any people on it. There might
be savages and cannibals.

"It rained steady all night, and the sea spilled into the boat now and
then. Two of us had to bale all the time to keep the boat afloat. We
were soaked to the skin with fresh and salt water, weak from the days
of exposure and hunger, and we were barely able to keep from being
thrown out of the boat by its terrible rocking and pitching, and yet
we all felt like singing a song. All but the Japanese cook. Iwata
had almost gone mad, and was praying to his joss whenever anything
new happened. During that night a wave knocked him over and crushed
one of his feet against the tank of drinking water. The salt water
got into the wound and swelled it, and he was soon unable to move.

"The second day in the small boat was the captain's forty-eighth
birthday. The old man spoke of it in a hearty way, hoping that when
he was forty-nine he would be on the deck of some good ship. There
was no sign of the El Dorado that morning. But with wind and sea as
they were, we could not have seen the ship very far, and we had made
some distance under oarpower during the night. We put up our little
sail at nine o'clock, though the wind was strong. The skipper said
that we could not expect anything but rough weather, and that we had
to make the best of every hour, considering what we had to eat and
that we were eleven in the boat. The wind was now from the southwest,
and we steered northeast. We had to steer without compass because it
was dark, and we had no light.

"We had our first bite to eat about noon of this second day out. We
had then been nearly three months at sea, or, to be exact, it was
seventy-eight days since we had left port. It was thirty hours after
the coffee and biscuit on the El Dorado, and God knows how much longer
since we had had a whole meal, and now we didn't have much. The old
man bossed it. He took a half-bucket of fresh water, and into this he
put a can of soup. This he served, and gave each man two soda crackers
and his share of a pound of corned beef. We dipped the crackers into
the bucket. (I tell you it was better than the ham and eggs we had
at the hotel when we landed.) We had this kind of a meal twice a day,
and no more.

"The next day the wind was again very strong, with thunder and
lightning, and we ran dead before the wind with no more sail than
a handkerchief. The sea began to break over the boat, and our old
man said that we could not live through i