If Bligh here meant to deny the fact of men, in extreme cases, destroying each other for the sake of appeasing hunger, he is greatly mistaken. The fact was but too well established, and to a great extent, on the raft of the French frigate Meduse, when wrecked on the coast of Africa, and also on the rock in the Mediterranean, when the Nautilus frigate was lost. There may be a difference between men, in danger of perishing by famine, when in robust health, and men like those of the Bounty, worn by degrees to skeletons, by protracted famine, who may thus have become equally indifferent to life or death.
The escape of the Centaur's boat, perhaps, comes nearest to it. When the Centaur was sinking, Captain Inglefield and eleven others, in a small leaky boat, five feet broad, with one of the gunwales stove, nearly in the middle of the Western Ocean, without compass, without quadrant, without sail, without great-coat or cloak, all very thinly clothed, in a gale of wind, with a great sea running, and the winter fast approaching,—the sun and stars, by which alone they could shape their course, sometimes hidden for twenty-four hours;—these unhappy men, in this destitute and hopeless condition, had to brave the billows of the stormy Atlantic, for nearly a thousand miles. A blanket, which was by accident in the boat, served as a sail, and with this they scudded before the wind, in expectation of being swallowed up by every wave; with great difficulty the boat was cleared of water before the return of the next great sea; all of the people were half drowned, and sitting, except the balers, at the bottom of the boat. On quitting the ship the distance of Fayal was two hundred and sixty leagues, or about nine hundred English miles.
Their provisions were a bag of bread, a small ham, a single piece of pork, two quart bottles of water, and a few of French cordials. One biscuit, divided into twelve morsels, was served for breakfast, and the same for dinner; the neck of a bottle broken off, with the cork in, supplied the place of a glass; and this filled with water was the allowance for twenty-four hours for each man.
On the fifteenth day, they had only one day's bread, and one bottle of water remaining of a second supply of rain; on this day Matthews, a quarter-master, the stoutest man in the boat, perished of hunger and cold. This poor man, on the day before, had complained of want of strength in his throat, as he expressed it, to swallow his morsel; and, in the night, drank salt-water, grew delirious, and died without a groan. Hitherto despair and gloom had been successfully prevented, the men, when the evenings closed in, having been encouraged by turns to sing a song, or relate a story, instead of a supper: 'but,' says the Captain, 'this evening I found it impossible to raise either.' The Captain had directed the clothes to be taken from the corpse of Matthews and given to some of the men, who were perishing with, cold; but the shocking skeleton-like appearance of his remains made such an impression on the people, that all efforts to raise their spirits were ineffectual. On the following day, the sixteenth, their last breakfast was served with the bread and water remaining, when John Gregory, the quarter-master, declared with much confidence that he saw land in the south-east, which turned out to be Fayal.
But the most extraordinary feat of navigation is that which is related (on good authority) in a note of the Quarterly Review, vol. xviii. pp. 337-339:—
Of all the feats of navigation on record, however, that of Diogo Botelho Perreira, in the early period of 1536-37, stands pre-eminent; it is extracted from the voluminous Decades of Diogo de Couto, whose work, though abounding with much curious matter, like those of most of the old Portuguese writers, has not been fortunate enough to obtain an English translation. We are indebted to a friend for pointing it out to us, and we conceive it will be read with interest.