“It rained steady all night, and the sea spilled into the boat now and then.  Two of us had to bale all the time to keep the boat afloat.  We were soaked to the skin with fresh and salt water, weak from the days of exposure and hunger, and we were barely able to keep from being thrown out of the boat by its terrible rocking and pitching, and yet we all felt like singing a song.  All but the Japanese cook.  Iwata had almost gone mad, and was praying to his joss whenever anything new happened.  During that night a wave knocked him over and crushed one of his feet against the tank of drinking water.  The salt water got into the wound and swelled it, and he was soon unable to move.

“The second day in the small boat was the captain’s forty-eighth birthday.  The old man spoke of it in a hearty way, hoping that when he was forty-nine he would be on the deck of some good ship.  There was no sign of the El Dorado that morning.  But with wind and sea as they were, we could not have seen the ship very far, and we had made some distance under oarpower during the night.  We put up our little sail at nine o’clock, though the wind was strong.  The skipper said that we could not expect anything but rough weather, and that we had to make the best of every hour, considering what we had to eat and that we were eleven in the boat.  The wind was now from the southwest, and we steered northeast.  We had to steer without compass because it was dark, and we had no light.

“We had our first bite to eat about noon of this second day out.  We had then been nearly three months at sea, or, to be exact, it was seventy-eight days since we had left port.  It was thirty hours after the coffee and biscuit on the El Dorado, and God knows how much longer since we had had a whole meal, and now we didn’t have much.  The old man bossed it.  He took a half-bucket of fresh water, and into this he put a can of soup.  This he served, and gave each man two soda crackers and his share of a pound of corned beef.  We dipped the crackers into the bucket. (I tell you it was better than the ham and eggs we had at the hotel when we landed.) We had this kind of a meal twice a day, and no more.

“The next day the wind was again very strong, with thunder and lightning, and we ran dead before the wind with no more sail than a handkerchief.  The sea began to break over the boat, and our old man said that we could not live through it unless we could rig up a sea-anchor.  We were sure we would drown.  We made one by rolling four blankets together tightly and tying around them a long rope with which our boat was made fast to the ship when we embarked.  This we let drag astern about ninety-feet.  It held the boat fairly steady, and kept the boat’s head to the seas.  We fastened it to the ring in the stern.  We used this sea-anchor many times throughout our voyage, and without it we would have gone down sure.  Of course we took in a great deal of water, anyhow; but we could keep her baled out, and the sea-anchor prevented her from swamping.