t turn to a delusion--dreaded that we
might wake up and find ourselves in the boat again.

It is an amazing adventure. There is nothing of its sort in history
that surpasses it in impossibilities made possible. In one extraordinary
detail--the survival of every person in the boat--it probably stands
alone in the history of adventures of its kinds. Usually merely a part
of a boat's company survive--officers, mainly, and other educated and
tenderly-reared men, unused to hardship and heavy labour; the untrained,
roughly-reared hard workers succumb. But in this case even the rudest
and roughest stood the privations and miseries of the voyage almost as
well as did the college-bred young brothers and the captain. I mean,
physically. The minds of most of the sailors broke down in the fourth
week and went to temporary ruin, but physically the endurance exhibited
was astonishing. Those men did not survive by any merit of their own, of
course, but by merit of the character and intelligence of the captain;
they lived by the mastery of his spirit. Without him they would
have been children without a nurse; they would have exhausted their
provisions in a week, and their pluck would not have lasted even as long
as the provisions.

The boat came near to being wrecked at the last. As it approached the
shore the sail was let go, and came down with a run; then the captain
saw that he was drifting swiftly toward an ugly reef, and an effort
was made to hoist the sail again; but it could not be done; the men's
strength was wholly exhausted; they could not even pull an oar. They
were helpless, and death imminent. It was then that they were discovered
by the two Kanakas who achieved the rescue. They swam out and manned the
boat, and piloted her through a narrow and hardly noticeable break in
the reef--the only break in it in a stretch of thirty-five miles! The
spot where the landing was made was the only one in that stretch where
footing could have been found on the shore; everywhere else precipices
came sheer down into forty fathoms of water. Also, in all that stretch
this was the only spot where anybody lived.

Within ten days after the landing all the men but one were up and
creeping about. Properly, they ought to have killed themselves with
the 'food' of the last few days--some of them, at any rate--men who had
freighted their stomachs with strips of leather from old boots and with
chips from the butter cask; a freightage which th