But none could answer correctly.
"It seemed to rise from the sea, far away on the starboard bow," said Reeves.
"The starboard bow!" repeated Hartly, shuddering.
We gazed intently around us, and though one of our men insisted that he could see a large figure like that of a man swimming towards us in the moonlit water, the rest could discern nothing.
This supernatural cry or sound seemed to belong neither to earth nor heaven; it rent the air and penetrated to our inner hearts; its cadence, too, was horrible, and unlike anything we had ever heard before. Its source occasioned us endless surmise, and we never discovered it; but the circumstance affected us all variously, and for a time we forgot our thirst, our hunger, and our danger, in the mystery and vague fear it occasioned.
That it could be given, as one surmised, by a drowning seaman who had escaped from some wreck, was impossible, for under the brilliant moon of the early May night, the whole sea was visible to us as at noonday. Hans of Orkney declared it to be a spirit of the sea, a water-bull, or the ghost of a man, whom we had unwittingly deserted in the foundering wreck. Cuffy moaned out that it was a warning from the Obi man. An Irish batman muttered something about a Banshee, but poor Hartly was too careless now, or too desponding, to suggest anything, and remained silent.
I can scarcely conceive that this cry, so strange, so wild and thrilling—so appalling to those who were in such a solemn and terrible situation—and which was heard by us all at the same moment, was the combined effect of imagination; but whether it was some phenomenon—a sound brought through the air from a vast distance, by some unknown cause—the echo of a crime committed elsewhere, or a jarring of the elements that affected our over-strained organs of hearing, I know not.
I merely relate the event as it occurred; but never, while life remains, shall I forget the bewildering and terrifying effect of that appalling shriek, when it rang in our ears, across the otherwise silent sea on that most mournful night.