here was a horrible gurgling sound of water rushing into her, and her
main deck blew up with a loud clap or blast of noise. I could follow the
line of her bulwarks fluctuating and waving in the clear dark blue when
she was some feet under. A number of whirlpools spun round over her, but
the slowness of her foundering was solemnly marked by the gradual
descent of the ruins of masts and yards which were attached to the hull
by their rigging, and which she dragged down with her. On a sudden, when
the last fragment of mast had disappeared, and when the hollows of the
whirlpools were flattening to the level surface of the sea, up rose a
body, with a sort of leap. It was the sailor that had lain drowned on
the starboard side of the forward deck. Being frozen stiff he rose in
the posture in which he had expired, that is, with his arms extended; so
that, when he jumped to the surface, he came with his hands lifted up to
heaven, and thus he stayed a minute, sustained by the eddies which also
revolved him.

The shock occasioned by this melancholy object was so great, it came
near to causing me to swoon. He sank when the water ceased to twist
him, and I was unspeakingly thankful to see him vanish, for his posture
had all the horror of a spectral appeal, and such was the state of my
mind that imagination might quickly have worked the apparition, had it
lingered, into an instrument for the unsettling of my reason.

I rose from the seat on to which I had sunk and loosed the sail, and
hauling the sheet aft, put the oar over the stern, and brought the
little craft's head to an easterly course. The draught of air was
extremely weak, and scarce furnished impulse enough to the sail to raise
a bubble alongside. The boat was about fifteen feet long; she would be
but a small boat for summer pleasuring in English July lake-waters, yet
here was I in her in the heart of a vast ocean, many leagues south and
west of the stormiest, most inhospitable point of land in the world,
with distances before me almost infinite for such a boat as this to
measure ere I could heave a civilized coast or a habitable island into
view!

At the start I had a mind to steer north-west and blow, as the wind
would suffer, into the South Sea, where perchance I might meet a whaler
or a Southseaman from New Holland; but my heart sank at the prospect of
the leagues of water which rolled between me and the islands and the
western American seaboard. Indeed I understood tha