In this fashion the seemingly endless night at length wore itself away and the lowering dawn came, disclosing to us the true seriousness of our condition.  There we were, aweary, hollow-eyed, haggard-looking little band, sodden to the very bones of us with long hours of exposure to the pitiless buffeting of rain and sea, our flesh salt-encrusted, our eyes bloodshot, our hands raw and bleeding with the severe and protracted work at the pumps, adrift in mid-ocean upon a mastless, sorely battered, and badly leaking hulk, with her ballast shifted and a heavy list, tossed helplessly upon a furiously raging sea that seemed instinct with a relentless determination to overwhelm us, toiling and fighting doggedly against the untiring elements, in the hope that, perchance, if our strength held out, we might keep the now crazy, straining, and complaining fabric beneath us afloat long enough to afford us some chance of saving our lives.  Yet the hope was, after all, but a slender one; for with the coming of daylight we were able to see that our plight was very considerably worse than we had dreamed it to be during the hours of darkness; for _then_ we had believed that the loss of our masts and the springing of a somewhat serious leak represented the sum total of our misfortunes; while _now_ we saw, to our unspeakable dismay, that, with the solitary exception of the longboat, the whole of our boats were so badly damaged as to be altogether beyond our ability to repair; of two of them, indeed, nothing save the stem and stern remained dangling forlornly from the davit tackles.  But that, bad though it was, was not the worst; for it was no longer possible for us to blind ourselves to the fact that the leak was gaining upon us inexorably, and that, even though we should continue to toil with unabated energy, we could not keep the ship afloat longer than a few hours more, at the utmost.