No, sir, I will struggle and persevere to the last.' "'Ah,' said he, 'what can you do?
Our boat will not live five minutes in the surf, and you have no other resource.' "'I will take the boat,' said I, 'and when she fills I will cling to a spar.

I will not die until my strength is exhausted and I can breathe no longer.' Here the conversation ended, when the captain covered his head with a blanket.

I then wrote the substance of our misfortune in the log-book, and also a letter to my mother; rolled them up in a piece of tarred canvas; and, assisted by the carpenter, put the package into a tight keg, thinking that this might probably be thrown on shore, and thus our friends might perhaps know of our end." Men who face Death thus sturdily are apt to overcome him.

The gale lessened, the ship was patched up, the craven captain resumed command, and in two weeks' time the "Industry" sailed, sorely battered, into Santa Cruz, to find that she had been given up as lost, and her officers and crew "were looked upon as so many men risen from the dead." Young Coggeshall lived to follow the sea until gray-haired and weather-beaten, to die in his bed at last, and to tell the story of his eighty voyages in two volumes of memoirs, now growing very rare.

Before he was sixteen he had made the voyage to Cadiz--a port now moldering, but which once was one of the great portals for the commerce of the world.