Petit, watching Fate from the corner of a red eye, saw the road open.
“At the most,” he explained to the three comrades, “we can but die, and be damned into hell. From the hell here to the hell there—it is but a passage.”
The comrades being each desperate criminals like himself, were agreed.
So they succeeded in stealing a whaleboat, and having matured their schemes, they fled one night for liberty, leaving fresh blood-stains behind them.
At sunrise in the morning Jean Petit and his three friends found themselves, with a scanty supply of provisions and water, afloat on the Pacific without either chart or compass.
Petit assumed the leadership without formality of election. He was captain and commander. His word, supported by the sharp knife in his belt, became law.
He sat sullenly at the tiller, and as the sun rose at the sea margin, headed the boat south by west.
Thus commenced one of the strangest voyages in history.
All that day, and the next, and the next, and the next, the boat, with its crew of four, headed south, south and south by west.
They had taken count of food and water, and to each was apportioned his share.
Each morning Jean Petit, at whose feet lay the provisions, grimly doled out the scanty portions.
At the end of the week a change had come over the four.
They were lean and weatherbeaten; their hands and faces were blistered by the sun. Their cheeks were sunken. There was an anxious look in their hollow eyes.
At the end of fourteen days the change was still more remarkable. Their hair and beards had grown strangely long; their hands had taken the appearance of claws, tipped with long sharp, carnivorous-looking fingernails. Their lips were dry and broken, and their skins had turned from bronze to an ugly yellow.
For ten days there had fallen not a drop of rain; they had left but a pint and a half of impure water.
On the morning of the fifteenth day Jean Petit divided this, together with the remnant of the food, into four even portions!
Never had the grim red-eyed man at the stern been more exact and precise.
“It is well, comrades,” said he, weighing the last crumb of bread, “that we pronounce a benediction. ‘Eat, drink, and be merry!’” he cried solemnly, “‘for to-morrow we die.’”