“Oh, we can tie a bit of my red flannel shirt or your white one to the hooks. Fish bite at anything at sea, if they can only see it. Hullo!” added David, “I didn’t see that before.”
“What?” exclaimed Jonathan.
“Why, the name of the vessel to which this boat belonged. There it is, painted there on the gunwale as large as life, the Eric Strauss. I suppose she was a German ship, but I never heard of her.”
The two boys got out the lines presently, attaching small pieces of fluttering cloth to the hooks, and heaved them overboard, dragging them in the wake of the boat some distance astern; but they caught nothing that day, nor did they even see the sign of a fin. A whale travelling by himself, and not accompanied by a “school” as usual, was the only solitary denizen of the deep that they perceived.
It was the same the next day, the boat sailing in a north-east direction as well as David could judge, for the wind remained in the same quarter, from the southward and westward. But he had some difficulty in keeping her on her course at night, owing to the absence of the north star, which is never seen south of the equator, although he could manage to steer her all right by the sun during the day.
When the third morning broke, the boys were starving with hunger, and could have eaten anything. They even tried to gnaw at bits of leather cut out of their boots, but they were so tough and sodden from their long immersion in the sea that they could make nothing of them.
If it had not been for the breaker of water which they found providentially in the boat, they felt that they must have died.