head with an effort, and
in a weak voice made this correction--with solemnity and feeling:

'Raising abscesses! He had a family of them. He done it to keep from
standing his watch.'

Any provisions that lay handy were gathered up by the men and two
passengers and brought and dumped on the deck where the 'Portyghee'
lay; then they ran for more. The sailor who was telling this to Mr.
Burlingame added:

'We pulled together thirty-two days' rations for the thirty-one men that
way.'

The third mate lifted his head again and made another correction--with
bitterness:

'The "Portyghee" et twenty-two of them while he was soldiering there and
nobody noticing. A damned hound.'

The fire spread with great rapidity. The smoke and flame drove the men
back, and they had to stop their incomplete work of fetching provisions,
and take to the boats with only ten days' rations secured.

Each boat had a compass, a quadrant, a copy of Bowditch's 'Navigator,'
and a Nautical Almanac, and the captain's and chief mate's boats had
chronometers. There were thirty-one men all told. The captain took an
account of stock, with the following result: four hams, nearly thirty
pounds of salt pork, half-box of raisins, one hundred pounds of bread,
twelve two-pound cans of oysters, clams, and assorted meats, a
keg containing four pounds of butter, twelve gallons of water in a
forty-gallon 'scuttle-butt', four one-gallon demijohns full of water,
three bottles of brandy (the property of passengers), some pipes,
matches, and a hundred pounds of tobacco. No medicines. Of course the
whole party had to go on short rations at once.

The captain and the two passengers kept diaries. On our voyage to San
Francisco we ran into a calm in the middle of the Pacific, and did
not move a rod during fourteen days; this gave me a chance to copy the
diaries. Samuel Ferguson's is the fullest; I will draw upon it now.
When the following paragraph was written the doomed ship was about one
hundred and twenty days out from port, and all hands were putting in the
lazy time about as usual, as no one was forecasting disaster.

(Diary entry) May 2. Latitude 1 degree 28 minutes N., longitude 111
degrees 38 minutes W. Another hot and sluggish day; at one time,
however, the clouds promised wind, and there came a slight breeze
--just enough to keep us going. The only thing to chronicle to-day
is the quantities of fish about; nine bonitos were caught