Then, sitting on the little deck, I looked about me to see if I could discover any traces of last night’s horror; but there was a moderate breeze blowing, and I instantly recognised that the junk must have drifted several miles from the spot where the disaster had occurred. There was nothing to be seen, no, not so much as a solitary scrap of wreckage, within the radius of a mile, beyond which everything was blotted out by a curtain of haze.
By this time I had pretty completely recovered my senses, and was able to fully realise my situation. I was wet, cold, feverish, and horribly thirsty, and was the sole occupant of a small, leaky junk of about twenty-five tons, without masts or sails, these having been removed in order the better to fit her for the duty of carrying troops. She had a pair of sweeps aboard, it is true; but they were so ponderous that each demanded the strength of four men to work it; they were therefore quite useless to me, even had I known precisely where I was, which I did not. All I knew was that I was some fifty miles, or thereabout, to the southward and eastward of Iwon; but I might as well have been five hundred miles from the place, for all the means I had of returning to it, or even of making a shot at Gensan. The fact was that I was adrift in a hulk; and the utmost that I could do was to keep her afloat, if possible, and patiently wait for something to come along and take me off her.
Realising this, I proceeded to overhaul the junk, with a view to ascertaining what were her resources. I remembered that a cask of fresh water had been put aboard her for the use of the troops while landing and embarking; and I soon found this, still more than half-full, snugly stowed away under her foredeck, with a lot of raffle consisting of odds and ends of line of varying sizes, a fragment of fishing-net, a few short lengths of planking, and other utterly useless stuff. I drank dipper after dipper of water, until my raging thirst was quenched, and then stripped off my clothes, wrung them out, and spread them to dry in the wind while I rubbed my body dry with my hands, employing a considerable amount of exertion, in order to restore warmth to my cramped limbs. In this effort I was at length successful; and my next business was to search the other end of the junk, in the vague hope that I might find something in the way of food; but there was none; therefore I had to go hungry. I had a bucket, however, and with this I bailed the hooker practically dry, as much to pass the time and keep myself warm, as for any other reason. Then, having done everything that I could think of, all that remained for me was to wait as patiently as might be for something to come along and rescue me.
My position was by no means an enviable one. I had no food; but, for the moment, that did not greatly matter, since the smart of my wound had made me feverish, and I had no appetite. On the other hand, I suffered from an incessant thirst, which even the copious draughts of water in which I frequently indulged did little to allay. The weather was overcast, and there was a thin mist lying upon the surface of the grey sea which circumscribed my view to a radius of less than a mile, and the air was keenly raw. I recognised that it was necessary to keep myself constantly active, to counteract the effect of the chilly atmosphere, and this I did, bustling about, overhauling the raffle in the junk, and executing a good deal of utterly useless work, which I varied from time to time by taking long spells of watching, in the hope of sighting some craft to which I might signal for assistance. Also I repeatedly bathed my head in sea water, which did a little toward reducing the feeling of feverishness from which I was suffering.
Toward the afternoon the conditions became more favourable. The clouds broke, the sun came out and took the feeling of rawness out of the air, so that I no longer suffered from the cold, and the mist melted away, affording me a clear view to the horizon. But the sea was bare; there was not even so much as a blur of steamer’s smoke staining the sky in any direction; and I began to wonder how long it might be before I should be picked up, or whether indeed I should be picked up at all. I knew, of course, that the non-arrival of the Kinshiu at Gensan would give rise to speculation, and that probably a search for her would be instituted along the course which she might be expected to steer, but I was already several miles from that course, and hourly drifting farther from it. The question of importance to me was whether the search would extend over a sufficiently wide area to take me in.
The remainder of that day passed uneventfully for me; I could do nothing beyond what I have already indicated; no craft of any description hove in sight; and toward sunset the pangs of hunger began to manifest themselves. I watched the sea until night closed down; and then, when it became so dark that further watching was useless, I crept in under the fore deck among the raffle and turned in upon such a bed as I had been able to prepare for myself during the day, in anticipation of the possibility that I might be obliged to pass the night aboard the junk.
As might be supposed, under the circumstances, the earlier part of the night at least was full of discomfort for me; but somewhere along in the small hours I dropped off to sleep, and eventually slept soundly, to be awakened by the noise of steam blowing off, close at hand. I started up, listened for a moment to assure myself that the sound was not an illusion, and, satisfied that it was real, scrambled up on the junk’s deck, to be greeted with the sight of several ships of war close at hand. A single glance sufficed to assure me that my troubles were at an end; for the ships in sight were those of Admiral Kamimura’s squadron, the Idzumi being hove-to at less than a cable’s length distant, in the very act of lowering a boat. There were several officers on her bridge, and she was close enough to enable me to see that they were all scrutinising the junk through their glasses; I therefore waved to them, and was waved to in reply. A few minutes later the boat, in charge of a lieutenant, dashed smartly alongside and the officer scrambled nimbly up the junk’s low side.
I think he had not recognised me until then, although we knew each other very well. He gazed at me dubiously for a moment, then his hand shot out to grasp mine as he exclaimed:
“Hillo! my dear Swinburne, what does this mean; what are you doing here? And are you all alone?”
I answered his question by informing him, in as few words as possible, of what had happened to the ill-fated Kinshiu Maru, and then we got down into the boat and pulled across to the Idzumi, where Kamimura and his officers were impatiently awaiting us. They gave me the warmest of welcomes, and would not even permit me to tell them my story, the lieutenant who had rescued me assuring them that he had already obtained all the particulars and could tell it as well as I could. I was accordingly at once turned over to the care of the ship’s surgeon, and made comfortable in the sick bay, the squadron immediately resuming its cruise.
Now that the tension of looking after myself was relaxed, a reaction set in, with high fever, and for the next four days I was really ill, with frequent intervals of delirium. But there were no complications of any kind, and by the end of the sixth day I was so far recovered as to be able to dress and sit up for an hour or two. Everybody aboard the Idzumi was exceedingly kind to me, as kind indeed as though they had been brothers; and this fraternal feeling of kindly interest was not confined to the Idzumi alone, Kamimura himself informing me, with a smile, that it had become quite a habit for the other ships to signal an inquiry as to my condition, every morning. As the officers of the ship came off watch, they came tiptoeing along to inquire after me; and if I happened to be awake, and the doctor permitted it, they would sit and chat with me for half an hour or so before retiring to their cabins, by which means I gradually acquired all the missing links in the story of the squadron’s abortive cruise.