The sight of a death-bed is always a moving one; but, generally speaking, death-beds affect us with one kind of emotion only: the grief of separation. Those who stand round the dying person shed tears all the more copiously because they run no danger themselves.

  But it is different in the case of an unfortunate wretch expiring from hunger and thirst in the midst of other wretches on the point of death from hunger and thirst like him. In this case every one sees his own fate foreshadowed in that of the dying man. The bystanders already feel, in anticipation, the pangs of death themselves. This delirium, in two hours, in the evening, or next morning, will be their delirium; this death, sooner or later, will be their death.

  Here are no tears which console by their very abundance; dry eyes, a gloomy and reserved despair, teeth which gnash when the first symptoms are felt of the pains which are racking the sufferer; howls instead of lamentations; curses instead of words of consolation.

  At length the Captain expired.

  This was on the 1st of July, eleven days after the catastrophe.

  In the convulsions of his death agony he clasped his wife so closely that they could neither unlock his arms nor unclasp his hands. She, for her part, could not believe him to be dead. Feeling herself pressed against her husband’s heart, she struggled not to be deprived of this last embrace, and she was only persuaded of the fact after infinite trouble. She then sadly dropped her arms, and, strange to say, her tears ceased to flow. The men divided among them the few clothes which the Captain possessed, and cast his corpse into the sea.

  When she heard the splash made by the falling body, Mrs. Bremner uttered a faint shriek, threw up her arms, and fainted. John Mackay rushed to her aid, and revived her; then she opened her eyes, and recovered the faculty of weeping, which she appeared to have lost.

  During the five days which had elapsed between the return of the raft and the death of the Captain, no other accident had happened other than a succession of deaths.

  One man was seized with cramps in the stomach, and died in convulsions; sometimes the dying man lost hold of the rigging to which he was clinging and fell into the sea; sometimes he expired grasping it so tightly that it required all the remaining strength of three or four men to make him let go; one died so tightly riveted to the mizzen-stays that his corpse was left hanging to them for two whole days, until, putrefaction setting in, they disarticulated his arms at the wrists, leaving the hands clutching the stay, while the body was swallowed up by the waves.

  On the morning of the 28th, two days before the Captain’s death, Mr. Wade, chief mate, declared that he could bear this inaction no longer.

  The raft, fastened to a cable, was floating below the mizzen-top; he asked if any men would embark with him, and try a different chance from their shipmates. Two European sailors, two Malays, and four Lascars, eight men in all, volunteered, and in spite of all John Mackay’s efforts to dissuade them, embarked afresh. As before, the rope was cut, and the raft drifted away. It became lost to sight as on the previous occasion, but next morning it was not visible in the wake of the vessel; a squall had arisen in the course of the night, and, in all probability, the raft and its occupants had been swallowed up by the sea.

  This squall, fatal to the men who left, had a fortunate result for those who remained. Heavy rain fell; the men were able to soak their clothes with it and quench their thirst, thus alleviating their chief source of suffering.

  After this, forty-eight hours seldom passed without some fresh squall bringing more rain, which, in addition to wearing a shirt which had been dipped in the sea by means of a rope-yarn, was a great relief. Indeed, whenever these poor fellows, exhausted though they were, could swallow some gulps of fresh water, for some hours the gnawing pains of hunger subsided.

  On the day of Captain Bremner’s death, besides him died two men in the foretop, and two in the mizzen-top. The men posted in these two places had no communication with one another; they saw what was going on, but had neither anything to say, nor strength to say it if they had.

  John experienced every morning great surprise at finding himself alive, and had a firm conviction that each day would be his last, and that he should be a corpse before night. He had heard it stated that a man cannot live more than a certain number of days without food — six, eight, or ten at the most — and here on the eleventh day, that is to say, on the day of the death of Captain Bremner, he was living still.

  In the evening the sea was calmer than it ever had been before. Several Lascars, who encumbered the mizzen- top, crowding their comrades, and being hustled by them, swam off to reach the foretop, which had never been full, and in which the death of two men, whom they had seen thrown into the sea, had made still more space. So weak were they that they reached it with the greatest difficulty, and, assisted by their comrades, climbed aloft.

  After the 1st and 2nd of July, the survivors were so enfeebled that they became not only unconscious of what was going on around them, but even of their own sufferings. The debility into which even the strongest eventually fell had almost destroyed the sensation of hunger. When a little rain fell, these dying men seemed to awake from a lethargy; they moved about in an unusual and awkward manner in their efforts to collect all the water they could. Having swallowed this, and exchanged some words of satisfaction, slowly, sadly, and mournfully they gradually returned to their former state of silence and torpor.

  The acute suffering of these emaciated and enfeebled bodies arose no longer from hunger and thirst, but from cold. Although in the latitude of the equator, the nights were intensely chilly. Then were heard complaints, groans, chattering teeth. At dawn, the rising of the sun was preceded by a rise in temperature; then the stiff limbs drawn up under the body were stretched out and recovered their suppleness.

