“We sailed from Valparaiso on the 4th of July,” continued Jerry. “I was in hopes we should stay in port one day more, for the Americans were going to have a jolly celebration of Independence; but we were all ready, and the wind was fair, so we sailed early in the morning. It was the middle of winter, but we had not seen any ice, and it was about as warm as it is here in October. We soon got into colder weather, though. I remember one night, when we were a few days out, the air grew very cold, and we discovered an immense iceberg right in our track. It was all of a hundred and fifty feet high, above water, and I should think it must have been a mile round it. We made out just to clear it, and that was all. There had been a thick fog for a day or two before, and if we had come across the iceberg then, we should have gone pell-mell right into it, and I reckon that would have been the end of us. Perhaps it would have been better for us if we had run into it, for the weather was calm, and we were near the coast, and might have saved ourselves in the boats.

“We made a pretty good run down the coast till we got into the neighborhood of the Horn, and then our troubles began again. We were beating about, off the cape, for about a month, before we got around it; and all the time it was cold, stormy, and rough. It was more wintry, and the days were shorter, than when we first doubled the cape. But we finally got into the Atlantic, and began to steer north. We thought the worst of the voyage was over now, and we did have very good luck until we got into the latitude of the Rio de la Plata. Do you know where that is, Emily?”

Emily readily found the river on her map.

“It’s a stormy region,” resumed Jerry. “They have a terrible kind of tempest, called a pampero, and we got caught in one. The day before it broke upon us, the weather was fine and the sea quite calm. Toward night, red and angry-looking clouds began to gather in the west, and now and then there was a flash of lightning. A slight breeze sprung up, but the air was hot and stifling, and the captain said we should have a tough blow, and set us to taking in sail. The gale commenced about sunset, and such a gale I don’t believe any of us ever saw before. It was perfectly furious, and that doesn’t half tell the story. The thunder rolled awfully, without stopping for a moment. The lightning seemed almost to scorch us, it was so near and so sharp. The wind blew a hurricane, and the sea ran mountains high, and broke over the deck, sweeping off everything in its way.”

“Didn’t it rain, too?” inquired Harriet; “you didn’t say anything about rain.”

“Well, I don’t know whether it rained or not,” replied Jerry. “It was impossible to tell, the spray was dashing over us so, all the time. I suppose it did rain, though, and in torrents, too. After two or three hours, it was impossible to do anything. Two of the men were washed away from the deck and lost; and a fellow couldn’t keep on deck, unless he was lashed to something. The rigging began to blow away like cobwebs, and we lost most of our sails and spars, and finally the head of the rudder and wheel were broken, so that we lost all control over the brig. Pretty soon after this, she canted over on her beam-ends, so that the upper lee-rail—the rail is the top of a vessel’s sides, that rises above the deck—was all of two feet under water.

“All hands were now called into the after-cabin, as that was the safest place. In the forecastle, where the sailors slept, the water was up to the lower berths. We were a sober set of fellows, then, I can assure you. There we were, huddled together, expecting every moment to go down. Nobody said anything, but I guess most of us kept up a terrible thinking. I know I did, for one; I thought of everything I’d ever done. The captain kept watching the barometer, and down, down, down it kept going till after midnight. But at last it stopped falling, and in about an hour after that it began to rise. That was a sign that the worst of the storm was over; and we began to have a little hope, now, that we might escape, after all. Pretty soon the wind changed, and about daybreak the brig righted herself, and we went on deck to see how matters stood.

“Well, we found it was indeed a pretty sad case. The tempest was not so furious as it had been, but our brig was a complete wreck. Nothing was left of the foremast above the foretop, and the spars and rigging of the mainmast had all disappeared, and only a stump of the mast was left. The jib-boom was carried away and bowsprit sprung. The galley and poop were stove, too. We found there was four feet of water in the hold, and our water and provisions were nearly all spoilt. And, to crown all, we were drifting directly toward a reef, about two miles off, where the surf was breaking in a terrible fashion. Wasn’t that a pretty fix? The first thing the captain did was to try to mend the rudder; but we couldn’t do anything with it. Then he said we must abandon the brig or we should be dashed to pieces on the rocks.

“We had lost a small boat in the gale, but, luckily for us, we had two larger ones that were safe. We got these ready, and stowed away provisions, water, sails, and compasses, in them. Five of us then got into one of the boats, by the captain’s orders. The mate took charge of it, and the captain told him what course to take. The captain and the rest of the crew, and the three passengers that were on board,—nine in all,—took the other boat, which was a life-boat. Our boat came near getting swamped when we launched it, and, in fact, we expected to be dashed to pieces before we got clear of the brig. But, as good luck would have it, both boats got off from the wreck without losing a man.”

“Not good luck, my son,” said Mrs. Preston, “but good Providence; the hand of God was certainly in it.”

“Well, call it good Providence,—it’s all the same,” replied Jerry.

“No, no, don’t say so,” replied his mother, with a reproving look and tone; for she was pained to hear him speak so lightly of the Almighty One who had delivered him from his perils.

