It is easily given.

The tall dark-bearded man is Captain Robert Redwood, the skipper of an American merchant-vessel, for some time trading among the islands of the Indian Archipelago.

The Irishman is his ship-carpenter, the Malay his pilot, while the others are two common sailors of his crew.

The boy and girl are his children, who, having no mother or near relatives at home, have been brought along with him on his trading voyage to the Eastern Isles.

The vessel passing from Manilla, in the Philippines, to the Dutch settlement of Macassar, in the island of Celebes, has been caught in a _typhoon_ and swamped near the middle of the Celebes Sea; her crew have escaped in a boat--the pinnace--but saved from death by drowning only to find, most of them, the same watery grave after long-procrastinated suffering from thirst, from hunger, from all the agonies of starvation.
One after another have they succumbed, and been thrown overboard, until the survivors are only six in number.