up again, full of clean,
sparkling salt-water. Into this I plunged my head, keeping it immersed
as long as my breath would allow, meanwhile removing the blood from my
face and hair as well as I could. The contact of the cold salt-water
made my lacerated forehead and scalp smart most atrociously, yet it
relieved my headache and greatly refreshed me. Then, stripping off my
wet shirt, I tore a long strip from it and, thoroughly saturating it in
the clean salt-water, bound up my wound as best I could, after which I
felt distinctly better.

Then, sitting on the little deck, I looked about me to see if I could
discover any traces of last night's horror; but there was a moderate
breeze blowing, and I instantly recognised that the junk must have
drifted several miles from the spot where the disaster had occurred.
There was nothing to be seen, no, not so much as a solitary scrap of
wreckage, within the radius of a mile, beyond which everything was
blotted out by a curtain of haze.

By this time I had pretty completely recovered my senses, and was able
to fully realise my situation. I was wet, cold, feverish, and horribly
thirsty, and was the sole occupant of a small, leaky junk of about
twenty-five tons, without masts or sails, these having been removed in
order the better to fit her for the duty of carrying troops. She had a
pair of sweeps aboard, it is true; but they were so ponderous that each
demanded the strength of four men to work it; they were therefore quite
useless to me, even had I known precisely where I was, which I did not.
All I knew was that I was some fifty miles, or thereabout, to the
southward and eastward of Iwon; but I might as well have been five
hundred miles from the place, for all the means I had of returning to
it, or even of making a shot at Gensan. The fact was that I was adrift
in a hulk; and the utmost that I could do was to keep her afloat, if
possible, and patiently wait for something to come along and take me off
her.

Realising this, I proceeded to overhaul the junk, with a view to
ascertaining what were her resources. I remembered that a cask of fresh
water had been put aboard her for the use of the troops while landing
and embarking; and I soon found this, still more than half-full, snugly
stowed away under her foredeck, with a lot of raffle consisting of odds
and ends of line of varying sizes, a fragment of fishing-net, a few
short lengths of planking, and other utterly useless stuf