“Safe enough, Boston,” he remarked.  “But you go down; you’re younger.”

Boston smiled and sprang down on the pile, from which he passed up a box.  “Looks like tinned stuff, Doc.  Open it, and I’ll look over here.”

The doctor smashed the box with his foot, and found, as the other had thought, that it contained cylindrical cans; but the labels were faded with age.  Opening one with his jack-knife, he tasted the contents.  It was a mixture of meat and a fluid, called by sailors “soup-and-bully,” and as fresh and sweet as though canned the day before.

“We’re all right, Boston,” he called down the hatch.  “Here’s as good a dish as I’ve tasted for months.  Ready cooked, too.”

Boston soon appeared.  “There are some beef or pork barrels over in the wing,” he said, “and plenty of this canned stuff.  I don’t know what good the salt meat is.  The barrels seem tight, but we won’t need to broach one for a while.  There’s a bag of coffee—­gone to dust, and some hard bread that isn’t fit to eat; but this’ll do.”  He picked up the open can.

“Boston,” said the doctor, “if those barrels contain meat, we’ll find it cooked—­boiled in its own brine, like this.”

“Isn’t it strange,” said Boston, as he tasted the contents of the can, “that this stuff should keep so long?”

“Not at all.  It was cooked thoroughly by the heat, and then frozen.  If your barrels haven’t burst from the expansion of the brine under the heat or cold, you’ll find the meat just as good.”

“But rather salty, if I’m a judge of salt-horse.  Now, where’s the sail-locker?  We want a sail on that foremast.  It must be forward.”

In the forecastle they found sailor’s chests and clothing in all stages of ruin, but none of the spare sails that ships carry.  In the boatswain’s locker, in one corner of the forecastle, however, they found some iron-strapped blocks in fairly good condition, which Boston noted.  Then they opened the main-hatch, and discovered a mixed pile of boxes, some showing protruding necks of large bottles, or carboys, others nothing but the circular opening.  Here and there in the tangled heap were sections of canvas sails—­rolled and unrolled, but all yellow and worthless.  They closed the hatch and returned to the cabin, where they could converse.

“They stowed their spare canvas in the ’tween-deck on top of the cargo,” said Boston; “and the carboys—­”

“And the carboys burst from the heat and ruined the sails,” broke in the doctor.  “But another question is, what became of that acid?”

“If it’s not in the ’tween-deck yet, it must be in the hold—­leaked through the hatches.”

“I hope it hasn’t reached the iron in the hull, Boston, my boy.  It takes a long time for cold acids to act on iron after the first oxidation, but in fifty years mixed nitric and sulphuric will do lots of work.”