190 THE AMERICAN WHALEMAN 



ing about a thousand miles off the coast of Peru. After hav- 

 ing been thrown into the water while attacking a cachalot, Cap- 

 tain Hosmer and his five companions vanished from the sight 

 of the bark and the remaining boats. In a small, leaky craft, 

 which they finally succeeded in righting, and without food or 

 water, they were adrift from June 23 until July 13, when Cap- 

 tain Hosmer and one other survivor reached Cocus Island, 

 where they were found two days later by a boat's crew from 

 the whaler Leonidas. During this long period of horror the 

 more hardy were driven to subsist on the flesh and blood of 

 those who died, one after another, from starvation and ex- 

 posure} and in one instance lots were cast to determine which 

 member of the crew should be killed in order to furnish food 

 for those remaining. 



Similar experiences, save only for the final eating of the 

 dead, befell the members of another and larger group. While 

 cruising "on the line" (near the equator), three boats from 

 the bark Harriet were forced to spend an entire night beside 

 a sperm whale which they had killed just before nightfall. 

 In the morning it was blowing a galej and they lay by the body 

 for three days, waiting for the gale to blow itself out and hop- 

 ing against an empty horizon that the bark would find them 

 in cruising about the vicinity. In their disappointment they 

 stood to the westward day after day, drinking rain-water and 

 subsisting upon a shark and several flying-fish which they were 

 fortunate enough to catch. On the eleventh day they were 

 finally picked up by the bark Hanseat, of Hamburg j and only 

 a few days later, by a great stroke of good fortune, they fell 

 in with their own vessel, which had given them up as lost and 

 was making its way to Hawaii in order to refit and to ship a 

 new crew. As late as 1 8 8 1 a boat from the schooner Edward 

 Lee, of Provincetown, likewise drifted about for eleven days 

 without sighting a single sail. With no water and with only 

 a little raw meat, cut from the captured whale which was the 

 cause of their difficulties, the members of the crew suffered 

 agonies of hunger, thirst, and exposure before they were res- 

 cued by a friendly vessel which took them into Pensacola, 

 Florida. 



But even such experiences were, amazingly, not the worst. 



