ot have discerned her
top-sails above the horizon.

CHAPTER XLIV.

JANUARY 15th.--After this further shattering of our excited hopes death
alone now stares us in the face; slow and lingering as that death may
be, sooner or later it must inevitably come.

To-day some clouds that rose in the west have brought us a few puffs
of wind; and in spite of our prostration, we appreciate the moderation,
slight as it is, in the temperature. To my parched throat the air seemed
a little less trying but it is now seven days since the boatswain took
his haul of fish, and during that period we have eaten nothing even
Andre Letourneur finished yesterday the last morsel of the biscuit which
his sorrowful and self-denying father had entrusted to my charge.

Jynxstrop the negro has broken loose from his confinement, but Curtis has
taken no measures for putting him again under restraint. It is not to be
apprehended that the miserable fellow and his accomplices, weakened as
they are by their protracted fast, will attempt to do us any mischief
now.

Some huge sharks made their appearance to-day, cleaving the water
rapidly with their great black fins. The monsters came close up to the
edge of the raft, and Flaypole, who was leaning over, narrowly escaped
having his arm snapped off by one of them. I could not help regarding
them as living sepulchres, which ere long might swallow up our miserable
carcasses; yet, withal, I profess that my feelings were rather those of
fascination than of horror.

The boatswain, who stood with clenched teeth and dilated eye, regarded
these sharks from quite another point of view. He thought about
devouring the sharks, not about the sharks devouring him; and if he
could succeed in catching one, I doubt if one of us would reject the
tough and untempting flesh. He determined to make the attempt, and as
he had no whirl which he could fasten to his rope he set to work to
find something that might serve as a substitute. Curtis and Dowlas
were consulted, and after a short conversation, during which they kept
throwing bits of rope and spars into the water in order to entice the
sharks to remain by the raft, Dowlas went and fetched his carpenter's
tool, which is at once a hatchet and a hammer. Of this he proposed to
make the whirl of which they were in need, under the hope that either
the sharp edge of the adze or the pointed extremity opposite would stick
firmly into the jaws of any shark that might swallow it.