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We eat a lot of them so, fur we couldn’t wait, an’ the rest we spread on the deck to dry, fur the sun was now shinin’ hot enough to bake bread. We couldn’t go below much, fur there was a pretty good swell on the sea, an’ things was floatin’ about so’s to make it dangerous. But we fished out a piece of canvas, which we rigged up ag’in’ the stump of the mainmast so that we could have somethin’ that we could sit down an’ grumble under. What struck us all the hardest was that the bark was loaded with a whole cargo of jolly things to eat, which was just as good as ever they was, fur the water couldn’t git through the tin cans in which they was all put up, an’ here we was with nothin’ to live on but them salted biscuit. There wasn’t no way of gittin’ at any of the ship’s stores, or any of the fancy prog, fur everythin’ was stowed away tight under six or seven feet of water, an’ pretty nigh all the room that was left between decks was filled up with extry spars, lumber, boxes, an’ other floatin’ stuff. All was shiftin’, an’ bumpin’, an’ bangin’ every time the vessel rolled.

“As I said afore, Tom was second mate, an’ I was bo’s’n. Says I to Tom, ‘The thing we’ve got to do is to put up some kind of a spar with a rag on it fur a distress flag, so that we’ll lose no time bein’ took off.”There’s no use a-slavin’ at anythin’ like that,’ says Tom, ‘fur we’ve been blowed off the track of traders, an’ the more we work the hungrier we’ll git, an’ the sooner will them biscuit be gone.’

“Now when I heared Tom say this I sot still an’ began to consider. Bein’ second mate, Tom was, by rights, in command of this craft. But it was easy enough to see that if he commanded there’d never be nothin’ fur Andy an’ me to do. All the grit he had in him he’d used up in holdin’ on durin’ that typhoon. What he wanted to do now was to make himself comfortable till the time come for him to go to Davy Jones’s locker–an’ thinkin’,most likely, that Davy couldn’t make it any hotter fur him than it was on that deck, still in latitood nothin’ at all, fur we’d been blowed along the line pretty nigh due west. So I calls to Andy, who was busy turnin’ over the biscuits on the deck. ‘Andy,’ says I, when he had got under the canvas, ‘we’s goin’ to have a ‘lection fur skipper. Tom, here, is about played out. He’s one candydate, an’ I’m another. Now, who do you vote fur?An’ mind yer eye, youngster, that you don’t make no mistake.”I vote fur you’ says Andy. ‘Carried unanermous!’ says I. ‘An’ I want you to take notice that I’m cap’n of what’s left of the Mary Auguster, an’ you two has got to keep your minds on that, an’ obey orders.’If Davy Jones was to do all that Tom Simmons said when he heared this, the old chap would be kept busier than he ever was yit. But I let him growl his growl out, knowin’ he’d come round all right, fur there wasn’t no help fur it, consid’rin’ Andy an’ me was two to his one. Pretty soon we all went to work, an’ got up a spar from below, which we rigged to the stump of the foremast, with Andy’s shirt atop of it.