Few sailors can behold the ship in which they have sailed sinking before their eyes without the same emotion of distress and pity, almost, which the spectacle of a drowning man excites in them. She has grown a familiar name, a familiar object; thus far she has borne them in safety; she has been rudely beaten, and yet has done her duty; but the tempest has broken her down at last; all the beauty is shorn from her; she is weary with the long and dreadful struggles with the vast forces that nature arrayed against her; she sinks, a desolate, abandoned thing, in mid-ocean, carrying with her a thousand memories which surge up in the heart with the pain of a strong man’s tears.
I looked from the ship to realize our own position. Perhaps not yet could it be keenly felt, for the ship was still a visible object for us to hold on by; and yet, turning my eyes away to the far reaches of the horizon at one moment borne high on the summit of the ocean swell, which appeared mountainous when felt in and viewed from the boat, then sinking deep in the hollow, so that the near ship was hidden from us—the supreme loneliness of our situation, our helplessness, and the fragility and diminutiveness of the structure on which our lives depended, came home to me with the pain and wonder of a shock.
Our boat, however, was new this voyage, with a good beam, and showing a tolerably bold side, considering her dimensions and freight. Of the two quarter-boats with which the Grosvenor had been furnished, this was the larger and the stronger built, and for this reason had been chosen by Stevens. I could not hope, indeed, that she would live a moment in anything of a sea; but she was certainly stout enough to carry us to the Bermudas, providing that the weather remained moderate.
It was now six o’clock. I said to the boatswain:
“Every hour of this weather is valuable to us. There is no reason why we should stay here.”
“I should like to see her sink, Mr. Royle; I should like to know that poor Jim found a regular coffin in her,” he answered. “We can’t make no headway with the sail, and I don’t recommend rowin’ for the two or three mile we can fetch with the oars. It ’ud be wurse nor pumpin’.”
He was right. When I reflected, I was quite sure I should not, in my exhausted state, be able to handle one of the big oars for even five minutes at a stretch; and, admitting that I had been strong enough to row for a couple of hours, yet the result to have been obtained could not have been important enough to justify the serious labor.
The steward all this time sat perfectly quiet in the bottom of the boat, with his back against the mast. He paid no attention to us when we spoke, nor looked around him, though sometimes he would fix his eyes vacantly on the sky as if his shattered mind found relief in contemplating the void. I was heartily glad to find him quiet, though I took care to watch him, for it was difficult to tell whether his imbecility was not counterfeited, by his madness, to throw us off our guard, and furnish him with an opportunity to play us and himself some deadly trick.
As some hours had elapsed since we had tasted food, I opened a tin of meat and prepared a meal. The boatswain ate heartily, and so did the steward: but I could not prevail upon Mary to take more than a biscuit and sherry and water.
Indeed, as the evening approached, our position affected her more deeply, and often, after she had cast her eyes toward the horizon, I could see her lips whispering a prayer, and feel her hand tightening on mine.