Mayo found the girl very quiet in the hook of his arm, and he put his free hand against her cheek. She did not move under his touch.
“She has fainted, sir.”
“No, she's dead! She's dead!” Candage began to weep and started to splash his way across the cabin, directed by Mayo's voice.
“She is all right—she is breathing,” the young man assured the father. “Here! This way, captain! Take her. Hold her up. I want to see whether anything can be done for us.”
“Nothing can be done!” whimpered Candage. “We're goners.”
“We're goners,” averred Oakum Otie.
“We're goners,” echoed Dolph.
Mayo gave the girl into the groping arms of her father and stood for a few moments reflecting on their desperate plight. He was not hopeful. In his heart he agreed with the convictions which his mates were expressing in childish falsetto. But being a young sailor who found his head above water, he resolved to keep on battling in that emergency; the adage of the coastwise mariner is: “Don't die till Davy Jones sets his final pinch on your weasen!”
First of all, he gave full consideration to what had happened. The Polly had been whipped over so quickly that she had been transformed into a sort of diving-bell.{*} That is to say, a considerable amount of air had been captured and was now retained in her. It was compressed by the water which was forced up from below through the windows and the shattered skylight. The pressure on Mayo's temples afforded him information on this point. The Polly was floating, and he felt comforting confidence that she would continue to float for some time. But this prospect did not insure safety or promise life to the unfortunates who had been trapped in her bowels. The air must either escape gradually or become vitiated as they breathed it.
* The strange adventure of the Polly is not an
improbability of fiction. A Bath, Maine, schooner, lumber-
laden, was tripped in exactly this fashion off Hatteras.
Captain Boyd Mayo's exploit has been paralleled in real life
in all details. My good friend Captain Elliott C. Gardner,
former skipper of the world's only seven-master, the Thomas
W. Lawson, furnished those details to me, and after writing
this part of the tale I submitted the narrative to him for
confirmation. It has received his indorsement.—H. D.