With great difficulty the crew gained the rocks. The ship having immediately broken up, they were able to recover nothing eatable, except three small cheeses found entangled among the rock-weed. Some pieces of the spars and sails that came ashore gave them a temporary shelter, but every thing else had been carried away from the island by the strong drift. In a day or two the cook died. Day by day their sufferings from cold and hunger increased. The main-land being in full view before them, they built a boat and got it into the water. It was overset, and dashed in pieces against the rocks. One day they descried three boats in the offing, but no signals they were able to make could attract notice. Then, when reduced to a miserable band of emaciated, hopeless wretches, they undertook and with great labor constructed a raft, upon which two men ventured to attempt to reach the shore. Two days afterward it was found on the beach, with one of its crew lying dead at some distance. After this they were obliged to resort to cannibalism in order to sustain life, subsisting on the body of the carpenter, sparingly doled out to them by the captain's hand. To make an end of this chapter of horrors, the survivors were rescued after having been twenty-four days on the island. The raft was, after all, for them a messenger of preservation, for it induced a search for the builders. No one can read this narrative without feeling his sympathy strongly excited for the brave John Deane, master of the wrecked vessel. He seemed possessed of more than human fortitude, and has told with a sailor's simple directness of his heroic struggle for life. His account was first published in 1711, appended to a sermon by Cotton Mather. Deane afterward commanded a ship of war in the service of the Czar, Peter the Great.[109] Few who have seen the light-house tower on this lonely rock, distant not more than a dozen miles from the coast, receiving daily and nightly obeisance of hundreds of passing sails, can realize that the story of the _Nottingham_ could be true. It is a terrible injunction to keep the lamps trimmed and brightly burning.[110]