For it was broadside that the galleon glided, almost imperceptibly, ever sucking down.  She glided as if a loadstone drew her, and, at first, Abel Keeling had thought it was a loadstone, pulling at her iron, drawing her through the pearly mists that lay like face-cloths to the water and hid at a short distance the tarnish left by the sail.  But later he had known that it was no loadstone drawing at her iron.  The motion was due—­must be due—­to the absolute deadness of the calm in that silent, sinister, three-miles-broad waterway.  With the eye of his mind he saw that loadstone now as he lay against a gun-truck, all but toppling down the deck.  Soon that would happen again which had happened for five days past.  He would hear again the chattering of monkeys and the screaming of parrots, the mat of green and yellow weeds would creep in towards the Mary over the quicksilver sea, once more the sheer wall of rock would rise, and the men would run....

But no; the men would not run this time to drop the fenders.  There were no men left to do so, unless Bligh was still alive.  Perhaps Bligh was still alive.  He had walked half-way down the quarter-deck steps a little before the sudden nightfall of the day before, had then fallen and lain for a minute (dead, Abel Keeling had supposed, watching him from his place by the gun-truck), and had then got up again and tottered forward to the forecastle, his tall figure swaying and his long arms waving.  Abel Keeling had not seen him since.  Most likely, he had died in the forecastle during the night.  If he had not been dead he would have come aft again for water....

At the remembrance of the water Abel Keeling lifted his head.  The strands of lean muscle about his emaciated mouth worked, and he made a little pressure of his sun-blackened hand on the deck, as if to verify its steepness and his own balance.  The mainmast was some seven or eight yards away....  He put one stiff leg under him and began, seated as he was, to make shuffling movements down the slope.

To the mainmast, near the belfry, was affixed his contrivance for catching water.  It consisted of a collar of rope set lower at one side than at the other (but that had been before the mast had steeved so many degrees away from the zenith), and tallowed beneath.  The mists lingered later in that gully of a strait than they did on the open ocean, and the collar of rope served as a collector for the dews that condensed on the mast.  The drops fell into a small earthen pipkin placed on the deck beneath it.

Abel Keeling reached the pipkin and looked into it.  It was nearly a third full of fresh water.  Good.  If Bligh, the mate, was dead, so much the more water for Abel Keeling, master of the Mary of the Tower.  He dipped two fingers into the pipkin and put them into his mouth.  This he did several times.  He did not dare to raise the pipkin to his black and broken lips for dread of a remembered agony, he could not have told how many days ago, when a devil had whispered to him, and he had gulped down the contents of the pipkin in the morning, and for the rest of the day had gone waterless....  Again he moistened his fingers and sucked them; then he lay sprawling against the mast, idly watching the drops of water as they fell.