On the fifteenth day, they had only one day's bread, and one bottle of
water remaining of a second supply of rain; on this day Matthews, a
quarter-master, the stoutest man in the boat, perished of hunger and
cold. This poor man, on the day before, had complained of want of
strength in his throat, as he expressed it, to swallow his morsel; and,
in the night, drank salt-water, grew delirious, and died without a
groan. Hitherto despair and gloom had been successfully prevented, the
men, when the evenings closed in, having been encouraged by turns to
sing a song, or relate a story, instead of a supper: 'but,' says the
Captain, 'this evening I found it impossible to raise either.' The
Captain had directed the clothes to be taken from the corpse of Matthews
and given to some of the men, who were perishing with, cold; but the
shocking skeleton-like appearance of his remains made such an impression
on the people, that all efforts to raise their spirits were ineffectual.
On the following day, the sixteenth, their last breakfast was served
with the bread and water remaining, when John Gregory, the
quarter-master, declared with much confidence that he saw land in the
south-east, which turned out to be Fayal.
But the most extraordinary _feat of navigation_ is that which is related
(on good authority) in a note of the _Quarterly Review_, vol. xviii. pp.
337-339:--
Of all the feats of navigation on record, however, that of Diogo Botelho
Perreira, in the early period of 1536-37, stands pre-eminent; it is
extracted from the voluminous Decades of Diogo de Couto, whose work,
though abounding with much curious matter, like those of most of the old
Portuguese writers, has not been fortunate enough to obtain an English
translation. We are indebted to a friend for pointing it out to us, and
we conceive it will be read with interest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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