To
see the men’s heads bowed down and the
captain’s hand pointing into the sea when we
hailed the Long-boat, a few days after, gave
me as heavy a shock and as sharp a pang of
heartache to bear as ever I remember suffering
in all my life. I only mention these
things to show that if I did give way a little
at first, under the dread that our captain
was lost to us, it was not without having
been a good deal shaken beforehand by more
trials of one sort or another than often fall
to one man’s share.
I had got over the choking in my throat with
the help of a drop of water, and had steadied
my mind again so as to be prepared against
the worst, when I heard the hail (Lord help
the poor fellows, how weak it sounded!)—
“Surf-boat, ahoy!”
I looked up, and there were our companions
in misfortune tossing abreast of us;
not so near that we could make out the
features of any of them, but near enough,
with some exertion for people in our condition,
to make their voices heard in the
intervals when the wind was weakest.
I answered the hail, and waited a bit, and
heard nothing, and then sung out the captain’s
name. The voice that replied did not
sound like his; the words that reached us were:
“Chief-mate wanted on board!”
Every man of my crew knew what that
meant as well as I did. As second officer in
command, there could be but one reason for
wanting me on board the Long-boat. A
groan went all round us, and my men looked
darkly in each other’s faces, and whispered
under their breaths:
“The captain is dead!”
I commanded them to be silent, and not to
make too sure of bad news, at such a pass as
things had now come to with us. Then,
hailing the Long-boat, I signified that I was
ready to go on board when the weather
would let me—stopped a bit to draw a good
long breath—and then called out as loud as I
could the dreadful question—
“Is the captain dead?”
The black figures of three or four men in
the after-part of the Long-boat all stooped
down together as my voice reached them.
They were lost to view for about a minute;
then appeared again—one man among them
was held up on his feet by the rest, and
he hailed back the blessed words (a very
faint hope went a very long way with people
in our desperate situation):
“Not yet!”
The relief felt by me, and by all with me,
when we knew that our captain, though unfitted
for duty, was not lost to us, it is not
in words—at least, not in such words as a
man like me can command—to express. I
did my best to cheer the men by telling them
what a good sign it was that we were not as
badly off yet as we had feared; and then
communicated what instructions I had to
give, to William Rames, who was to be left in
command in my place when I took charge of
the Long-boat. After that, there was nothing
to be done, but to wait for the chance of the
wind dropping at sunset, and the sea going
down afterwards, so as to enable our weak
crews to lay the two boats alongside of each
other, without undue risk—or, to put it
plainer, without saddling ourselves with the
necessity for any extraordinary exertion of
strength or skill. Both the one and the
other had now been starved out of us for
days and days together.
At sunset the wind suddenly dropped, but
the sea, which had been running high for so
long a time past, took hours after that before
it showed any signs of getting to rest. The
moon was shining, the sky was wonderfully
clear, and it could not have been, according
to my calculations, far off midnight, when the
long, slow, regular swell of the calming ocean
fairly set in, and I took the responsibility of
lessening the distance between the Long-boat
and ourselves.
It was, I dare say, a delusion of mine; but
I thought I had never seen the moon shine
so white and ghastly anywhere, either at sea
or on land, as she shone that night while we
were approaching our companions in misery.
When there was not much more than a boat’s
length between us, and the white light
streamed cold and clear over all our faces,
both crews rested on their oars with one
great shudder, and stared over the gunwale
of either boat, panic-stricken at the first sight
of each other.