58 CAPTAIN KENNEDY. 
tion of our health, during a course of sixteen 
days of heavy and almost continual rain, I would 
recommend to every one, in a similar situation, 
the method we practised, which is, to dip their 
clothes in the salt water, and wring them out as 
often as they become filled with rain. It was 
the only resource we had, and, I believe, was of 
the greatest service to us ; for it felt more like a 
change of dry clothes than could well be ima- 
gined. We had occasion to do this so often, that 
at length all our clothes were wrung to pieces ; 
for, except the few days we passed on the coast 
of New Holland, we were continually wet either 
with rain or sea." 
The practice alluded to in this passage, as 
well as in other parts of Captain Bligh's affect- 
ing narrative, is also strongly recommended by 
Captain Kennedy, in his account of the loss of 
his ship at sea, and of his distresses afterwards. 
Captain Kennedy sailed with his crew from 
Port Royal, Jamaica, on the 21st of December, 
1768. They were shipwrecked, their vessel was 
sunk, and thirteen men were crowded into the 
yawl. Tossed about with hardly any provisions, 
they at last reached the Bay of Honduras. " It 
may," says he, " appear very remarkable, that 
though I had neither tasted food nor drank 
for eight days, I did not feel the sensations 
of hunger and thirst On the fourteenth day 
my drought often required me to gargle my 
throat with salt water. On the 10th of January, 
1769, we arrived at St. George's Quay in a 
very languid state, having then lost six out of 
the thirteen in the coarse of about twenty days. 
