ted and still
more reasoning American has not been able to shake entirely off the secret
influence of a sentiment that seems the concomitant of his condition.

There is a majesty, in the might of the great deep that has a tendency to
keep open the avenues of that dependant credulity which more or less
besets the mind of every man, however he may have fortified his intellect
by thought. With the firmament above him, and wandering on an interminable
waste of water, the less gifted seaman is tempted, at every step of his
pilgrimage, to seek the relief of some propitious omen. The few which are
supported by scientific causes give support to the many that have their
origin only in his own excited and doubting temperament. The gambols of
the dolphin, the earnest and busy passage of the porpoise, the ponderous
sporting of the unwieldy whale, and the screams of the marine birds, have
all, like the signs of the ancient soothsayers, their attendant
consequences of good or evil. The confusion between things which are
explicable, and things which are not, gradually brings the mind of the
mariner to a state in which any exciting and unnatural sentiment is
welcome, if it be or no other reason than that, like the vast element on
which he passes his life, it bears the impression of what is thought a
supernatural, because it is an incomprehensible, power.

The crew of the "Royal Caroline" had not even the advantage of being
natives of a land where necessity and habit have united to bring every
man's faculties into exercise, to a certain extent at least. They were all
from that distant island that has been, and still continues to be, the
hive of nations, which are probably fated to carry her name to a time when
the sight of her fallen power shall be sought as a curiosity, like the
remains of a city in a desert.

The whole events of that day of which we are now writing had a tendency to
arouse the latent superstition of these men. It has already been said,
that the calamity which had befallen their former Commander, and the
manner in which a stranger had succeeded to his authority, had their
influence in increasing their disposition to doubt. The sail to leeward
appeared most inopportunely for the character of our adventurer, who had
not yet enjoyed a fitting opportunity to secure the confidence of his
inferiors, before such untoward circumstances occurred as threatened to
deprive him of it for ever.

There has existed but one occasion