This was on May 22, or eighteen days after they had left the island of Tofa, during most of which time there had been drenching rains and somber skies and heavy seas, which broke into the boat and almost swamped her time and again. The seventeen men were still existing on the morsels of bread and pork carefully weighed out with the musket-ball, which they said was “little better than starving,” but Bligh held them in hand, and there was no rebellion even when he explained that the system of rationing would permit them to exist for twenty-nine days longer, though he was not at all certain that they could fetch Timor in that time, and he purposed to make the stores hold out for six weeks. In order to do that they would have to omit their supper and get along on two meals of a twenty-fifth of a pound of bread. “I was apprehensive that a proposal on this head would be ill received,” Lieutenant Bligh commented, “and that it would require my utmost resolution to enforce it. However, on representing to the people the necessity of guarding against casual delays, from adverse winds, and other causes, they all cheerfully assented.” There was never a more methodical man than this Lieutenant William Bligh. When they caught a couple of boobies, sea-fowl as large as a duck, the bodies were divided into seventeen portions, and one man was detailed to turn his back while another pointed at the pieces and asked, “Who is to have this?” The first sailor named a companion at random, and drew the fragment designated. In this manner a fair distribution was assured, and the man who drew the feet of the bird to chew could have no quarrel with the lucky sailor who got a bit of the breast. Bligh was a capable navigator with the quadrant and compass which the mutineers had given him and he was driving for a passage to the southward of Endeavor Straits and an offing on the coast of New Holland, as Australia was then called. His crew was exceedingly low-spirited, but he diverted them with the hope of finding smoother water inside the far-flung reefs and a landing where they might eat fresh fruits and ease their weary bones for a little while. After three weeks of misery, this speck of an open boat in a trackless waste of ocean descried the wooded headlands of New Holland and a surf which beat against the outer ramparts of coral. They found an opening and rowed into a lagoon, where they hauled the boat out upon the white sand and feasted luxuriously on oysters. These they roasted in a fire which Lieutenant Bligh kindled with a lens of his spy-glass. Then they cooked a stew, and were so mightily refreshed that “all retained strength and fortitude sufficient to resist what might be expected in our voyage to Timor.”