The exclamation was forced from me by an overpowering effluvium that at
the moment swept on board us from the drifting boat, which was now on
our weather-bow, and close aboard of us. As she dropped alongside, in
the wake of the fore chains, all hands crowded to the rail to look down
into her; while one smart fellow, with a rope's-end in his hand, was
already over the side, clinging to a channel-iron, with one foot upon
its bolt-head, ready to drop into her and make fast. But the odour that
arose from the little craft and assailed our nostrils was so
unendurable, and the sight that her interior revealed was so dreadful
and revolting, that we recoiled as one man, and allowed the boat with
her awful freight to scrape slowly along the ship's side from the fore
chains to the taffrail, without an effort to secure her. To do so would
indeed have been utterly useless, for that first glance down into her
amply sufficed to assure us all that the forms lying prone there were
dead and rotting corpses. They were those of two men, a lad of sixteen
or seventeen, a woman, and a child of some eight or ten years old; the
clothing of the two last mentioned being of so fine a texture and make
as to suggest that the wearers must have been people of some
consequence.

A small breaker, with the bung out, and obviously empty, stood at the
foot of the mast, with a tin dipper beside it; while the lower half of a
sailor's sea boot, with the sole only of its fellow, lying in the
stern-sheets, in company with a sailor's sheath-knife, told only too
plainly of the terrible straits to which the poor creatures had been
driven to quell the craving torments of hunger. The words "_La Belle
Amelie_, Marseille," deeply carved in the transom, gave us the name and
nationality of the ship to which this dreadful waif had once belonged,
and completed the details of the entry which I that same evening made in
my official log-book.

The barque still having way upon her, the boat slowly scraped along our
side until she reached our starboard quarter; and there--the halliard of
the sail, which served also as a mast shroud, fouling our main-brace
bumpkin--she hung, and refused to drag clear. Seeing this, and anxious
to rid the ship of such hideous companionship, the mate whipped out his
knife and, getting down upon the bumpkin, cut through the halliard, thus
releasing the boat and, at the same time, letting the sail down by the
run and sending the extremity of