It was but just
      now that I passed directly before the eyes of the mate; it was no
      long while ago that I ventured into the captain’s own private
      cabin, and took thence the materials with which I write, and have
      written. I shall from time to time continue this journal. It is
      true that I may not find an opportunity of transmitting it to the
      world, but I will not fall to make the endeavour. At the last
      moment I will enclose the MS. in a bottle, and cast it within the
      sea. An incident has occurred which has given me new room for
      meditation. Are such things the operation of ungoverned chance? I
      had ventured upon deck and thrown myself down, without attracting
      any notice, among a pile of ratlin-stuff and old sails in the
      bottom of the yawl. While musing upon the singularity of my fate,
      I unwittingly daubed with a tar-brush the edges of a
      neatly-folded studding-sail which lay near me on a barrel. The
      studding-sail is now bent upon the ship, and the thoughtless
      touches of the brush are spread out into the word DISCOVERY. I have made many observations lately upon the structure of the
      vessel. Although well armed, she is not, I think, a ship of war. Her rigging, build, and general equipment, all negative a
      supposition of this kind. What she is not, I can easily
      perceive—what she is I fear it is impossible to say. I know not
      how it is, but in scrutinizing her strange model and singular
      cast of spars, her huge size and overgrown suits of canvas, her
      severely simple bow and antiquated stern, there will occasionally
      flash across my mind a sensation of familiar things, and there is
      always mixed up with such indistinct shadows of recollection, an
      unaccountable memory of old foreign chronicles and ages long ago. I have been looking at the timbers of the ship. She is built of a
      material to which I am a stranger. There is a peculiar character
      about the wood which strikes me as rendering it unfit for the
      purpose to which it has been applied. I mean its extreme
      porousness, considered independently by the worm-eaten condition
      which is a consequence of navigation in these seas, and apart
      from the rottenness attendant upon age. It will appear perhaps an
      observation somewhat over-curious, but this wood would have every
      characteristic of Spanish oak, if Spanish oak were distended by
      any unnatural means. In reading the above sentence a curious apothegm of an old
      weather-beaten Dutch navigator comes full upon my recollection. “It is as sure,” he was wont to say, when any doubt was
      entertained of his veracity, “as sure as there is a sea where the
      ship itself will grow in bulk like the living body of the
      seaman.”


      About an hour ago, I made bold to thrust myself among a group of
      the crew. They paid me no manner of attention, and, although I
      stood in the very midst of them all, seemed utterly unconscious
      of my presence. Like the one I had at first seen in the hold,
      they all bore about them the marks of a hoary old age. Their
      knees trembled with infirmity; their shoulders were bent double
      with decrepitude; their shrivelled skins rattled in the wind;
      their voices were low, tremulous and broken; their eyes glistened
      with the rheum of years; and their gray hairs streamed terribly
      in the tempest. Around them, on every part of the deck, lay
      scattered mathematical instruments of the most quaint and
      obsolete construction. I mentioned some time ago the bending of a studding-sail. From
      that period the ship, being thrown dead off the wind, has
      continued her terrific course due south, with every rag of canvas
      packed upon her, from her trucks to her lower studding-sail
      booms, and rolling every moment her top-gallant yard-arms into
      the most appalling hell of water which it can enter into the mind
      of a man to imagine. I have just left the deck, where I find it
      impossible to maintain a footing, although the crew seem to
      experience little inconvenience. It appears to me a miracle of
      miracles that our enormous bulk is not swallowed up at once and
      forever. We are surely doomed to hover continually upon the brink
      of eternity, without taking a final plunge into the abyss. From
      billows a thousand times more stupendous than any I have ever
      seen, we glide away with the facility of the arrowy sea-gull; and
      the colossal waters rear their heads above us like demons of the
      deep, but like demons confined to simple threats and forbidden to
      destroy. I am led to attribute these frequent escapes to the only
      natural cause which can account for such effect. I must suppose
      the ship to be within the influence of some strong current, or
      impetuous under-tow. I have seen the captain face to face, and in his own cabin—but,
      as I expected, he paid me no attention. Although in his
      appearance there is, to a casual observer, nothing which might
      bespeak him more or less than man, still, a feeling of
      irrepressible reverence and awe mingled with the sensation of
      wonder with which I regarded him. In stature he is nearly my own
      height; that is, about five feet eight inches. He is of a
      well-knit and compact frame of body, neither robust nor
      remarkably otherwise. But it is the singularity of the expression
      which reigns upon the face—it is the intense, the wonderful, the
      thrilling evidence of old age, so utter, so extreme, which
      excites within my spirit a sense—a sentiment ineffable. His
      forehead, although little wrinkled, seems to bear upon it the
      stamp of a myriad of years. His gray hairs are records of the
      past, and his grayer eyes are sibyls of the future. The cabin
      floor was thickly strewn with strange, iron-clasped folios, and
      mouldering instruments of science, and obsolete long-forgotten
      charts. His head was bowed down upon his hands, and he pored,
      with a fiery unquiet eye, over a paper which I took to be a
      commission, and which, at all events, bore the signature of a
      monarch. He muttered to himself, as did the first seaman whom I
      saw in the hold, some low peevish syllables of a foreign tongue,
      and although the speaker was close at my elbow, his voice seemed
      to reach my ears from the distance of a mile. The ship and all in it are imbued with the spirit of Eld.