I must have fallen into a stupor, as the effect of the terrible strain on
mind and body of all I had gone through. For I remember nothing of that
first night on the spar, and only came slowly back to sense of sodden pain
and hunger when the sun was up. Some sailorly instinct, of which I have no
recollection whatever, had taken a turn of the rope under my arms and round
the yard, and so kept me from slipping away. But I woke up to agonies of
cold--a sodden deadness of the limbs which set me wondering numbly if I had
any legs left--and a gnawing hunger and emptiness. I felt no thirst;
perhaps because my body was so soaked with water. In the same dull way the
horrors of the previous day came back on me, and I wondered heavily if my
dead comrades had not the better lot.

But the bright sun warmed the upper part of me, and I essayed to drag my
dead legs out of the water, if perchance they might be warmed back to life
also. They came back in time, with horrible pricking pains and cramps which
I could only suffer, lest I should roll off into the water. And if I had, I
am not at all sure that I would have struggled further, so weary and broken
had the night left me.

All that day I lay on my spar, warmed into meagre life by the sun, and
tortured at first with the angry clamour of an empty stomach, for it was
full twenty hours since I had eaten, and the wear and tear alone would have
needed very full supplies to make good. But in time the bitter hunger gave
place to a sick emptiness which I essayed to stay by chewing bits of
floating seaweed. And this, and the drying of my body by the sun, brought
on a furious thirst, to which the sparkling water that broke against my
spar proved a most horrible temptation. So torturing was it in the
afternoon that the sodden cold of the night now seemed as nothing in
comparison, and to relieve it I dropped my body into the water to soak
again.