Before the words were well spoken the men in the quarter-boat carried the threat into action. The conflict was brief: the quarter-boat was too crowded for fighting. The starboard men in the long-boat fought with their oars, whilst the fellows to port steadied the boat. The fight did not last long, and presently the quarter-boat sheered off, half of the men in her cut about the head and bleeding—two of them senseless. It was sundown on the following day. The long-boat lay adrift. The last drop of water had been served out eight hours before. The quarter-boat, like a horrible phantom, had been haunting and pursuing her all day, begging for water when there was none. It was like the prayers one might expect to hear in hell. The men in the long-boat, gloomy and morose, weighed down with a sense of crime, tortured by thirst, and tormented by the voices imploring for water, lay on their oars when the other boat tried to approach. Now and then, suddenly, and as if moved by a common impulse, they would all shout out together: “We have none.” But the quarter-boat would not believe. It was in vain to hold the breaker with the bung out to prove its dryness, the half-delirious creatures had it fixed in their minds that their comrades were withholding from them the water that was not. Just as the sun touched the sea, Lestrange, rousing himself from a torpor into which he had sunk, raised himself and looked over the gunwale. He saw the quarter-boat drifting a cable’s length away, lit by the full light of sunset, and the spectres in it, seeing him, held out in mute appeal their blackened tongues. Of the night that followed it is almost impossible to speak. Thirst was nothing to what the scowbankers suffered from the torture of the whimpering appeal for water that came to them at intervals during the night. When at last the Arago, a French whale ship, sighted them, the crew of the long-boat were still alive, but three of them were raving madmen. Of the crew of the quarter-boat was saved—not one.
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