l in sailing to Rio Janeiro, distant from us
something less than six hundred miles. The Captain's boat being the
larger of the two carried the second mate, steward, cook, and eight
seamen, while the mate's boat held the carpenter and four seamen--myself
included among the latter.

The boats laid alongside of one another while the Captain and mate
decided upon the course to be steered; then we separated, made sail to
the southeast breeze that had set in, and stretched away into the
northwest, the Captain's boat in the lead. The wind gathered strength
from the southeast, giving us a following breeze for the port toward
which we were steering, and both boats made good weather of the moderate
sea then running, sweeping along at the rate of five knots to the hour.

All that afternoon the boats kept within sight of one another, and when
night fell not over a quarter of a mile divided us. With the first flush
of dawn we swept the expanse of waters, but nothing was to be seen. We
were alone. Every little while during the day that followed we would
scan the horizon, hoping to lift the long-boat's sail into view; but in
vain. We never saw her again, or heard tidings of the twelve brave souls
from whom we had parted only a few hours before. That she never reached
port is certain; but what her ultimate fate proved, no one knows.

It blew up a gale of wind that afternoon, and I heard the mate say that
the storm experienced during the week that was past had recurved, and
that we would get it worse than ever on its back track. To prevent the
boat from foundering, we unstepped the mast, made a span to it by
securing a length of rope to each end, and to the middle of this bridle
we bent the boat's painter. Then we dropped this sea-anchor over the
bows, and rode to it, the strain upon the painter keeping the head of
the boat to the seas that rolled down on us.

When night settled upon the deep it shut out one of the wildest sights
of ocean-lashed waters that I had ever seen; but the darkness only
intensified the terror, for in the blackness we would feel the frail
boat swung with dizzy velocity up and up and up on some mountainous sea,
as though she was never going to stop; then, while the great seething
crest was roaring in a thousand diabolical voices about us, she would
drop down, down, down with a motion that was like falling through space.

It might have been the middle of the night when, worn out from the labor
of bailing witho