“As I was saying,” resumed Jerry, “both boats got clear of the wreck. We didn’t know exactly where we were, but we thought we were not within two or three hundred miles of the coast. The reef the brig was driving upon was a barren island. It was very rocky, and the cliffs rose up, almost perpendicular, nearly two hundred feet, I should think. There was no chance to land, that we could see, even if the weather had been calm. The brig drifted toward the island very fast after we left her, and the last we saw of her, she was thumping upon the rocks, and just ready to go to pieces.

“The weather cleared off finely after sunrise, and the change in the wind made the sea a good deal smoother, so that we could manage the boats pretty well. We saw two or three vessels the day before the hurricane, and we kept a sharp lookout, in hopes we should fall in with one of them. We pulled toward land, and kept within sight of the captain’s boat all that day; but the next morning we could see nothing of her, although we took the course the captain gave us. We concluded, at last, that they had gone down; but it seems they were picked up by a ship bound for New Orleans, three days after the wreck, and brought home. We didn’t know anything about that, however, till we got to Boston. And it seems, too, they thought we had gone down; for they say the ship cruised around a day or two, hunting after us, and they finally concluded we had gone to Davy Jones’s locker.”

“Where’s that?” inquired Harriet, reaching for the atlas.

“You won’t find it there, sis,—it’s in the bottom of the sea,” replied Jerry. “And, in fact, we did come pretty near going there,” he continued. “Our boat couldn’t stand a rough sea half as well as theirs, and if we hadn’t had two or three first-rate seamen, I don’t believe we’d have lived through it. As it was, we got drenched and almost smothered by the sea. All the bread we had was soaking wet with salt water, and we had nothing else to eat but a little junk and rice, and there was no chance to cook them. But the worst thing that happened to us was the losing of our compass. We lost it the first night out. A heavy sea broke over us, and carried away our rudder and one oar and several other things from the boat, among them the compass. We came very near broaching to and upsetting several times during the night, and although this was the second night we had been without sleep, we couldn’t get a moment’s rest, for it took all of us to manage the boat.

“The next day the sea was a good deal smoother, and we rigged up a mast and hoisted a sail, and steered with an oar toward land. From dawn till night we kept a sharp lookout for the other boat, but we didn’t see any signs of her, or of anything else. We got a little sleep, by turns, that day. The third day we began to feel rather blue. So much of our bread was spoilt that we put ourselves upon short allowance. We were sore and stiff and weak, and the sun beat down upon us hot enough to roast us almost. We kept straining our eyes all day, hoping to discover a sail, but we saw nothing. We didn’t look for land yet, for we knew we must be a great way from the coast.”

“You said you were only about two or three hundred miles from shore when you were wrecked,” remarked Mrs. Preston; “I should think you might have sailed that distance in five or six days.”

“I said we must have been at least two or three hundred miles from shore when we were wrecked,” replied Jerry, “but I didn’t know how much more. The pampero drove us out of our course, and the captain had no chance to take an observation, and find where we were, after the gale commenced. Besides, after we took to the boat, we didn’t make much progress. The first day, the sea ran so high that about all we could do was to keep the boat on the top of the waves. After that, we were so used up that we couldn’t row but little; and as our boat was an old tub of a concern, and we had but one small sail, and the wind was almost in our faces, no wonder we didn’t get along very fast.

“Well, we crept along in this way for about a week, and didn’t see the least sign of a sail until the morning of the eighth day. I shall never forget that day, as long as I live. About the middle of the forenoon, we discovered the least speck of a sail, away off in the east, and we soon found she was steering north. We hoisted a signal of distress, and began to pull toward her with all our might. You never saw fellows work harder than we did. A little while before, we could hardly handle an oar; but now strength seemed to come to us, and we pulled away as though we were as fresh and strong as need be. We kept it up for nearly three hours, but at last we found it was of no use, and gave up the race. The sail gained on us, and by noon she was out of sight.”

“Oh, that was too bad,” said Mrs. Preston. “Don’t you suppose anybody in the vessel saw you?”

“No, I suppose not,” said Jerry. “We didn’t get within four miles of them, and our boat was so small that they couldn’t have seen us unless they happened to turn their glass toward us. But it was a terrible disappointment to us. Some of the fellows raved like madmen, and cursed the vessel and everybody that was in it. Others were so down in the mouth that they couldn’t say a word. As for me, I actually went to crying,—a thing I hadn’t done before since the last time I”——

—“Got licked at school,” Jerry was about to add; but just then bethinking himself of sundry tear-drawing admonitions he had received in his earlier service on board the Susan, he concluded not to finish the sentence.

“Well, no wonder we acted strangely,” continued Jerry. “We were just as weak as children. As soon as we lost all hope of getting on board the vessel, our strength went off just as suddenly as it came. We thought we’d give up then,—we didn’t care what became of us. So we floated along, just where the wind and current carried us, the rest of that day and night. But the next morning we discovered an island, five or six miles off, and that roused us up a little. We steered toward it, and concluded we’d land and see if we could find anything to eat.”

Here a sharp and sudden cry from the baby, in the bedroom, called Mrs. Preston away for a few minutes, and interrupted the narrative.