Читать книгу Men Against the Sea – Book Set. The Greatest Maritime Adventure Novels: The Bounty Trilogy, Lost Island, The Hurricane, Botany Bay, The Far Lands, Tales of the South Seas… онлайн

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The sufferings of the older men were, naturally, greater than those of the younger ones. A midshipman, who was no more than a boy, sold his allowance of water two days running for another man’s allowance of bread. So terrible is thirst that several of the men drank their own urine. They died, without exception, in the sequel of the voyage.

We again attempted to keep the boats together by towing, during the nights of the fifth and sixth of September, but the lines broke as usual, and the strain on the boats was so great that we were obliged to abandon this method of keeping together during the night. Edwards had given his officers the exact latitude of Timor, and the longitude by the timekeeper on that date. This in case we should become separated. Fortunately, we managed to keep within sight of each other during the whole of the following week. In the pinnace we caught one booby, and the blood and flesh were divided into twenty-four shares and distributed in the old seaman’s manner of “Who shall have this?” This good fortune came on the eleventh of September, at a time when we were sorely in need of it.