“The nights were frightful, and many times all of us had terrible dreams, and sometimes thought we were on shore.  Men would cry out about things they thought they saw, and other men would have to tell them they were not so.  We were always up and down on top of the swells, and our bodies ached so terribly from the sitting-down position and from the joggling of the motion that we would cry with pain.  The salt water got in all of our bruises and cracked our hands and feet, but there was no help for us, and we had to grin and bear it.  A shark took hold of our sea-anchor and we were afraid that he would tear it to pieces.

“Every day the captain took an observation when he could, and told us where we were.  We made about a hundred miles a day, but very often we steered out of our course because we had no matches or lantern.

“On the eighteenth we were in latitude 26 53’ South, and the captain said that Easter Island was in the 27th degree, so after all we had steered pretty well.

“On the night of the nineteenth, we had a fearful storm.  It seemed worse than the hurricane we had on the El Dorado.  All night long we thought that every minute would end us, and we lay huddled in misery, not caring much whether we went down or not.  But the next morning, we set part of the sail again, and at noon that day the captain took a sight and found that we were in latitude 27 8’ south.  Easter Island is 27 10’ south.  And now we began to fear that we might run past Easter Island.  If we did, we knew we could never get back with the wind.  We had squall after squall now, but we felt sure that soon we must see land.  Our soup was all gone, and we were living on the soda crackers mixed with water and milk.  Each of us got a cupful of this stuff once a day.

“On the twenty-second, when we were nine days out, I saw the land at ten o’clock in the morning, thirty miles away.  We felt pretty good over that, and had two cupfuls of the mixture, because we felt we were nearly safe.  My God! what we felt when we saw the rise of that land!  The captain said it was Easter Island for certain, but that it was not a place that any merchant ships ever went, as there was no trade there.  Once we saw the land we could not get any nearer to it.  We tried to row toward it, but the wind was against us.  Two days we hung about the back of that island, just outside the line of breakers.  We were afraid to risk a landing, for the coast was rocky.  On the eleventh day we saw a spot where the rocks looked white, and we rowed in toward it with great pains and much fear.  A big sea threw us right upon a smooth boulder, and we leaped from the boat and tried to run ashore.  We were weak and fell down many times.  Finally we got a hold and we carried everything out of the boat, and after hours hauled it up out of reach of the breakers.