"You must know, Mates," said he, "that when I was a foremastman aboard the Boomerang of Liverpool, bound from Newfoundland to Waterford, in latitude 47 north and longitude 45 west, the look-out men reported a boat in sight, on a dark-grey squally day in April, and bearing about half a mile on the lee-bow, and in the stern-sheets of that identical boat, far out in mid-ocean, sat a man, steering it with an oar! There warn't no vessels in sight, but an iceberg or two, for we were leaving the floes astern going north with the Gulf stream, so the air, you may believe, was bitterly keen and cold. We edged down towards him, but as he seemed to take no notice of us, or heeded a shout or two, I was sent off with three hands in the quarter-boat to overhaul him. My eye! we found as that 'ere boat was steered by a corpse! In her stern-sheets he sat stiff, motionless, lifeless, frozen hard as a rock, but with his head drooping a little forward. He was rigidly upright, with the oar over the back-board of the stern, as if he had been a-sculling, and so hard were his hands frozen to it, that we failed to get it from the death-grasp. The boat had been half full of water that had turned to ice, in which he was wedged to his knees. Over his head and shoulders the spray and spoon-drift of the sea had been washing again and again, freezing as it came. How long he must have been dead, or whence or how he came there, there was nothing to tell us. We held the water with our oars, and held our breath too, as the boat with its terrible occupant, on a current and before the impetus of the wind, went bobbing past us, and we struck out for the ship, anxious only to see the last of that ghastly boatman."
Clear, warm, and sunny was the weather as the Amethyst ploughed the tropical seas, when Derval saw in the sky the wonderful constellation of six stars named the Southern Cross, which, though coeval with the universe, was first seen with awe by Christian eyes in the fifteenth century, when Cada Mosto, the Venetian, steered his caravel into the Southern Sea.
One fine day Captain Talbot and his three mates were amusing themselves with revolver practice, at a quart-bottle slung from the foreyard-arm, at which they fired from the quarterdeck, but as the motion of the ship was considerable, as she was then going before the wind with all her yards square, and consequently rolled heavily, such was the oscillation of the object, that after some twenty shots it was only broken by Mr. Paul Bitts, who was greatly inflated by the circumstance and the applause it won him and now ensued thereon, an event somewhat illustrative of the strange doctrine of chances—a thing happening by luck, without expectation or prevision.
As Mr. Bitts was dropping fresh cartridges into the chambers of his breech-loading pistol, with the air of a candle-snuffer at twenty paces, his eyes fell on Derval, who, with the other two middies, was regarding him with some interest, if it was not a very warm one.
"Well, young fellow, do you think you could do that—eh?" he asked with a grin.
"I should like to try, sir," replied Derval, colouring.
"Oho! the deuce you would! Why, you young——"
"Give him a shot," said Captain Talbot, interrupting some abusive epithet; "take my revolver, Hampton. Grummet, run up another bottle to the yard-arm."
"It will save trouble to let him have a shy at the neck—that is enough for such a marksman!" sneered Paul Bitts.
Derval nervously took the Captain's pistol, for he had never had such an implement in his hand before, raised it, aimed, and while thinking the report was all he would make, fired, and, by a most astounding "fluke," smashed the bottle-neck which was yet dangling from the yard-arm!