Despair—it is a feeble word to describe their feelings—was now upon the remaining men, who for another week were tossed about, hither and thither, until they had lost all count of their bearings. The sun kept behind the clouds, and fogs and mists enwrapped them in their wet, cold folds. In one sense this was a blessing in disguise; it kept the pangs of thirst under somewhat. But as they shivered in the bottom of the boat, huddling together to keep each other warm, they were in no mood to thank Heaven for fogs which they knew hid them from passing vessels. By Saturday morning eleven men had died and been thrown overboard, and the five survivors looked dumbly at each other, reading in bleared eyes the question, “Whose turn next?”
It was the turn of Peter Preive, the mess-room steward, of whom a strange story is told. Before he left Antwerp on the Columbian he had dreamed a dream—that he would be a fortnight adrift in an open boat before he died. On the morning of the thirteenth day Preive lay at the point of death, for the hundredth time telling his comrades his dream and assuring them they would be picked up on the morrow.
It sounds like fiction, but it is solid fact, and those mariners took heart of courage: if some parts of the dream had come true, why not another? And so they lived on, as they had for some days past, with Preive’s dream as encouragement, though they could not altogether look with equanimity upon the prospect before them; ere the fourteenth day dawned some of those five that remained might have gone to join their comrades!
They had been reduced now to trying to make a paste out of the boot leather and the remains of the biscuits—anything to stave off hunger. But even their craving stomachs could not take kindly to the mixture, and the men knew that they were now face to face with death at last. They looked in the biscuit tank again, and found there—crumbs, simply a few crumbs, which they scooped up in order to mix some more of the unpalatable paste. And then, like a messenger of hope, they saw a smudge on the horizon, watched it grow larger and denser, saw the hull of a ship grow out of the mist. Four of them yelled themselves hoarse again, waved their signal, took out their oars and tugged away at them like mad. They bent their backs to the work, they pulled till their arms ached, and got hardly any way on her; they were too weak to pull against the sea effectively. Then the big ship stopped, and they saw her taking some soundings. She got up steam again and moved forward; and the castaways knew that they had been seen.
The reaction set in; the men who had borne up for thirteen days against hunger, thirst, who had fought against madness and death, crumpled up and fell in the bottom of their boat. They were done.
Meanwhile the big ship was punching her way towards them. She was the Seneca (Captain Johnson), who had been searching for the missing lifeboat for many days, having crossed from the spot where the Columbian burnt out to Nova Scotia and back time after time without sighting the unfortunate men. The captain had, indeed, given up hope of ever finding them; and when the look-out sighted the boat, and the Seneca plunged towards her at full steam, Captain Johnson scarcely believed it possible that anyone could be alive in her.
When they came up with her they saw the five men lying in the bottom of the boat, helpless, emaciated, eyes sunken, bodies trembling. Preive, alive when the Seneca came up, died from the shock of the sight of her; Tiere, who had commanded all through, and had done much to encourage the others, tried to lift himself up, but fell back exhausted, and the other four living men had to be helped out of their boat.
Their cruise was at an end. They were saved; but the terror of it will never leave them.
FRANCIS DRAKE’S RAID ON THE SPANISH MAIN
How Drake Took Toll for Spanish Treachery