464 INCIDENTS OF TRAVEL. 



getting scarce, and with crew and passengers twenty 

 in number, we broached our last cask of water. The 

 heat was scorching, and the calm and stillness of the 

 sea were fearful. All said we were enchanted ; and. the 

 sailors added, half in earnest, that it was on account of 

 the heretics ; sharks more numerous than ever ; we 

 could not look over the side of the vessel without see- 

 ing three or four, as if waiting for prey. 



On the fourteenth the captain was alarmed. The log 

 was thrown regularly, but could not give his position. 

 Toward evening we saw an enormous monster, with a 

 straight black head ten feet out of water, moving di- 

 rectly toward us. The captain, looking at it from the 

 rigging with a glass, said it was not a whale. Another 

 of the same kind appeared at the stern, and we were 

 really nervous ; but we were relieved by hearing them 

 spout, and seeing a column of water thrown into the air. 

 At dark they were lying huge and motionless on the 

 surface of the water. 



On the fifteenth, to our great joy, a slight breeze 

 sprang up in the morning, and the log gave three miles 

 an hour. At twelve o'clock we took the latitude, which 

 was in 25° 10', and found that in steering southward at 

 the rate of three miles an hour by the log, we were fifty- 

 five miles to the northward of the reckoning of the day 

 before. The captain now believed that we were in the 

 midst of the Gulf Stream, had been so perhaps two or 

 three days, and were then two or three hundred miles 

 past Havana. Mr. Catherwood's chronometer gave 88° 

 longitude ; but this was so far out of the way by our 

 dead reckoning, that, with our distrust of the chronome- 

 ter, we all disregarded it, and the captain especially. 

 We were then in a very bad position, short of provis- 

 ions and water, and drifted past our port. The captain 



