, if it was the will of
Providence that he should so perish, at all events the Royal Christopher
was no loser by his loss.

CHAPTER XXIII

WE GET TO THE ISLAND

Even if we had lost a better man than Jensen it would have been our duty
none the less to work hard the next day to get our rafts ready and fit
for sea. Very few men are indispensable to their fellows, and certainly,
as far as making the rafts was concerned, it would have been far more
serious if Abraham Janes, the carpenter, had taken it into his head to
throw himself overboard than that Cornelys Jensen had taken it into his
head to do so. Yet, in a manner, too, we missed Cornelys Jensen. He was
an able man, full of all kinds of knowledge, and he had a domineering
way with the seamen which they seemed to recognise and to obey
unflinchingly. These fellows, for the most part, took the tidings of his
death very indifferently. Some of them seemed to miss him as a trained
dog might miss his master. Some, again, seemed scarcely to miss him at
all. One or two, and especially the fellow who saw the death and the
manner of it, seemed to take the matter very greatly to heart, and to go
about with a sad brow and a sullen eye in consequence.

As for Lancelot and myself, I must say that we soon grew to accept his
loss with composure. There was so much to do that there would have been
little time for a greater grief than either of us could honestly wear.
The weather was mending hourly, and the rafts were making rapid
progress. By the end of that day they were finished and ready for the
sea.

By this time, so strange are the chops and changes of the weather in
that part of the world, the sea and sky were as gentle as on a summer's
day. I have heard the phrase 'as smooth as a mill-pond' applied to salt
water many a thousand times, but never, indeed, with so much truth as if
it had been applied to the ocean that day. It lay all around us, one
tranquillity of blue, and above it the heavens were domed with an azure
fretted here and there with fleeces of clouds, even as the water was
fretted here and there with laces of foam. In the clear air we could see
the islands ahead of us sharply dark against the sky, and as we watched
them our longing to be at them, to tread dry land again, was so great as
to be almost unbearable. Those who have lived on shore all their lives
can form little or no idea of the way in which the thoughts of a man who
is tasting the terrors of sh