As the voyage grew longer, we had to be more and more sparing with our drinking water. The supply began to run low. We could no longer collect rain water in our sails. They were coated with salt. We tried to wash them out in the rain, but then the spray and the waves kept washing in and kept the sails salty and added a further salting to any water we collected. Our supply of fruit that we had picked up in the Cook Islands ran out now, and about all we had left was hardtack, not in itself a thirst-quenching kind of food. We also had a side of delicious bacon, but of course we dared not touch it for fear of increasing our thirst. You have often heard of the torments of thirst at sea? Well, they are not exaggerated, for exaggeration is impossible. When the rains stopped and the blazing tropical sun beat down on us all day and we still had days to sail on and on, then the torments of the damned, the torments of thirst smote us with a fiery agony. Our gums dried out and were like rough iron. We sucked our fingers and gnawed at our knuckles to bring a flow of saliva and refresh our burning mouths. And then came the sailor's worst enemy, scurvy. Our diet of hardtack, lack of exercise, and general hardships brought it on. Our knees swelled up so badly that we had to cut our trousers. The rocking of the boat knocked them together or against the wooden sides, and then the pain was almost unendurable. Our lips were black and broken. Our tongues were swollen and hard. It was as if you had a stone in your mouth. Our gums became snow white and seemed to recede. Our teeth felt as though they were sticking far out of our jaws. They hurt constantly and were loose and felt as if they were going to drop out. With these shaking teeth we ate our hardtack. I never before knew how hard hardtack was. We had unending headaches, and it seemed as if something were pressing our eyes right out of their sockets. We got water in our legs, and could hardly stand any more. We had to slide around the seats to do what had to be done in navigating the boat. In scurvy, the blood turns to water, first in the legs and then upward. When it reaches the heart you die. Where the blood is water the flesh is white, and you can see the line of the white creep slowly up. We wondered who would be the first--the first to have the line of white rise to the heart. My boys made marks to show the line clearly and mark its daily progress upward. It was a kind of sport. It was keeping a daily log, a log of death. Parmien was the youngest of us, but he seemed to be on his way to win the race. The line was higher on him than on the others. He joked about it. There was nothing terrible in it. We were all in a deep apathy. Our brains were like balls of cotton. Nothing mattered, certainly not death. Death would come, we thought, as a relief from these sufferings. The prospect of its arrival became more and more attractive.