tered,
and badly leaking hulk, with her ballast shifted and a heavy list,
tossed helplessly upon a furiously raging sea that seemed instinct with
a relentless determination to overwhelm us, toiling and fighting
doggedly against the untiring elements, in the hope that, perchance, if
our strength held out, we might keep the now crazy, straining, and
complaining fabric beneath us afloat long enough to afford us some
chance of saving our lives. Yet the hope was, after all, but a slender
one; for with the coming of daylight we were able to see that our plight
was very considerably worse than we had dreamed it to be during the
hours of darkness; for _then_ we had believed that the loss of our masts
and the springing of a somewhat serious leak represented the sum total
of our misfortunes; while _now_ we saw, to our unspeakable dismay, that,
with the solitary exception of the longboat, the whole of our boats were
so badly damaged as to be altogether beyond our ability to repair; of
two of them, indeed, nothing save the stem and stern remained dangling
forlornly from the davit tackles. But that, bad though it was, was not
the worst; for it was no longer possible for us to blind ourselves to
the fact that the leak was gaining upon us inexorably, and that, even
though we should continue to toil with unabated energy, we could not
keep the ship afloat longer than a few hours more, at the utmost.

And then what were we to do? The longboat, fine boat though she was,
when stocked with even a meagre supply of provisions and water, would
not accommodate more than twenty-five men, and I gravely doubted whether
she would live ten minutes in such a sea as was then running, with half
that number in her. Still, with the exception of such a raft as we
might be able to put together, she was all that we had, and half an hour
of daylight sufficed to show me that no time must be lost in making
preparations to quit the slowly foundering ship. Yet it would not do
for us to leave the pumps for a moment; one gang must, at all costs, be
kept hard at work pumping out as much as possible of the water that was
pouring in through the open seams, otherwise the leak would gain upon us
so rapidly that the ship would settle from under us long before we were
ready to face such a catastrophe. I therefore at once set about the
formulating of my plans and carrying them into effect. First of all,
while one gang kept the pump-brakes clanking and the clear wate