  Then came fresh torture; the sun, rising to the zenith, beat fiercely on these unprotected heads, a prey to sunstroke; then the misery of the night was forgotten for that of the day; and the absent breeze was invoked, as by night was the absent sun.

  In the midst of all this tragic drama many singular isolated incidents occurred almost unnoticed even by those under whose eyes they passed, and whose death agonies rendered them indifferent to the dying struggles of others.

  As we have already said, although all were dying from the same causes, all did not die in the same manner; for instance, the son of Mr. Wade, a robust and well proportioned youth, died almost suddenly, without a groan; whilst on the other hand, a youth of the same age, of feminine delicacy and physique, lasted during twelve days of hunger and thirst, and finally succumbed on the thirteenth.

  This lad’s father was on board, but the great disaster had separated them, the father being the sailor who had escaped to the foretop, while the son climbed up the mizzen-shrouds.

  Each remained where he was, conversing in words during the first few days; then, when their voices became too weak to carry the sound, by signs only. But when the youth’s signs informed his father that he felt death impending, the unhappy father seemed to recover all his strength.

  He lost no time in descending the man-ropes, although for two or three days he had scarcely stirred. Then dragging himself on hands and knees along the weather gunwale, he rejoined his son, took him in his arms, placed him on one of the three or four forecastle planks which had floated aft, and propped him up against the taffrail, lest the waves should wash him away.

  When the youth experienced one of those violent spasms in the stomach which we have already mentioned as a mortal symptom, his father again lifted him in his arms, raised him as high as his breast, and wiped the foam from his lips. When a few drops of rain fell, he carefully gathered all he could by means of his handkerchief, which he wrung over the mouth of his child; if the shower increased into a downpour, he opened the lad’s mouth, so that he might imbibe the reviving moisture in its first freshness.

  Thus he remained, in the same position, for five days. At last, notwithstanding all his care, the youth expired.

  Then the poor father lifted him up, grasping him tight to his breast with a power incredible in a man who had had no food for sixteen days. He stared at him with a bewildered expression, still believing that breath would again come from his lips. But the facts were too strong; it was impossible to doubt that his son was really dead.

  On realizing this, nothing more seemed to affect him, and he appeared quite indifferent to his own fate. He remained near his son’s corpse, stolid and silent, till the sea, increasing under a squall, caught his son’s body and swept it overboard.

  He watched the corpse float away into the transparent depths of the ocean; then, when he lost sight of it, he wrapped himself up in a piece of canvas, lay down, and never rose again. He must, however, have survived two or three days, so far as can be surmised, for the witnesses of this episode, whose interest and anxiety were aroused by its pathetic circumstances, noticed that his limbs quivered every time a wave broke over his body. The scene altogether was so heart-breaking that it deeply moved men whose own situation was so awful that it may well be supposed they had little inclination to observe that of others.

  The ship drifted and rolled along at the will of the sea, but under the eye of God, and no one could say whither she was making.

  At last, on the evening of the 10th of July, twenty days after the great disaster, one of the shipwrecked sailors, who had long been fixing his gaze on what seemed to him an object in the offing, struggled to an erect position for a better view, and cried out as loud as he could:

  “Land! Land!”

  CHAPTER V.

  MRS. BREMNER’S THIRTY RUPEES.

  THIS herald note of salvation, instead of being received, as might be supposed, with ecstatic joy, was heard without any emotion at all. So deadened were the faculties of the survivors, and so apathetic had they become under these moribund conditions, that God’s mercies went for nothing with them, and no one even stirred to verify or disprove the alleged fact of land being in sight.

  However, after some minutes, as if a sensible period was required to convey the meaning of this news to the blunted perceptions of those to whom it was sought to be imparted, a slight stir occurred among the wretched survivors. This movement, at first hardly discernible, became contagious, and at length general attention was directed towards the point indicated. But the day was by this time too far spent to decide with certainty whether the object were really land or only one of those mirages which so often mislead shipwrecked crews tossing and drifting on the waste of ocean.

  At first little notice was taken of this important intelligence; then, without discussing it, all eyes were strained in the direction shown. Next, night came on, and it was impossible to see anything; and, lastly, strange to say, every one spoke and behaved as if land were plainly in sight. Conversation, previously dead, revived; every one had something to say, and the universal opinion, with one exception, was that land was in sight.

  This exception was John Mackay. He held that it could not be land; and, even supposing it were, he maintained that this by no means proved a rescue.

  Poor Mrs. Bremner, shattered by the death of her husband and by her own sufferings, was about to grasp this announcement of land in sight with all the strength of the hope left in her. Her mind was clinging to this idea as her body would have clung to rigging or spars. This obstinate incredulity of John Mackay, his cold reception of the news, supposing it to be genuine, exasperated her.

  “Why, tell me,” she exclaimed, “why do you dispute the existence of any coast at all, and why, again, if there be a coast, and that coast be lying before us, why are you so indifferent at seeing it?”

  “Madam,” replied the second mate, “in the first place because I don’t believe in the existence of land in this latitude and longitude; and in the second, because if there be land, instead of being our refuge, it will prove our destruction.”

