It will be remembered that, when making preparations for the gale, we had sent down our topgallant and royal-yards. When the project of cutting away the masts to serve as a last retreat for the crew had been carried out, somebody had had the forethought to get these spars overboard and secured to the wreck of the foremast; and in subsequently planning our raft it had been our intention to get the topgallant-yard on end to serve as a mast, with the sail as our means of propulsion through the water. Our plans were not carried out to such a stage of completeness as this when the strange sail hove in sight, and all our energies were now employed to get this part of the work done forthwith; as I felt convinced that, lying so low in the water as we were, we might be passed at a very short distance unobserved, unless we could raise a spar of some sort to attract attention.
But, owing to our very limited amount of standing room, and the aggravating way in which the water still washed over our structure, this particular task of getting the topgallant-yard on end proved most difficult; and we were still struggling ineffectually for success when a loud groan of disappointment, instantly followed by a frantic hail, told me that something was wrong; and, looking again toward the ship, now distant only some two miles, we saw that she had altered her course a couple of points, by which proceeding she would pass to the southward of us without approaching any nearer.
For a minute or two something very like a panic took possession of all hands, and everybody began to shout and gesticulate to the utmost of his ability without reference to the efforts of the rest. At length, however, Woodford and I managed between us to secure silence; upon which we directed that, whilst as many as could do so should stand up and wave jackets, shirts, or any other article most handy, the whole should at a given signal unite in a simultaneous hail. This we did, waiting each time until we rose to the crest of a sea; but it soon became evident that our voices were not powerful enough to reach the ship—I never expected that they would be—for she swept on unheeding, and was very soon to the eastward of us, increasing her distance every minute.
This most disheartening state of affairs continued until she had run about three miles to leeward of us, when we suddenly saw her round to and back her main-yard. I ought to mention, by the bye, that we had ere this discovered her to be a full-rigged ship—and not the Dido, as some had at first declared her to be—with her mizzen-topmast and fore and main-topgallant-masts gone, showing that she too must have encountered the hurricane which had proved so disastrous to us. She was evidently a foreigner; many of us pronounced her to be a Spaniard; and I thought that, if so, it was more than probable she was the identical vessel we had been sent out to look for.
“Hurrah!” shouted Tompion, as the stranger rounded to, “she sees us, my hearties; and—look, if my eyes don’t deceive me, there goes one of her quarter-boats down into the water. Now, ain’t that just like a lubberly Spaniard, to lie there with his main-topsail to the mast and give his boat’s crew a three-miles pull to windward when he might just as well make a couple of short boards and heave to within a cable’s length of us?”
By this time I had scrambled to my feet, and was with half a dozen others watching with mingled curiosity and apprehension the movements of the stranger, which were certainly not such as I should have expected her to make had her object in heaving to been our rescue. A boat had certainly been lowered, but we had not as yet caught a glimpse of it, from the exasperating circumstance that whenever we rose upon a sea the boat happened to be sunk in a hollow. At length, however, we got a moment’s view of her, and not only of her but also of something else which looked remarkably like another raft or a piece of wreckage, and it was toward this that the boat was steering and not toward us.
“By heaven!” I exclaimed, “they have not seen us after all; they are not coming here, and unless we can make them hear us within the next ten minutes our chance will be lost. It is a piece of wreckage—possibly part of the poor old Dolphin—that they have stopped to examine. We must shout, lads, and with a will, the ship is to leeward of us and may catch the sound. Now then, when we rise stand by—one, two, three, Ship ahoy!”
We shouted as we had probably never shouted before, not once but at least fifty times; we shouted ourselves hoarse, and at last had the vexation to see the boat being again hoisted up. We now fully expected to see the ship immediately bear up on her course, but she did not; her topsail remained aback for nearly ten minutes longer, during which we continued to shout and wave for our very lives. At length, however, the ponderous main-yard swung, the square canvas was braced sharp up, and the ship gathered way. A breathless half minute passed, during which every eye among us was unwaveringly fixed upon the distant ship, except when she vanished behind a wave-crest, and then a joyous shout went up.
“Now she sees us! she is standing this way, hurrah! hurrah!” And in the midst of it all the boom of a gun came sullenly up against the wind from the stranger, as an assurance of help and rescue.
Oh, how anxiously we watched the noble fabric as she ponderously ploughed her way obliquely toward us over the liquid ridges, now plunging to her hawse-holes and rolling heavily to leeward as she dived into the trough, and anon raising her dripping bows, richly carved and gilt, high in air as she slowly climbed to the surge’s crest! Her motion was slow and stately, for the wind had dropped very considerably, whilst, owing to the loss of her upper spars, she was under short canvas, and her approach consequently seemed to us most tediously slow. At length, however, she arrived within a biscuit-throw of us, backed her main-topsail again, and once more lowered a boat, which a dozen oar-strokes sufficed to bring alongside our raft. The bowman laid in his oar and hove us a rope, and as he did so the officer in charge of the boat—a young man in the undress uniform of a Spanish naval lieutenant—rose to his feet in the stern-sheets and, raising his hat to the little cluster of uniforms he saw among us, said in Spanish: