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 they did not get rid of by digestion, but by other means.  The captain and the two passengers did not eat strips and chips, as the sailors did, but scraped the boot-leather and the wood, and made a pulp of the scrapings by moistening them with water.  The third mate told me that the boots were old and full of holes; then added thoughtfully, ‘but the holes digested the best.’  Speaking of digestion, here is a remarkable thing, and worth nothing:  during this strange voyage, and for a while afterward on shore, the bowels of some of the men virtually ceased from their functions; in some cases there was no action for twenty and thirty days, and in one case for forty-four!  Sleeping also came to be rare.  Yet the men did very well without it.  During many days the captain did not sleep at all —­twenty-one, I think, on one stretch.