e light winds our
passage was lengthened more than we had expected, and we were running
short of provisions of all sorts. There were still two casks of bread
left, each containing about four hundred-weight.

"Never mind," observed the second mate, "we shall have enough to take us
to the Cape."

At length the first was finished, and we went below to get up the
second. It was marked bread clearly enough, but when the carpenter
knocked in the head, what was our dismay to find it full of new sails,
it having been wrongly branded! The captain at once ordered a search to
be made in the store-room for other provisions. The buffalo meat we had
salted had long been exhausted, part of it having turned bad; and
besides one cask of pork, which proved to be almost rancid, a couple of
pounds of flour with a few other trifling articles, not a particle of
food remained in the ship. Starvation stared us in the face.

CHAPTER THIRTY.

THE VOYAGE HOME, AND HOW IT ENDED.

On hearing of the alarming scarcity of food on board, the captain called
the crew aft.

"Lads," he said, "I don't want to hide anything from you. Should the
wind shift to the westward, it may be a month or more before we reach
the Cape, so if you wish to save your lives, you must at once be put on
a short allowance of food and water. A quarter of a pint of water, two
ounces of pork, and half an ounce of flour is all I can allow for each
man, and the officers and I will share alike with you."

Not a word was said in reply, and the men went forward with gloomy
looks. To make the flour go farther we mixed whale oil with it, and,
though nauseous in the extreme, it served to keep body and soul
together.

At first the crew bore it pretty well, but they soon took to grumbling,
saying that it was owing to the captain's want of forethought in not
laying in more provisions that we were reduced to this state.

Hitherto the wind had been fair, but any day it might change, and then,
they asked, what would become of us? Most of them would have broken
into open mutiny had not they known that the mates and doctor, Jack and
I, Jim, and probably Brown and Soper, would have sided with the captain,
though we felt that they were not altogether wrong in their accusation.

I heard the doctor tell Mr Griffiths that he was afraid the scurvy
would again appear if we were kept long on our present food. Day after
day we glided on across the smooth ocean with a cloudless sky