My two associates had got the launch in as good order as circumstances would allow.  But it wanted ballast to carry sail hard, and they had felt this disadvantage; particularly Neb, when he first got the boat on a wind.  I could understand, by his account of the difficulties and dangers he experienced,—­though it came out incidentally, and without the smallest design to magnify his own merits,—­that nothing but his undying interest in me, could have prevented him from running off before the wind, in order to save his own life.  An opportunity now offered to remedy this evil, and we went to work to transfer all the effects I had placed on the stage, to the launch.  They made a little cargo that gave her stability at once.  As soon as this was done, we entered the boat, made sail, and hauled close on a wind, under reefed luggs; it beginning to blow smartly in puffs.

I did not part from the raft without melancholy regrets.  The materials of which it was composed were all that now remained of the Dawn.  Then the few hours of jeopardy and loneliness I had passed on it, were not to be forgotten.  They still recur vividly to my thoughts with deep, and, I trust, profitable, reflections.  The first hour after we cast off, we stood to the southward.  The wind continuing to increase in violence, and the sea to get up, until it blew too fresh for the boat to make any headway, or even to hold her own against it, Marble thought he might do better on the other tack,—­having some reason to suppose there was a current setting to the southward and eastward,—­and we wore round.  After standing to the northward for a sufficient length of time, we again fell in with the spars; a proof that we were doing nothing towards working our way to windward.  I determined, at once, to make fast to them, and use them as a sort of floating anchor, so long as the foul wind lasted.  We had some difficulty in effecting this object; but we finally succeeded in getting near enough, under the lee of the top, to make fast to one of its eye-bolts—­using a bit of small hawser, that was in the boat, for that purpose.  The boat was then dropped a sufficient distance to leeward of the spars, where it rode head to sea, like a duck.  This was a fortunate expedient; as it came on to blow hard, and we had something very like a little gale of wind.

As soon as the launch was thus moored, we found its advantage.  It shipped no more water, or very little, and we were not compelled to be on the look-out for squalls, which occurred every ten or fifteen minutes, with a violence that it would not do to trifle with.  The weather thickened at these moments; and there were intervals of half an hour at a time, when we could not see a hundred yards from the boat, on account of the drizzling, misty rain that filled the atmosphere.  There we sat, conversing sometimes of the past, sometimes of the future, a bubble in the midst of the raging waters of the Atlantic, filled with the confidence of seamen.  With the stout boat we possessed, the food and water we had, I do not think either now felt any great concern for his fate; it being possible, in moderate weather, to run the launch far enough to reach an English port in about a week.  Favoured by even a tolerably fair wind, the object might be effected in even two or three days.