She turned her pale face and soft and swimming eyes up to the stars and gazed at them intently, as though she witnessed a vision there.
But though the wind had abated, it still blew a gale, and the sea boiled and tumbled about us and over our decks in a manner that would have been terrifying had we not seen it in a greater state of fury.
I sent the steward forward to see if he could get the galley fire to burn, so as to boil us some water for coffee, for though the ship was in a warm latitude, yet the wind, owing to its strength, was at times piercingly cold, and we all longed for a hot drink—a cup of hot coffee or cocoa being infinitely more invigorating, grateful, and warming than any kind of spirits drunk cold.
All that the steward did, however, was to get wet through; and this he managed so effectually that he came crawling aft, looking precisely as if he had been fished out of the water with grappling-hooks.
I lighted a bull's-eye lamp and went to the pumps and sounded the well.
On hauling up the rod I found to my consternation that there were nine inches of water in the ship.
I was so much startled by this discovery that I stood for some moments motionless; then, bethinking me that one of the plugged auger holes might be leaking, I slipped forward without saying a word to the others, and, getting a large mallet from the tool-chest, I entered the forecastle, so as to get into the fore peak.
I had not been in the forecastle since the men had left the ship, and I cannot describe the effect produced upon me by this dark deserted abode, with its row of idly swinging hammocks glimmering in the light shed by the bull's-eye lamp; the black chests of the seamen which they had left behind them; here and there a suit of dark oilskins suspended by a nail and looking like a hanged man; the hollow space resonant with the booming thunder of the seas and the mighty wash of water swirling over the top-gallant deck.
The whole scene took a peculiarly ghastly significance from the knowledge that of all the men who had occupied those hammocks and bunks, one only survived; for four of them we ourselves had killed, and I could not suppose that the long-boat had lived ten minutes after the gale had broken upon her.
I made my way over the cable-ranges, stooping my head to clear the hammocks, and striking my shins against the sea-chests, and swung myself into the hold.