A blanket, which was by accident in the boat, served as a sail, and with this they scudded before the wind, in expectation of being swallowed up by every wave; with great difficulty the boat was cleared of water before the return of the next great sea; all of the people were half drowned, and sitting, except the balers, at the bottom of the boat.

On quitting the ship the distance of Fayal was two hundred and sixty leagues, or about nine hundred English miles.
Their provisions were a bag of bread, a small ham, a single piece of pork, two quart bottles of water, and a few of French cordials.

One biscuit, divided into twelve morsels, was served for breakfast, and the same for dinner; the neck of a bottle broken off, with the cork in, supplied the place of a glass; and this filled with water was the allowance for twenty-four hours for each man.
On the fifteenth day, they had only one day's bread, and one bottle of water remaining of a second supply of rain; on this day Matthews, a quarter-master, the stoutest man in the boat, perished of hunger and cold.

This poor man, on the day before, had complained of want of strength in his throat, as he expressed it, to swallow his morsel; and, in the night, drank salt-water, grew delirious, and died without a groan.

Hitherto despair and gloom had been successfully prevented, the men, when the evenings closed in, having been encouraged by turns to sing a song, or relate a story, instead of a supper: 'but,' says the Captain, 'this evening I found it impossible to raise either.' The Captain had directed the clothes to be taken from the corpse of Matthews and given to some of the men, who were perishing with, cold; but the shocking skeleton-like appearance of his remains made such an impression on the people, that all efforts to raise their spirits were ineffectual.
On the following day, the sixteenth, their last breakfast was served with the bread and water remaining, when John Gregory, the quarter-master, declared with much confidence that he saw land in the south-east, which turned out to be Fayal.
But the most extraordinary _feat of navigation_ is that which is related (on good authority) in a note of the _Quarterly Review_, vol.xviii.