ntimely end--but
of this hereafter.

CHAPTER IV

THE OPEN-BOAT NAVIGATION

The boat is lower'd with all the haste of hate,
With its slight plank between thee and thy fate;
Her only cargo such a scant supply
As promises the death their hands deny;
And just enough of water and of bread
To keep, some days, the dying from the dead:
Some cordage, canvas, sails, and lines, and twine.
But treasures all to hermits of the brine,
Were added after, to the earnest prayer
Of those who saw no hope save sea and air;
And last, that trembling vassal of the Pole,
The feeling compass, Navigation's soul.

* * * * *

The launch is crowded with the faithful few
Who wait their Chief--a melancholy crew:
But some remained reluctant on the deck
Of that proud vessel, now a moral wreck--And
view'd their Captain's fate with piteous eyes;
While others scoff'd his augur'd miseries,
Sneer'd at the prospect of his pigmy sail,
And the slight bark so laden and so frail.

Christian had intended to send away his captain and associates in the
cutter, and ordered that it should be hoisted out for that purpose,
which was done--a small wretched boat, that could hold but eight or ten
men at the most, with a very small additional weight; and, what was
still worse, she was so worm-eaten and decayed, especially in the bottom
planks, that the probability was, she would have gone down before she
had proceeded a mile from the ship. In this 'rotten carcass of a boat,'
not unlike that into which Prospero and his lovely daughter were
'hoist,'

not rigg'd,
Nor tackle, sail, nor mast; the very rats
Instinctively had quit it,

did Christian intend to cast adrift his late commander and his eighteen
innocent companions, or as many of them as she would stow, to find, as
they inevitably must have found, a watery grave. But the remonstrances
of the master, boatswain, and carpenter prevailed on him to let those
unfortunate men have the launch, into which nineteen persons were
thrust, whose weight, together with that of the few articles they were
permitted to take, brought down the boat so near to the water, as to
endanger her sinking with but a moderate swell of the sea--and to all
human appearance, in no state to survive the length of voyage they were
destined to perform over t