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“‘I’d like to know what good that old hulk is to us,’ says Tom Simmons. ‘She can’t take us off.’It did look to me somethin’ like the blind leadin’ the blind. But Andy he sings out:’We’d be better off aboard of her, fur she ain’t water- logged, an’, more’n that, I don’t s’pose her stores are all soaked up in salt water.’There was some sense in that, an’ when the steamer had got to within half a mile of us, we was glad to see a boat put out from her with three men in it. It was a queer boat, very low an’ flat, an’ not like any ship’s boat I ever see.

But the two fellers at the oars pulled stiddy, an’ pretty soon the boat was ‘longside of us, an’ the three men on our deck. One of ’em was the first mate of the other wreck, an’ when he found out what was the matter with us, he spun his yarn, which was a longer one than ours. His vessel was the Water Crescent, nine hundred tons, from ‘Frisco to Melbourne, an’ they had sailed about six weeks afore we did. They was about two weeks out when some of their machinery broke down, an’ when they got it patched up it broke ag’in, worse than afore, so that they couldn’t do nothin’ with it. They kep’ along under sail for about a month, makin’ mighty poor headway till the typhoon struck ’em, an’ that cleaned their decks off about as slick as it did ours, but their hatches wasn’t blowed off, an’ they didn’t ship no water wuth mentionin’, an’ the crew havin’ kep’ below, none of ’em was lost. But now they was clean out of provisions an’ water, havin’ been short when the breakdown happened, fur they had sold all the stores they could spare to a French brig in distress that they overhauled when about a week out. When they sighted us they felt pretty sure they’d git some provisions out of us. But when I told the mate what a fix we was in his jaw dropped till his face was as long as one of Andy’s hands. Howsomdever, he said he’d send the boat back fur as many men as it could bring over, an’ see if they couldn’t git up some of our stores. Even if they was soaked with salt water, they’d be better than nothin’. Part of the cargo of the Water Crescent was tools an, things fur some railway contractors out in Australier, an’ the mate told the men to bring over some of them irons that might be used to fish out the stores. All their ship’s boats had been blowed away, an’ the one they had was a kind of shore boat for fresh water, that had been shipped as part of the cargo, an’ stowed below. It couldn’t stand no kind of a sea, but there wasn’t nothin’
but a swell on, an’ when it come back it had the cap’n in it, an’ five men, besides a lot of chains an’ tools.

“Them fellers an’ us worked pretty nigh the rest of the day, an’ we got out a couple of bar’ls of water, which was all right, havin’ been tight bunged, an’ a lot of sea-biscuit, all soaked an sloppy, but we only got a half-bar’l of meat, though three or four of the men stripped an’ dove fur more’n an hour. We cut up some of the meat an’ eat it raw, an’ the cap’n sent some over to the other wreck, which had drifted past us to leeward, an’ would have gone clean away from us if the cap’n hadn’t had a line got out an’ made us fast to it while we was a- workin’ at the stores.