HAZARDS AND COMPENSATIONS 195 



four boats, with an allowance of one-half pint of water and 

 one-half biscuit per man per day. For forty-five days they 

 drifted without seeing either a sail or a sign of land. Then 

 they landed on one of the Ladrone Islands j but since no fresh 

 water was found, another start was made, this time for Tinian. 

 There the Spanish governor insisted that they were pirates 

 and refused to allow them to come ashore. At length, how- 

 ever, he was prevailed upon for a small supply of bread and 

 watery and with this scant encouragement they set out again, 

 finally reaching Guam and safety only after another month 

 and a half of semi-starvation. 



The ship Junius was likewise lost on a reef in the Mozam- 

 bique Channel in October, 1851J and on February 11, 1823, 

 the whaler Two Brothers sank within thirty minutes after 

 striking heavily on some hidden rocks in Latitude 24 degrees 

 9 minutes North and Longitude 167 degrees 30 minutes West. 

 In the former case the crew, with only four salt hams as food, 

 spent six days and nights at sea before reaching landj while 

 the twenty-one men of the Two BrotherSy crowded into two 

 boats, were fortunately picked up within a few hours by another 

 whaler. 



Another curious accident befell the ship Minerva Second, 

 of New Bedford, while cruising in the South Pacific in 1856. 

 A reef was touched so lightly that no evidence of serious dam- 

 age could be found. Several months later, however, a heavy 

 leak began quite unaccountably j and the crew, working fur- 

 iously at the pumps, was barely able to prevent the vessel from 

 foundering before reaching Sydney. There it was discovered 

 that the contact with the reef had loosened a portion of the 

 copper sheathing, and that the few boards thus exposed had 

 been so eaten by worms that at length the water was allowed 

 to rush into the hold. 



A further series of dangers awaited those whalemen who 

 ventured into high latitudes in pursuit of the right whale and 

 the bowhead. The extreme cold and the utter barrenness of 

 the Arctic regions were sufficiently serious handicaps j but the 

 greatest perils centered about the existence of vast quantities 

 of ice. Whether in the form of icebergs, ice-floes, field-ice, or 

 shore-ice, it was a constant menace. And perhaps the most 



