For life, dear life, nearly suffocated, amidst the hissing spray, we
reached the cutter, the dog and his helpless master.

* * * * *

For three miserable days I had been exposed, half naked and bareheaded,
in an open boat, without water, or food, or shade. The third fierce West
Indian noon was long passed, and once more the dry, burning sun sank in
the west, like a red hot shield of iron. I glared on the noble dog as he
lay at the bottom of the boat, and would have torn at his throat with my
teeth, not for food, but that I might drink his hot blood; but as he
turned his dull, gray, glazing eye on me, the pulses of my heart
stopped, and I fell senseless.

When my recollection returned, I was stretched on some fresh plantain
leaves, in a low, smoky hut, with my faithful dog lying beside me,
whining and licking my hands and face. Underneath the joists, that bound
the rafters of the roof together, lay a corpse, wrapped in a boatsail,
on which was clumsily written with charcoal, "The body of John Deadeye,
Esq., late commander of his Britannic Majesty's sloop Torch."

There was a fire on the floor, at which Lieutenant Splinter, in his
shirt and trousers, drenched, unshorn, and death-like, was roasting a
joint of meat, whilst a dwarfish Indian sat opposite to him fanning the
flame with a palm-leaf. I had been nourished during my delirium; for the
fierceness of my sufferings were assuaged, and I was comparatively
strong. I anxiously inquired of the lieutenant the fate of our
shipmates.

"All gone down in the old Torch; and had it not been for the launch and