as the last bit of food or drink
we had on the El Dorado.

"The taking off of the great chain was a murderous job. When we
loosened it, the huge seas would sweep over the logs and us while
we tried to get them overboard. It was touch and go. We had to use
capstanbars to pry the big logs over and over. We tried to push them
with the rolling of the ship. One wave would carry a mass of the
logs away, and the next wave would bring them back, crashing into
the vessel, catching in the rigging, and nearly pulling it down,
and the masts with it. Dodging those big logs was awful work, and
if you were hit by one, you were gone. They would come dancing over
the side on the tops of the waves and be left on the very spot from
which we had lifted them overboard. The old man should have thrown
the deck-load over two days before. The water now grew deeper all the
time, and the ship wallowed like a waterlogged raft. The fo'c's'le
was full of water. The El Dorado was drowning with us aboard.

"We were all on deck because we had nowhere else to go. There was
nothing in the cabin or the fo'c's'le but water. The sea was now
like mountains, but it stopped breaking, so that there was a chance
to get away. We were hanging on to stays and anything fixed.

"The captain now gave up hope, as we had long ago. He ordered all hands
to make ready to lower the one boat we had left, and to desert the
ship. We had a hard time to get this boat loose from the spanker-stay,
and we lowered it with the spanker-tackle. Just while we were doing
that, a tremendous wave swept the poop, with a battering-ram of logs
that had returned. Luckily, the boat we were lowering escaped being
smashed, or we had all been dead men now.

"We filled a tank with twenty-five gallons of water from the
scuttle-butts and carried it to the boat. The old man ordered the
cook and the boy to get some grub he had in a locker in his cabin,
high up, where he had put it away from the flood. The cook and the
boy were scared stiff, and when they went into the cabin, a sea came
racing in, and all saved was twenty pounds of soda crackers, twelve
one-pound tins of salt beef, three of tongue, thirty-two cans of milk,
thirty-eight of soup, and four of jam.

"We went into the boat with nothing but what we wore, and that was
little. Some of us had no coats, and some no hats, and others were
without any shoes. We were in rags from the terrible fight with the
logs and the sea. The old man went be