g washed out of
the boat, on the other. Upon coming into possession of the boat,
therefore, I was not only so fortunate as to find an ark of refuge, but
also rations of food sufficient to last me ninety-six days.

Knowing all this--such knowledge being a part of my duty--no sooner had
I hove the last bucketful of water out over the gunwale than I opened
the food locker and spread the constituents of a very satisfying
breakfast in the stern-sheets of the boat; whereupon I fell to and made
an excellent meal.

As I sat there, eating and drinking, a solitary individual adrift in the
vast expanse of the Southern Ocean, I began to look my future in the
face and ask myself what I was now to do. In a general sense it was not
at all a difficult question to answer. The _Saturn_, that splendid,
new, perfectly equipped steamship, had gone to the bottom, taking with
her five hundred and thirty-four human beings; and, apart from myself
and the boat I sat in, there was nothing and nobody to tell what her
fate had been. I was the sole survivor of a probably unexampled
disaster, and my obvious duty was to hasten, with as little delay as
possible, to some spot from which I could report the particulars of that
disaster to the owners of the ship.

But what spot, precisely, must I endeavour to reach? As an officer of
the ship I of course knew her exact position at noon on the day
preceding her loss. It was Latitude 39 degrees 3 minutes 20 seconds
South; Longitude 52 degrees 26 minutes 45 seconds East; I remembered the
figures well, having something of a gift in that direction, which I had
sedulously cultivated, in view of the possibility that some day I might
find it exceedingly useful. In the same way I was able to form a fairly
accurate mental picture of the chart upon which that position had been
pricked off, for Cooper, our "second", and I had been studying it
together in the chart-house shortly after the skipper had "pricked her
off". As a result, I knew that the _Saturn_ had foundered some two
thousand miles east-south-east of the Cape of Good Hope; that
Madagascar--the nearest land--bore about north-by-west, true; with the
islands of Reunion and Mauritius, not much farther off, bearing about
two points farther east. These items of information were of course
valuable; but their value was to a very great extent discounted by the
fact that I had neither sextant nor chronometer wherewith to determine
the boat's position, day