“’Well, Captain K., what shall we do next?  We have now about six hours to pass before daylight; and, according to my calculation, we have only about three hours more drift.  Still, before that time there may, perhaps, be some favorable change.’

“He replied:  ’Mr. C., we have done all we can, and can do nothing more.  I am resigned to my fate, and think nothing can save us.’

“I replied:  ’Perhaps you are right; still, I am resolved to struggle to the last.  I am too young to die; I am only twenty-one years of age, and have a widowed mother, three brothers, and a sister looking to me for support and sympathy.  No, sir, I will struggle and persevere to the last.’

“‘Ah,’ said he, ’what can you do?  Our boat will not live five minutes in the surf, and you have no other resource.’

“‘I will take the boat,’ said I, ’and when she fills I will cling to a spar.  I will not die until my strength is exhausted and I can breathe no longer.’  Here the conversation ended, when the captain covered his head with a blanket.  I then wrote the substance of our misfortune in the log-book, and also a letter to my mother; rolled them up in a piece of tarred canvas; and, assisted by the carpenter, put the package into a tight keg, thinking that this might probably be thrown on shore, and thus our friends might perhaps know of our end.”

Men who face Death thus sturdily are apt to overcome him.  The gale lessened, the ship was patched up, the craven captain resumed command, and in two weeks’ time the “Industry” sailed, sorely battered, into Santa Cruz, to find that she had been given up as lost, and her officers and crew “were looked upon as so many men risen from the dead.”  Young Coggeshall lived to follow the sea until gray-haired and weather-beaten, to die in his bed at last, and to tell the story of his eighty voyages in two volumes of memoirs, now growing very rare.  Before he was sixteen he had made the voyage to Cadiz—­a port now moldering, but which once was one of the great portals for the commerce of the world.  In his second voyage, while lying in the harbor of Gibraltar, he witnessed one of the almost every-day dangers to which American sailors of that time were exposed: 

“While we were lying in this port, one morning at daylight we heard firing at a distance.  I took a spy-glass, and from aloft could clearly see three gunboats engaged with a large ship.  It was a fine, clear morning, with scarcely wind enough to ruffle the glass-like surface of the water.  During the first hour or two of this engagement the gunboats had an immense advantage; being propelled both by sails and oars, they were enabled to choose their own position.  While the ship lay becalmed and unmanageable they poured grape and canister shot into her stern and bows like hailstones.  At this time the ship’s crew could not bring a single gun to bear upon them, and all they could do was to use their small arms through the ports and over the rails.  Fortunately