"Well, that was a go, and no mistake, Joe!" Jim Tucker said. "Fancy having to live for six months on seal frizzled over a lamp and raw cabbages! You did not tell us how you did for drink."
"Melted snow," Joe replied. "I used to fix one of the basins of dried seal-skin a foot or so above the lamp, so that it would be hot enough to melt the snow without a risk of its burning itself. Then I used to pour the water from one basin to another for half an hour. Melted snow-water is poor stuff if you don't do that. I do not know the rights of it, but I have heard tell that it's 'cause there ain't no air in it, though for my part I never could see no air in water, except in surf. I had heard that that was the way they treated condensed water, and anyhow it was a sort of amusement like, and helped to pass the time."
"Well, it is a capital story to listen to, Joe," Jack said; "but I should not like to go through it myself. It must have been an awful time, shut up in a hole with a stinking lamp, for I expect it did stink, all those months."
"It did use to smell powerful strong sometimes, lad, and many a time at first it turned me as sick as a youngster on his first v'yage; but I got accustomed to it after a bit. The great thing was to keep your wick short."
"And now about your other wreck not far from here?"
"I will tell you that to-morrow evening, lads. That was a more ordinary kind of thing. It wasn't pleasant; I don't know that wrecks ever are, but it wasn't such an out-of-the-way thing as being chucked up on to an iceberg."
THE following evening, as the twilight was falling, the lads again gathered round the old sailor.
"Well, lads," he began, "just as this other affair I was telling you about happened further down south, so the other was a goodish bit to the north. We were bound for the Persian Gulf, and I fancy the captain got wrong with his reckonings. He had had trouble before we sailed; had lost his wife sudden, I heard, and, more's the pity, he took to drink. He was the first and last captain as ever I sailed under as did it; for Godstone & Son were always mighty particular with their masters, and would not have a man, not for ever so, who was given to lifting his elbow. Anyhow, we went wrong; and it is a baddish place to go wrong, I can tell you, is the Mozambique Channel. There was a haze on the water and a light breeze, and just about eight bells in the morning we went plump ashore--though none of us thought we were within a hundred miles of land. There was a pretty to-do, as you might fancy; but we had to wait until morning to see where we were; then we found, when the mist lifted a bit that we were on a low sandy coast.