d me eloquently enough that she
was perilously near to a foundering condition. I therefore rallied the
men and bade them get to work at the pumps forthwith; and it was then
that I discovered, to my horror, that, of our complement of sixty, we
had lost no fewer than fourteen, including my messmate, poor Jack Keene,
and Tasker, the gunner's mate, all of whom must have gone overboard when
the vessel was thrown down on her beam-ends! It was a most deplorable
affair, and I was especially grieved at the loss of my light-hearted
chum; but that was not the moment for indulgence in useless lamentation,
and I busied myself in doing what might be possible to provide for the
safety of the ship.

First of all I got a strong gang to work at the pumps in two relays,
each taking a spell of ten minutes pumping, followed by an equal length
of time for rest. When I had fairly started these, and saw the water
gushing in a clear stream from the spouts of both pumps, I set the rest
to work cutting away all the rigging which still held the wreckage of
the masts attached to the hull, leaving the fore and fore-topmast stays
untouched, my intention being that the drift of the hull should bring
the wreckage under the bows, where, being held fast by the stays, it
should form a sort of floating anchor to which the ship should ride head
to wind and sea. Thus we might hope that she would no longer ship water
in such quantities as to threaten her safety. After nearly an hour's
hard labour we succeeded, during which it appeared to me that the men
were making little or no impression upon the amount of water in the
hold. But, as I had hoped, when once we had brought the hull head to
wind she no longer shipped water in any very alarming quantities; and
after watching her carefully for some minutes I came to the conclusion
that we might safely venture to open the after hatchway and supplement
the efforts of those at the pumps by baling with buckets.

Before starting the pumps I had taken the precaution of having the well
sounded, with the result that we had discovered the depth of water in
the ship's interior to be three feet ten inches, as nearly as could be
ascertained; but the violent motions of the hull had rendered anything
like really accurate sounding an impossibility, and the same cause now
precluded us from ascertaining with certainty whether the leak was
gaining upon the pumps or _vice-versa_. One thing was perfectly
certain, and that was