Captain Faragar succumbed to the strain, and died with a farewell message to his wife and children. The time came at length when one of the sailors, more brutalized than the rest, broke out with the words:
“Here we are, sixteen of us, perishing for food, and what prospect is there before us? Wouldn’t it be better—”
He hesitated, while his companions held their breath and comprehended what was in his mind.
“Damn all ceremony!” was the conclusion which they expected and yet dreaded to hear. “One man must die that the rest may live, and that’s the bloody truth of it.”
They agreed with him, nodding their heads and refusing to look at one another. Then followed a long dispute over the fairest manner of letting chance decide the choice. It was obvious that every man had a natural anxiety to feel assured of no loaded dice or marked cards in this momentous game. There were objections to the traditional lottery of high and low numbers, and finally it was decided that sixteen pieces of rope-yarn should be cut by the mate. Fourteen of these were to be of precisely the same length, one a little shorter, and another shorter still. The sixteen pieces of rope-yarn were to be shoved through a crack in the bulkhead of the steward’s storeroom, the ends all even and just long enough for a man to take one in his fingers and pull it through the crack. The one who pulled out the strand that was a little shorter was to be dished up for his messmates, and the man who drew the strand that was shorter still had the unpleasant duty of acting as butcher.
The mate cut the rope-yarn, as requested, and arranged the sixteen lengths all in a row in the crack of the bulkhead. The men stood waiting the word, very reluctant to pluck out the ends of tarry cord, until Mr. MacCloud exclaimed:
“My lads, let us put it off until to-morrow. We have endured thus far, and a few hours longer cannot make much difference. Who knows what Providence may have in store for us?”
Some consented, while others were for going through with it at once. To-morrow came, and no help was in sight. They shambled into the steward’s storeroom and pulled the rope-yarns through the crack. Presently there was one man less on the muster-roll of the Barrett. Two or three days later the ceremony was repeated. Before it became necessary to doom a third man, the mate came below, a spy-glass in his hand, and he was trembling so violently that he clutched the table for support. “A sail,” he stammered, and they followed him on deck, where the winter day was dying into dusk. In desperate need of making some sort of signal, Mr. MacCloud emptied a powder-flask upon the windlass, fired a pistol into it, and a thick column of smoke billowed skyward.
The other ship observed it, and hoisted an ensign. Twelve of the Barrett’s company were alive, and they were safely transferred to the Ann of New York, bound to Liverpool. The waterlogged Barrett drifted on her aimless course, a derelict haunted by fearful memories, and from a crack in the bulkhead of the steward’s storeroom still hung the ends of a row of rope-yarns which had been made ready for the next game of chance.
In 1799 six soldiers of the British artillery garrison at St. Helena concocted a plot to desert and stow themselves away in an American ship, the Columbia, which was then in harbor. Their escape was discovered soon after the Yankee crew had smuggled them on board, and they could hear the alarm sounded and could see the lanterns glimmer along the sea-wall. Afraid that the Columbia would be searched, the fugitive red-coats stole a whale-boat from another ship, and the sympathetic American skipper gave them a bag of bread, a keg of water, a compass, and a quadrant. It was rather to be expected that a New England mariner who could remember Bunker Hill and Saratoga would lend a hand to any enterprise which annoyed the British army and diminished its fighting strength.