, steep sea that it was no longer possible for us to round-to and ride to a sea anchor as we had done on the night but one before. We were therefore obliged to scud before the wind all night under whole canvas, to avoid being pooped and swamped by the breaking seas that remorselessly chased us.

That was a harassing, anxious night for all hands of us, for by midnight it was blowing what is generally termed a fresh gale, that is, a breeze strong enough to compel a ship of, say, a thousand tons to reduce canvas to single-reefed topsails; and that, to us, in a small open boat, was about equivalent to what a hurricane would be to the bigger craft. There was no sleep for any of us, for we were in constant, imminent danger, and it taxed the resources of all hands to their utmost limit all through the night to keep the boat from being overwhelmed. The chief danger to an open boat under such circumstances arises from the fact that, lying so low in the water as she does, her sail becomes becalmed every time that she settles into the trough of a sea, and she gradually loses way. Then, as she is hove up on the breast of the next following sea, her sail suddenly fills again, and those in her have to be careful that, in filling, it does not jibe over, for if it did so it would certainly capsize the boat. But in guarding against that danger another of equal magnitude is incurred, for unless the boat is kept dead stern-on to the sea the chances are that she will broach-to and be filled by the breaking head of the sea when it overtakes her. When it comes to be remembered that this twofold peril threatens an open boat about twice a minute hour after hour, as long as the gale continues, some faint idea may be gained of the anxiety and discomfort we were called upon to endure on the occasion which I am now attempting to describe. And while the anxiety of all is sufficiently acute, the man who is most worried is the one who is at the helm, for the behaviour of a craft under such circumstances is in one respect distinctly and harassingly peculiar: at the most perilous moment of all, which is the moment before she is actually overtaken by the breaking crest of the wave, she is apt to refuse to answer her helm, and he who is steering her loses all control over her; she seems to be seized with a perverse determination to take a broad sheer one way or the other, with disastrous results, despite a hard-over helm, and then the only thing to be done to retrieve the situation is to effect a lightning shift of helm against all your past experience and your better judgment. But notwithstanding this, it generally has the desired effect, the reason commonly assigned being that, contrary to what is usually supposed, the body of water constituting the head of a sea actually has a quick forward motion, and when this overtakes a craft, large or small, which is only beginning to gather fresh headway, the result is practically the same as though she were going astern instead of ahead, and the helm must be manipulated accordingly. Whether this is really the true explanation of the curiously awkward phenomenon of which I have spoken I cannot say; but I know that the phenomenon occurs, and that it placed us in the direst peril at least half a hundred times during that never-to-be-forgotten night, a peril from which, it appeared to me, we each time escaped by the very skin of our teeth, and by what seemed to be nothing short of a series of miracles. True, we are told that the days of miracles are long past; but, after all, who knows?

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