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.