near that we could make out the features of any of them,
but near enough, with some exertion for people in our condition, to make
their voices heard in the intervals when the wind was weakest.

I answered the hail, and waited a bit, and heard nothing, and then sung
out the captain's name. The voice that replied did not sound like his;
the words that reached us were:

"Chief-mate wanted on board!"

Every man of my crew knew what that meant as well as I did. As second
officer in command, there could be but one reason for wanting me on board
the Long-boat. A groan went all round us, and my men looked darkly in
each other's faces, and whispered under their breaths:

"The captain is dead!"

I commanded them to be silent, and not to make too sure of bad news, at
such a pass as things had now come to with us. Then, hailing the Long-
boat, I signified that I was ready to go on board when the weather would
let me--stopped a bit to draw a good long breath--and then called out as
loud as I could the dreadful question:

"Is the captain dead?"

The black figures of three or four men in the after-part of the Long-boat
all stooped down together as my voice reached them. They were lost to
view for about a minute; then appeared again--one man among them was held
up on his feet by the rest, and he hailed back the blessed words (a very
faint hope went a very long way with people in our desperate situation):
"Not yet!"

The relief felt by me, and by all with me, when we knew that our captain,
though unfitted for duty, was not lost to us, it is not in words--at
least, not in such words as a man like me can command--to express. I did
my best to cheer the men by telling them what a good sign it was that we
were not as badly off yet as we had feared; and then communicated what
instructions I had to give, to William Rames, who was to be left in
command in my place when I took charge of the Long-boat. After that,
there was nothing to be done, but to wait for the chance of the wind
dropping at sunset, and the sea going down afterwards, so as to enable
our weak crews to lay the two boats alongside of each other, without
undue risk--or, to put it plainer, without saddling ourselves with the
necessity for any extraordinary exertion of strength or skill. Both the
one and the other had now been starved out of us for days and days
together.

At sunset the wind suddenly dropped, but the sea, which had been running
high for so long a t