Bye and bye, when Llewellyn, the steward, recovered sufficiently to be able to speak, he had a terrible tale to tell.
On the outbreak of the row on board the ship, he said, between Captain Dinks and Moody, he was about to slip forward to join Snowball in the galley to have a warm, for he found it cold in his pantry; and, besides, he had no one to speak to there, and he felt dull and cheerless.
Frightened at the altercation and afraid of getting hurt in the scuffle that arose, he hid himself in the bows of the longboat; and, as luck would happen, he was there when the boat was launched and went away from the side of the vessel with the mutineers, for he could not scramble out in time.
Bill Moody, said the steward, wanted to chuck him over board when he was discovered; but the rest of the men overruled him, and he was allowed to remain.
The boat was carried far to leeward, and so pitched about by the heavy sea which was running, that every moment they thought she would be swamped. They had to bale her out continuously, for the waves broke over her each moment, half-filling her on many occasions.
Fortunately, they were not dashed ashore in the darkness against the cliffs, which they could faintly see through the haze to be quite close; and towards daylight they were able to get up the fore-sail and steer her along the land, which stretched far away down to the southward, miles away from where they had left the ship. The mutineers tried all they could to find some place where they could beach the boat without risk of getting her stove in on the rocks; but their efforts were vain.
At last, they came past a mountain which was smoking, and as the shore seemed to shelve down here, Moody determined to endeavour to land there, saying that they would find the vicinity of the volcano warm and comfortable—better than some frozen ice-glaciers which they had noticed further north.
After many attempts and failures, they managed to run the boat on to a black sandy stretch of beach which opened out beyond the smoking mountain; and here, they unloaded her in safety.
They had then more provisions than would have lasted them for months with care.
“All of ourn!” ejaculated Mr Lathrope, interrupting the steward at this point of the narrative. “We would ha’ swopped some o’ them penguins and Kerguelen cabbage fur the lot, I guess.”