All the stories I had heard or read of shipwrecked men—their sufferings, their endurance of gnawing hunger and burning thirst, their cannibalism, their mortal struggles with their dearest friends for the last morsel of food, for the last drop of water, and how the weak perished that the strong might live—crowded upon my memory to augment the real terrors of our situation.
So suddenly had this final catastrophe come upon us that we had considerable difficulty in assuring ourselves of its reality, and that it was not a dream—a dream, alas! from which there might be no awaking.
So hour after hour passed darkly, slowly, and silently on.
The turbulence of the wind and waves abated, the lightning passed away, the scud ceased to whirl, the vapors were divided in heaven, and a faint light that stole tremulously upward from the horizon served to indicate the east and the dawn of the coming day.
CHAPTER XXIX.
DISCOVER LAND.
The following are the names of those who escaped with me in the longboat:
Marc Hislop, mate,
Thomas Lambourne, second mate,
Francis Probart, carpenter,
John Thomas Burnett, ship's cook,
Edward Carlton,
Henry Warren,
Hugh Chute,
Matthew Hipkin,
William Wilkins, usually called "Boy Bill."
As the morning light came in, there appeared to the south-westward a vast bank of mist or cloud which shrouded half the sky, and assumed a variety of beautiful tints when the rising sun shone on it—yellow and saffron, deepening into purple and blue as its masses changed in the contrary currents of air; while to the eastward, in the quarter of the sun's ascension, the rippling ocean shone as if covered with tremulous and glittering plates of mingled gold and green.
A ration of rum-and-water in equal proportions was now served round to each man—the leathern cover of a bung being our only cup, as we had omitted a drinking vessel among our hastily-collected stores. Half of a biscuit given to each constituted our breakfast, and with hope dawning with the day in our hearts, we shipped our oars and pulled stoutly toward the west.