But I am running ahead of my yarn. We shared the hatch cover between
us. We took turn and turn about, one lying flat on the cover and
resting, while the other, submerged to the neck, merely held on with
his hands. For two days and nights, spell and spell, on the cover and
in the water, we drifted over the ocean. Towards the last I was
delirious most of the time; and there were times, too, when I heard
Otoo babbling and raving in his native tongue. Our continuous
immersion prevented us from dying of thirst, though the sea water and
the sunshine gave us the prettiest imaginable combination of salt
pickle and sunburn.

In the end, Otoo saved my life; for I came to lying on the beach
twenty feet from the water, sheltered from the sun by a couple of
cocoanut leaves. No one but Otoo could have dragged me there and stuck
up the leaves for shade. He was lying beside me. I went off again; and
the next time I came round, it was cool and starry night, and Otoo was
pressing a drinking cocoanut to my lips.

We were the sole survivors of the Petite Jeanne. Captain Oudouse must
have succumbed to exhaustion, for several days later his hatch cover
drifted ashore without him. Otoo and I lived with the natives of the
atoll for a week, when we were rescued by the French cruiser and taken
to Tahiti. In the meantime, however, we had performed the ceremony of
exchanging names. In the South Seas such a ceremony binds two men
closer together than blood brothership. The initiative had been mine;
and Otoo was rapturously delighted when I suggested it.

"It is well," he said, in Tahitian. "For we have been mates together
for two days on the lips of Death."