In the morning we took stock.  To commence with, all but two or three had suffered frost-bite.  Aaron Northrup, unable to move because of his broken hip, was very bad.  It was the surgeon’s opinion that both of Northrup’s feet were hopelessly frozen.

The longboat was deep and heavy in the water, for it was burdened by the entire ship’s company of twenty-one.  Two of these were boys.  Benny Hardwater was a bare thirteen, and Lish Dickery, whose family was near neighbour to mine in Elkton, was just turned sixteen.  Our provisions consisted of three hundred-weight of beef and two hundred-weight of pork.  The half-dozen loaves of brine-pulped bread, which the cook had brought, did not count.  Then there were three small barrels of water and one small keg of beer.

Captain Nicholl frankly admitted that in this uncharted ocean he had no knowledge of any near land.  The one thing to do was to run for more clement climate, which we accordingly did, setting our small sail and steering quartering before the fresh wind to the north-east.

The food problem was simple arithmetic.  We did not count Aaron Northrup, for we knew he would soon be gone.  At a pound per day, our five hundred pounds would last us twenty-five days; at half a pound, it would last fifty.  So half a pound had it.  I divided and issued the meat under the captain’s eyes, and managed it fairly enough, God knows, although some of the men grumbled from the first.  Also, from time to time I made fair division among the men of the plug tobacco I had stowed in my many pockets—­a thing which I could not but regret, especially when I knew it was being wasted on this man and that who I was certain could not live a day more, or, at best, two days or three.

For we began to die soon in the open boat.  Not to starvation but to the killing cold and exposure were those earlier deaths due.  It was a matter of the survival of the toughest and the luckiest.  I was tough by constitution, and lucky inasmuch as I was warmly clad and had not broken my leg like Aaron Northrup.  Even so, so strong was he that, despite being the first to be severely frozen, he was days in passing.  Vance Hathaway was the first.  We found him in the gray of dawn crouched doubled in the bow and frozen stiff.  The boy, Lish Dickery, was the second to go.  The other boy, Benny Hardwater, lasted ten or a dozen days.

So bitter was it in the boat that our water and beer froze solid, and it was a difficult task justly to apportion the pieces I broke off with Northrup’s claspknife.  These pieces we put in our mouths and sucked till they melted.  Also, on occasion of snow-squalls, we had all the snow we desired.  All of which was not good for us, causing a fever of inflammation to attack our mouths so that the membranes were continually dry and burning.  And there was no allaying a thirst so generated.  To suck more ice or snow was merely to aggravate the inflammation.  More than anything else, I think it was this that caused the death of Lish Dickery.  He was out of his head and raving for twenty-four hours before he died.  He died babbling for water, and yet he did not die for need of water.  I resisted as much as possible the temptation to suck ice, contenting myself with a shred of tobacco in my cheek, and made out with fair comfort.