famine-shaken

Updated: July 15, 2025

And well I recollect the sad records of the log-book which was left on board the deserted ship; how she had been waterlogged for weeks and weeks, buoyed up by her timber cargo, the crew clinging in the tops, and crawling down, when they dared, for putrid biscuit-dust and drops of water, till the water was washed overboard and gone; and then notice after notice, 'On this day such an one died, 'On this day such an one was washed away' the log kept up to the last, even when there was only that to tell, by the stern business-like merchant skipper, whoever he was; and how at last, when there was neither food nor water, the strong man's heart seemed to have quailed, or perhaps risen, into a prayer, jotted down in the log 'The Lord have mercy on us! and then a blank of several pages, and, scribbled with a famine-shaken hand, 'Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth; and so the log and the ship were left to the rats, which covered the deck when our men boarded her.

Charles Kingsley - Prose Idylls, New and Old