about ninety miles, and if our raft would only hold
together so long and maintain the speed at which it was then travelling,
we might hope to reach land in from two and a half to three days.

I laid these facts before my companions, directing their special
attention to the circumstance that we had to look forward to three days
of suffering from thirst, and also from hunger in a minor degree, urging
them to the brave endurance of these privations, if necessary, and
pointing out to them that though unfortunately we happened to be in one
of the least-frequented of the passages, there was a chance, although a
somewhat slender one, of our being picked up at any hour, and I wound up
by reminding them that, even on that frail raft, we were as much under
the protection of Him who holds the waters in the hollow of His hand as
we should be were we safe on shore. At the doctor's suggestion we then
all knelt down, while he offered up a brief but earnest prayer for our
deliverance. We all felt much more hopeful after this short religious
exercise, and went cheerfully about our work of examining the raft, now
that we had daylight with us once more, with the object of ascertaining
whether it was possible to make any improvement in it or not. The
examination, careful and minute though it was, was soon over, and we
came to the conclusion that no improvement was possible with the
materials at hand, and that, if the lashings did not give way and the
weather continued fine, we had not much to fear.

Hawsepipe had rigged steering-gear to the raft by lashing a piece of
deck-plank, some twelve feet long, to the schooner's foremast in such a
way that half of it was immersed in the water and acted as a rudder,
while the other half slanted in over the raft and served as a tiller; it
was, in fact, a rude substitute for a steering-oar. This answered its
purpose perfectly, in so far as that it enabled us to keep the raft dead
before the wind; but when I tried the experiment of edging a couple of
points or so to the southward of the direction in which the wind blew,
with the view of reaching the Saint Domingo shore as quickly as
possible, I found that the speed of the raft lessened sensibly, and that
she began to drive slightly sideways through the water--she would not,
in short, travel in any direction except dead before the wind, and we
were therefore compelled to rest content with that, and to devote all
our energies to the most careful steer