For a day and a night, the fierce winds and huge waves crashed against our small craft, and I cannot explain today why we did not meet the same fate as had our unfortunate comrades in the other boat. Upon the second day, the rolling sea was changed to a flat, millpond surface, and the sun was unbearably hot. We had managed to bring with us only four bottles of water, enough to last but a few days. We did not live, we merely existed. I felt the gnawing, piercing pangs of thirst and hunger congest and constrict my being. Within fourteen days, four of our number had died of thirst, and there were three men besides myself left, starving.
My hands, when I reached up to touch my burned, bearded face, were trembling like a man beset with palsy. My eyes, I knew, were like my comrades’, empty, vacant, hopeless. I was conscious only of a searing ache over my entirety, and my mind was skipping and sliding over disjointed thoughts. We looked at each other, and still did not see; we were conscious only of hunger and heat and thirst. When we spoke, it was as if in a dream. Jackson had managed to hook a small fish, but had not the strength to pull it into the boat. I believe we realized the helplessness of our plight, and began at that moment of realization to get crazed. It was not long before we began to talk of drawing lots to see which of us should be killed to provide food for the others. The thought is horrible and distasteful now, as I sit with my belly full of good warm food, but then the thought meant only one thing—the lessening of the most terrible of pains—Hunger.
We resisted this impulse as long as humanly possible. But at last the time came when we must destroy one of our number, or fall upon each other like crazed wolves. We cast lots, and it fell upon me to be the victim. I prepared to die so that others might live.
I cannot give my reader any searing recollection of faith or impression that come to a man about to die, for I had none. I knew only that my breast was bared, and that one of my mates, with arm raised, was about to plunge his knife into my vitals. I believe that I wanted to die. But the shining knife did not come sweeping down, for at that moment, we heard a gunshot in the distance, and, looking in the direction from which the sound came, saw a white sail on the horizon.
This ship had seen our distress signal—my own shirt which hung from a propped up oar—and had fired a shot to let us know we had been seen. Death, under such horrible circumstances, breathes hotly down on few men.
I lived to see the pirate captain who had been the cause of our agony hanged from his own yardarm in the harbor of Calcutta.
