"Is the captain dead?"

The black figures of three or four men in the after-part of the Long-boat
all stooped down together as my voice reached them. They were lost to
view for about a minute; then appeared again--one man among them was held
up on his feet by the rest, and he hailed back the blessed words (a very
faint hope went a very long way with people in our desperate situation):
"Not yet!"

The relief felt by me, and by all with me, when we knew that our captain,
though unfitted for duty, was not lost to us, it is not in words--at
least, not in such words as a man like me can command--to express. I did
my best to cheer the men by telling them what a good sign it was that we
were not as badly off yet as we had feared; and then communicated what
instructions I had to give, to William Rames, who was to be left in
command in my place when I took charge of the Long-boat. After that,
there was nothing to be done, but to wait for the chance of the wind
dropping at sunset, and the sea going down afterwards, so as to enable
our weak crews to lay the two boats alongside of each other, without
undue risk--or, to put it plainer, without saddling ourselves with the
necessity for any extraordinary exertion of strength or skill. Both the
one and the other had now been starved out of us for days and days
together.

At sunset the wind suddenly dropped, but the sea, which had been running
high for so long a time past, took hours after that before it showed any
signs of getting to rest. The moon was shining, the sky was wonderfully
clear, and it could not have been, according to my calculations, far off
midnight, when the long, slow, regular swell of the calming ocean fairly