a bag of ballast in the bottom
of the boat.

"It's nigh on to fifteen year ago," said Silas, "that I was on the bark
Mary Auguster, bound for Sydney, New South Wales, with a cargo of
canned goods. We was somewhere about longitood a hundred an' seventy,
latitood nothin', an' it was the twenty-second o' December, when we was
ketched by a reg'lar typhoon which blew straight along, end on, fur a
day an' a half. It blew away the storm-sails. It blew away every
yard, spar, shroud, an' every strand o' riggin', an' snapped the masts
off close to the deck. It blew away all the boats. It blew away the
cook's caboose, an' everythin' else on deck. It blew off the hatches,
an' sent 'em spinnin' in the air about a mile to leeward. An' afore it
got through, it washed away the cap'n an' all the crew 'cept me an' two
others. These was Tom Simmons, the second mate, an' Andy Boyle, a chap
from the Adirondack Mount'ins, who'd never been to sea afore. As he
was a landsman, he ought, by rights, to 'a' been swep' off by the wind
an' water, consid'rin' that the cap'n an' sixteen good seamen had gone
a'ready. But he had hands eleven inches long, an' that give him a grip
which no typhoon could git the better of. Andy had let out that his
father was a miller up there in York State, an' a story had got round
among the crew that his granfather an' great-gran'father was millers,
too; an' the way the fam'ly got such big hands come from their habit of
scoopin' up a extry quart or two of meal or flour fur themselves when
they was levellin' off their customers' measures. He was a
good-natered feller, though, an' never got riled when I'd tell him to
clap his flour-scoops onter a halyard.

"We was all soaked, an' washed, an' beat, an' battered. We held on
some way or other till the wind blowed itself out, an' then we got on
our legs an' began to look about us to see how things stood. The sea
had washed into the open hatches till the vessel was more'n half full
of water, an' that had sunk her, so deep that she must 'a' looked like
a canal-boat loaded with gravel. We hadn't had a thing to eat or drink
durin' that whole blow, an' we was pretty ravenous. We found a keg of
water which was all right, and a box of biscuit which was what you
might call softtack, fur they was soaked through an' through with
sea-water. We eat a lot of them so, fur we couldn't wait, an' the rest
we spread on the deck to dry, fur the sun was now shinin' hot enough t