He said that he had just commenced his watch, Arthur having called him but a few moments before. The night was still lowering and overcast, but there was less wind and sea than when I first laid down. I proposed to relieve him at once, but he felt no greater inclination to sleep than myself and we watched together until morning. The two or three hours immediately before dawn seemed terribly long. Just as the first grey light appeared in the east, Arthur joined us. A dense volume of vapour which rested upon the water, and contributed to the obscurity in which we were enveloped, now gathered slowly into masses, and floated upward as the day advanced, gradually clearing the prospect; and we kept looking out for the island, in the momentary expectation of seeing it loom up before us through the mist. But when, as the light increased, and the fog rolled away, the boundaries of our vision rapidly enlarged, and still no land could be seen, we began to feel seriously alarmed. A short period of intense and painful anxiety followed, during which we continued alternately gazing, and waiting for more light, and again straining our aching eyes in every direction, and still in vain.
At last it became evident that we had in some manner drifted completely away from the island. The appalling conviction could no longer be resisted. There we were, lost and helpless, on the open ocean, in our chip of a boat, without provisions for a single day, or, to speak more definitely, without a morsel of bread or a drop of water.
Chapter Five.
The Consultation.
Out of Sight of Land—Slender Resources—What’s to be done?
“How rapidly, how rapidly, we ride along the sea!
The morning is all sunshine, the wind is blowing free;
The billows are all sparkling, and bounding in the light,
Like creatures in whose sunny veins, the blood is running bright.”
Morton alone still refused to relinquish the hope, that by broad daylight, we should yet be able to make out the island. He persisted in pronouncing it wholly incredible that we had made during the night, a distance sufficient to sink the land, which was but three or four miles off at the utmost, when we were overtaken by darkness; he could not understand, he said, how such a thing was possible.
Arthur accounted for it, by supposing that we had got into the track of one of the ocean currents that exist in those seas, especially among the islands, many of which run at the rate of from two to three miles an hour.