for many days, rough as it was.  In the latitude of Pitcairn, the island so famous because to it fled the mutineers of the Bounty, they all but perished.  For two days a severe storm nearly overwhelmed them.  The boat was more buoyant, and with the sea-anchor trailing, they came through the trial without injury.  Steve said the lightning was “yoost like a leedle bid of hell.”  It circled them about, hissed in the water, and finally struck their mast repeatedly, so that the wise captain took it down.  The entire heavens were a mass of coruscating electricity, and they could feel the air alive with it.  They were shocked by the very atmosphere, said Steve, and feared for their lives every moment.  The sea piled up, the wind blew a gale, and death was close at hand.  They wished they had not left Easter Island, and envied those who had remained there.

But they rode it out, with their pile of blankets a-trail, and with helm and oars alert to keep the boat afloat.

The gale amended after several days, and on the sixteenth day from their departure they reached Mangareva.  That island is in the Gambier group, and a number of Europeans live there.  The castaways were received generously, and were informed that a schooner was expected in a fortnight, which might carry them to some port on their way home.  But the old man said they must push on.  He had to report to his owners the loss of the El Dorado; he had to see his family.  They had come twenty-six hundred miles since deserting the schooner, and the thousand miles more to Tahiti was not a serious undertaking.  He persuaded Steve and Alex to his manner of thinking, and with the boat stocked with provisions they took the wave again, after a couple of days at Mangareva.

Now the bad weather was over.  The sea was comparatively smooth, and the breeze favorable.  But fate still had frowns for them, as if to keep them in terror.  Sharks and swordfish, as though resenting the intrusion of their tiny craft in waters where boats were seldom seen, attacked them furiously.  Five times a giant shark launched himself at their boat, head on, and drove them frantic with his menace of sinking them.  They were so filled with this dread that they fastened a marlinespike in the spar, and despite probability of provoking the shark to more desperate onslaughts, maneuvered so that they were able to kill him with a blow.

The next day a swordfish of alarming size played about them, approaching and retreating, eying them and acting in such a manner that they felt sure he was challenging the boat as a strange fish whose might he disputed.  One thrust of his bony weapon, and they might be robbed of their chance for life.  They shouted and banged on the gunwales, and escaped.