of fresh water if it was in
mortal seamanship to hold a vessel in one situation; but the fellows
were not to be cheered, their spirits sank and their faces grew longer
as the complexion of the fog told us that the sun was sinking fast,
and I own that when it came at last to his setting, and no break in
the flying vapour, and a blackness as of ink stealing into it out of
the swift tropic dusk, I myself felt horribly dejected, greatly
fearing that we had lost the brig for good.

Just before the last of the twilight faded out of the smoke that
shrouded us, we lashed both oars together and, attaching them to the
boat's painter, threw them overboard and rode to them. Our thirst was
now extreme, and to appease it--being without a dipper to drop into
the cask--we sank a handkerchief through the bung-hole and wrung it
out in the half of a cocoa-nut shell that was in the boat as a baler,
and by this means procured a drink, each man. Grateful to God indeed
was I that we had fresh water with us. I beat the cask, and gathered
by the sound that it was more than half full. Heaven was bountiful too
in providing us with biscuit. It had been the luckiest of thoughts on
Jackson's part, though he had desired nothing more than to obtain a
relish for his own rations of buffalo hump aboard.

I never remember the like of the pitch darkness of that night. There
was a moon, pretty nearly a full one if I recollect aright; but had
she been shining over the other side of the world it would have been
all the same. Her delicate silver beam could not pierce the vapour,
and never once did I behold the least glistening of her radiance
anywhere. There was a constant noise of wind in the dense thickness,
and an incessant seething and crackling of waters running nimbly, so
that though we would from time to time bend our ears in the hope of
catching the rushing and pouring noise of the sea divided by a ship's
stem, we never could hear more than the whistling of the breeze and
the lapping of the hurrying little surges. There was a deal of fire in
the water, and it came and went in sheets like the reflection of
lightning, insomuch that we might have believed ourselves in the heart
of an electric storm; but happily the wind never gathered so much
weight as to raise a troublesome sea, and though the boat tumbled
friskily she kept dry, and there was nothing in her movements to
render me uneasy.

I told the two fellows to lie down in the bottom of the boat,