At the end of two hours, by mutual consent, the fight was declared a draw.  The points standing at sixty-one and a half against sixty-two.

The ships were unlashed, and with three cheers from each crew, were headed on their way.

“Now, then,” said the Captain to me aside, “let us see how many of the crew are sufficiently exhausted to be thrown overboard.”

He went below.  In a few minutes he re-appeared, his face deadly pale.  “Blowhard,” he said, “the ship is sinking.  One of the pirates (sheer accident, of course, I blame no one) has kicked a hole in the side.  Let us sound the well.”

We put our ear to the ship’s well.  It sounded like water.

The men were put to the pumps and worked with the frenzied effort which only those who have been drowned in a sinking ship can understand.

At six p.m. the well marked one half an inch of water, at nightfall three-quarters of an inch, and at daybreak, after a night of unremitting toil, seven-eighths of an inch.

By noon of the next day the water had risen to fifteen-sixteenths of an inch, and on the next night the sounding showed thirty-one thirty-seconds of an inch of water in the hold.  The situation was desperate.  At this rate of increase few, if any, could tell where it would rise to in a few days.

That night the Captain called me to his cabin.  He had a book of mathematical tables in front of him, and great sheets of vulgar fractions littered the floor on all sides.

“The ship is bound to sink,” he said, “in fact, Blowhard, she is sinking.  I can prove it.  It may be six months or it may take years, but if she goes on like this, sink she must.  There is nothing for it but to abandon her.”

That night, in the dead of darkness, while the crew were busy at the pumps, the Captain and I built a raft.

Unobserved we cut down the masts, chopped them into suitable lengths, laid them crosswise in a pile and lashed them tightly together with bootlaces.

Hastily we threw on board a couple of boxes of food and bottles of drinking fluid, a sextant, a cronometer, a gas-meter, a bicycle pump and a few other scientific instruments.  Then taking advantage of a roll in the motion of the ship, we launched the raft, lowered ourselves upon a line, and under cover of the heavy dark of a tropical night, we paddled away from the doomed vessel.

The break of day found us a tiny speck on the Indian Ocean.  We looked about as big as this (.).

In the morning, after dressing, and shaving as best we could, we opened our box of food and drink.

Then came the awful horror of our situation.

One by one the Captain took from the box the square blue tins of canned beef which it contained.  We counted fifty-two in all.  Anxiously and with drawn faces we watched until the last can was lifted from the box.  A single thought was in our minds.  When the end came the Captain stood up on the raft with wild eyes staring at the sky.