This was too great a distance for a jump, seeing that it must be made from rail to rail without a run to give me a send-off; and yet it was so short that my not being able to cross it never even entered my mind. Had there been a mast standing on the hulk, with a yard fast to it, I could have rigged a rope from the yard-arm and swung myself across in a moment; but the decks being sea-swept, with nothing left standing on them, that way was not open to me; nor could I find a light spar--even the flag-staff at the stern being snapt away--that I could stretch across from one rail to the other and make a bridge of. The only other thing that occurred to me was to tear off some of the doors in the cabin and to make of them a little raft that I could pass by, though I saw well enough that pushing a raft through so dense a tangle even for that short distance would be a hard job. And then I had the thought that perhaps on the sailing-ship lying beside me I might find a sound boat, which would better answer my purpose since it could be the more easily moved through the weed. In point of fact I could not have moved a boat a single foot through that thicket without cutting a passage for it, and I might have thrown overboard three or four doors and so made a bridge over the weed that would have borne me easily--but I did not know then as much about that strange sea-growth as I came to know later on. As there was no hurry in one way, the ships being so bedded fast there that they were certain not to move more than a few feet at the utmost, I hunted up some food before setting myself to what I knew would be a heavy task; finding cold victuals of a coarse sort in the galley--left from the last meal that the two men had made there--and fairly fresh water in the tank. It was hard work eating, on board that foul ship and thinking of the foul hands which had made the food ready; but going without eating would have been harder, for I had the healthy appetite of a sound young fellow three-and-twenty years old. When I had finished my meal, and I got through it quickly, I made fast a line to the steamer's rail and slipped down it to the deck of the sailing-ship--a fine vessel of above a thousand tons, built of wood and on clipper lines. There was an immediate sense of relief in getting aboard of her, and away from the blood-stained steamer where the dead men had been; but I saw at a glance that what I was after was not there. She had carried four boats on her rail, as I could tell by the davits, and likely enough a long-boat on her fore-castle as well. But all of them were gone, and I could only hope--since they were not there for my use--that her crew had got safe away in them: as well enough might have happened when she was floating water-logged after the storm that had wrecked her was past.