arlier to abandon the mainmast
in favour of one of them the moment that the light of dawn revealed them
to me.

I struggled into a standing position on the spar that supported me,
steadying myself upon my somewhat precarious perch by grasping the arms
of the crosstrees, and carefully examined such fragments as came within
my ken with the heave of the sea. The detached pieces, which seemed to
consist mostly of pieces of planking, with what looked very like a
hatch, were all floating together, pretty much in a bunch, with only a
few fathoms of water separating any two pieces; I thought that if I
could but get in among them surely I ought to be able to find a piece
that would serve my purpose. The point that worried me was whether, in
my exhausted state, and in so heavy a sea, I dared make the attempt to
swim unaided the comparatively short distance that separated me from
those coveted fragments; but I reflected that, if I had not the strength
to achieve so simple a feat as that, I should certainly never be able to
accomplish the longer swim, even with the advantage of a support; the
choice seemed therefore to lie between the risk of drowning on the one
hand, and that of starvation upon the other; and it took me but a moment
to decide in favour of the former. Yes, I told myself, better in every
way to drown than to starve, and the sooner the matter was decided, the
better.

To give myself the best possible chance I flung off my jacket and kicked
off my shoes, retaining only my shirt and trousers. Then, casting off
the lashings by which I had secured myself to the shattered mainmast, I
stood up, and carefully took the bearings of the _flotsam_ relative to
the sun, to guide me when swimming. This done, I poised myself upon the
spar preparatory to diving off the mast, and had raised my hands above
my head, when not half-a-dozen fathoms away, and immediately between me
and the spot for which I was bound, I saw the dorsal fins of two
enormous sharks sculling quietly to and fro, as though to blockade me
and cut me off from my only hope of escape.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

MY VOYAGE ON THE HATCH.

I pulled myself up just in the nick of time, for in another second I
should have made the plunge, and that would have meant death, a horrible
death; for the splash which I should have made upon entering the water
must have inevitably attracted the attention of the monsters and brought
them upon me with a rush. It almost appeare