In the Sargasso Sea by Thomas A. Janvier

It was a long while before the pale pink gleam to the eastward spread up into the sky far enough to thin the shadows which hung over my dead fleet heavily, and longer still before I had light enough to venture to begin my scrambling walk from ship to ship again. It seemed to me, indeed, that the mist lay lower and was a good deal thicker than on the preceding evening; and this, with the fiery glow that was in it when the sunrise came, gave me hope that a douse of rain might be coming -- which chance of getting the water that I longed for heartened me even more than did the up-coming of the sun.

My throat was hurting me a good deal because of its dryness, and my itching thirst was all the stronger because the last food I had eaten -- being the mess left in the pan by the two men who had killed each other -- had been a salt-meat stew. Of hunger I did not feel much, save for gripes in my inside now and then; but I was weak because of my emptiness -- as I discovered when I got on my legs, and found myself staggering a little and the things around me swimming before my eyes. And what was worse than that was a dull stupidity which so possessed me that I could not think clearly; and so for a while kept me wandering about the deck of the brig aimlessly, while my wits went wool-gathering instead of trying to work out some plan -- even a foolish plan -- which would cheer me up with hopes of pulling through.