others, put
their backs into it right heartily while the sailors droned to the
cadence of the pump a sentimental ditty which ran on for any number of
verses and began in this wise:

"As, lately I traveled toward Gravesend,
I heard a fair Damosel a Sea-man commend:
And as in a Tilt-boat we passed along,
In praise of brave Sea-men she sung this new Song,
_Come Tradesman or Marchant, whoever he be,
There's none but a Sea-man shall marry with me!_"

Thus they labored all the night through, men near dead with fatigue
whose hard fate it was to contend now with pirates and again with the
hostile ocean. The skipper managed to stay the foremast and to bend
steering sails so that the ship was brought into the wind where her
motion was easier. The sky cleared before daybreak and the rosy horizon
proclaimed a fair sunrise. How far and in what direction the _Plymouth
Adventure_ had been blown by the storm was largely guesswork. By means
of dead reckoning and the compass and cross-staff, Captain Wellsby hoped
to work out a position but meanwhile he scanned the sea with a sense of
brooding anxiety.

Instead of praying for plenty of sea room, he now hoped with all his
heart that the vessel had been set in toward the coast. She was sinking
under his feet and would not live through the day. It was useless to
toil at the pumps or to strive at mending the shattered upperworks. The
men turned to the task of quitting the ship, and of saving the souls on
board. It was a pitiful extremity and yet they displayed a dogged,
unshaken fidelity. Only one boat had escaped destruction. The pinnace
had been staved in by the thunderbolt of a gun and the yawl, stowed upon
the cabin roof, was wrecked by round shot. The small jolly-boat would
hold the women passengers and the wounded sailors, with the hands
required to tend oars and sail.

Nothing remained but to try to knock together one or more rafts. Captain
Wellsby discussed it with his officers and it was agreed that the
able-bodied pirates should be left to build a raft for themselves,
taking their own wounded with them. This was more mercy than they had
any right to expect. The strapping young Devonshire boatswain, with his
head tied up, was for leaving the blackguards to drown in the forecastle
but the shipmaster was too humane a man for that.

It was drawing toward noon when the first mate descried land to the
westward, a bit o