about six hours to
pass before daylight; and, according to my calculation, we have only about
three hours more drift. Still, before that time there may, perhaps, be
some favorable change.'

"He replied: 'Mr. C., we have done all we can, and can do nothing more. I
am resigned to my fate, and think nothing can save us.'

"I replied: 'Perhaps you are right; still, I am resolved to struggle to
the last. I am too young to die; I am only twenty-one years of age, and
have a widowed mother, three brothers, and a sister looking to me for
support and sympathy. No, sir, I will struggle and persevere to the last.'

"'Ah,' said he, 'what can you do? Our boat will not live five minutes in
the surf, and you have no other resource.'

"'I will take the boat,' said I, 'and when she fills I will cling to a
spar. I will not die until my strength is exhausted and I can breathe no
longer.' Here the conversation ended, when the captain covered his head
with a blanket. I then wrote the substance of our misfortune in the
log-book, and also a letter to my mother; rolled them up in a piece of
tarred canvas; and, assisted by the carpenter, put the package into a
tight keg, thinking that this might probably be thrown on shore, and thus
our friends might perhaps know of our end."

Men who face Death thus sturdily are apt to overcome him. The gale
lessened, the ship was patched up, the craven captain resumed command, and
in two weeks' time the "Industry" sailed, sorely battered, into Santa
Cruz, to find that she had been given up as lost, and her officers and
crew "were looked upon as so many men risen from the dead." Young
Coggeshall lived to follow the sea until gray-haired and weather-beaten,
to die in his bed at last, and to tell the story of his eighty voyages in
two volumes of memoirs, now growing very rare. Before he was sixteen he
had made the voyage to Cadiz--a port now moldering, but which once was one
of the great portals for the commerce of the world. In his second voyage,
while lying in the harbor of Gibraltar, he witnessed one of the almost
every-day dangers to which American sailors of that time were exposed:

"While we were lying in this port, one morning at daylight we
heard firing at a distance. I took a spy-glass, and from aloft
could clearly see three gunboats engaged with a large ship. It
was a fine, clear morning, with scarcely wind enough to ruffle
the glass-like surface of the water. During the first