  “Our destruction! Why?” asked the poor woman, her eyes burning with fear.

  “Because,” replied John, “it being impossible to steer the ship, she cannot be brought into port, and, such being the case, she will strike on a reef far from the coast, and wherever she strikes she will infallibly go to pieces in a few minutes. If you are weary of suffering, if you feel that you have no strength to support life longer, pray for the sight of land, for land will most certainly terminate all our misfortunes.”

  This prediction, coming from so experienced a man as John Mackay, caused general consternation, and conversation and hope expired simultaneously. The second mate was himself so sceptical as to the reality of the land said to be in sight, that he tells us he did not even turn his head in the indicated direction the next morning, when he awoke. Just at this moment, however, one of the men in the foretop shook his handkerchief, and endeavoured to cry “Land! “The others saw the handkerchief, and guessed what he wished to convey, but the weak tones of his voice only reached their ears as in an inarticulate mumble.

  At the sight of this handkerchief, at the sound of this feeble and dying voice which nevertheless charmed his ear, the second mate himself felt a vague desire to rise and look round, yet, being in a comfortable position, his arms folded on his stomach, and facing the other direction, he felt a great indisposition to move. It required all the strength of will he possessed to enable him to sacrifice his comfort to his curiosity, and before he had decided to move, a man near had anticipated him and declared that land was actually in sight.

  On hearing this a second man rose, then a third, and in five minutes the whole company, including John Mackay himself, were erect and straining their eyes towards the horizon.

  He was obliged to admit that the object ahead was singularly like a coast line, but when Mrs. Bremner asked him if he judged it to be the Coromandel coast, the question seemed so absurd to the worthy sailor that, despite the gravity of the situation, he could not help smiling; but as the day went on, the indications of land grew so evident that he became convinced that the jagged horizon could be nothing else but the outline of land.

  Only, what land could it possibly be? He had not an idea.

  A general feeling of restlessness and anxiety ensued; but, strange to say, amidst this general restlessness, John Mackay experienced a sensation of hope, derived from a dominant religious idea.

  There are said to be men who do not believe in a God.

  What else have they to believe in, and what other faith is of any avail?

  Belief in God includes all other faith.

  The religious idea which dominated John Mackay was this. He considered it incredible that a beneficent God would inspire hope in the breasts of a party of wretches who had suffered frightful tortures, merely as a prelude to terminating their sufferings by death.

  Thus, when Mrs. Bremner turned towards him and questioned him with her eyes, as if he were the oracle upon whose reply depended the probabilities of life or death, John Mackay raised his eyes and hands to heaven, murmuring these words:

  “Let us hope!”

  Thenceforward, all eyes were steadily directed towards the coast.

  Unhappily, the more they neared it, and the better its character could be surmised, the more appearance did it present of a sterile desert, and night fell without any more cheering symptoms being descried.

  The second mate took up his usual sleeping position, firmly convinced that this night would be his last, and that before morning the ship would have struck and gone to pieces. For all that, he did not sleep less soundly, so exhausted was he.

  Shortly before sunrise, the whole company, both the sleeping and the wakeful, were roused by a violent shock — the ship had struck on a rock. A faint cry, hardly louder than a sigh, escaped from all; it died away immediately, and was succeeded by an agonized silence.

  The ship struck again and again; so violent were the shocks that the standing masts were shaken, and the tenants of the tops, finding it impossible to stand erect, were obliged to lie flat and grip the cross-trees. By nine or ten o’clock the sea had gone down several feet; the remnant of the deck slowly emerged and remained exposed. A general desire was felt to descend to it; but, enfeebled as they were by twenty days of famine, this was a difficult and dangerous matter. The condition of poor wretches who for three weeks had subsisted solely on a few drops of water caught in stormy weather may be imagined.

  Nevertheless, an effort was made, and as man generally succeeds in attaining his ends by the combination of will and skill, so they succeeded in this instance.

  The gunner and the second mate further undertook to lower poor Mrs. Bremner, and, after incredible efforts, got her down as far as the crowfoot, where their strength failed them and they were obliged to leave her. They then applied to such of the Lascars as appeared the least worn out. Two of them volunteered to bring her down on deck, but as they knew that the poor woman was possessed of thirty rupees, they demanded eight, which were promised in her name.

  They then climbed aloft to her, lifted her in their arms, and got her down in safety to the deck, which no sooner had they reached than they demanded payment of the eight rupees. Mrs. Bremner was so overjoyed at her rescue from the torture she had endured in the mizzen-top, and felt so hopeful at seeing land before her, notwithstanding the sinister predictions of John Mackay, that she would gladly have given them all the thirty, but the second mate pointed out to her that the twenty-two remaining rupees were all the money they had, and that, should the necessity for spending them arise, it would be more proper to devote them to the general service than to present them to a couple of mercenary wretches who were capable of extorting money from a woman, and that woman the wife of their deceased Captain, as the price of rendering her a slight service.

  With regard to the conduct of the ship’s company in general, John Mackay states with pride that this conduct of the two Lascars was the only instance of selfishness and greed which could be laid to their charge.