"They rowed across the south face of the rock, where the ship had struck, and found the water there deep past all knowing. The rock wasn't coral, and no coral formation surrounded it. In the clear blue water beneath them huge banners of kelp waved and winnowed like lifeless hands. Not a vestige of the Evening Star remained; she had disappeared in the unfathomable gulfs of the Pacific. It was a mere crag that had caught her, a needle-point piercing the floor of an otherwise unobstructed ocean, the topmost spire of some mighty mountain sunk in the bowels of the world. It may never before have been seen by mortal man; it certainly wasn't indicated on the best charts of that day. She would have had to seek a thousand years to touch it. A ship's length either side would have cleared her....
"They waited beside the rock till noon, to get an observation. Then they rowed away to the northward, bound for the Sandwich Islands. The dark spot on the water dwindled and disappeared in their wake. Devereux told me that, quite unaccountably, he felt his heart sinking as they lost sight of it; after all, it was their only link with a remote and perhaps unattainable world.
"The first night after the disaster, a heavy squall separated the boats. They couldn't find each other, and never came together again. The second mate reached Callao after a terrible journey, the first to report the loss of the Evening Star. He had been nearly swamped in that first squall. For two days he had hunted frantically for the other boats. Then, not being a good navigator, and having a very imperfect chart of the Pacific Islands, he had changed his course and steered due east, knowing that he would strike the American continent if he could keep on going. The fact of his arrival in Callao, its date, and his reported date of the disaster, are beyond dispute; for my own satisfaction, I have looked these matters up in the official records.
"The captain, in the longboat, was never heard of again. Him and his crew the Pacific took for toll.
"Devereux was picked up at sea, alive, well, and alone in the Evening Star's small whaleboat, exactly one year and three months after the ship went down"
"Easy, Nichols!" I remonstrated "Say that again, please. You can't expect me to swallow it whole at the first try"
"Those are the facts, I tell you" said Nichols calmly "I have also verified this latter statement, through correspondence with the captain who picked him up. It really happened—and the dates were as I said. He was picked up just north of the equator in the Pacific Ocean by the ship Vanguard, and brought in to San Francisco. I was informed by the captain of the Vanguard that he had been driven out of his course by meeting the northeast trade winds too far south, and had sighted Devereux adrift one morning in about 135° west and 2° north. The man was nearly dead from thirst, and was quite mad when they took him aboard; raved about an island nearby, said he'd been blown away from it, and begged them to cruise in search of it before they left the ground. There was no island in that vicinity, of course, nearer than the Marquesas. 'I was sorry for the poor fellow' the captain of the Vanguard wrote me 'but we couldn't waste time in indulging his fancy. He quieted down after a day or two, and seemed to settle into a sort of dull melancholy'
"This castaway, giving his name as Devereux, claimed to have been mate of the Evening Star, lost in that same quarter of the Pacific the year before. The people on the Vanguard had heard nothing of this disaster; in fact, the first report of it, brought in by the second mate, had just reached San Francisco from Callao when they got in. To corroborate the story, however, the whaleboat in which Devereux had been picked up had presented a battered and weather-beaten appearance, her paint peeling off and her bottom badly scarred, as if she'd been used a good while on the beach; and on her stern they had been able to decipher the letters—ENI-G —AR. Devereux claimed that his ship had touched a needle of rock and had sunk immediately; but no danger of that nature was laid down on the Vanguard's chart. A year later, as a result of these conflicting and sensational tales, the United States Government sent a gunboat to look for the rock, perhaps with secret instructions to keep a weather eye open for Devereux's island; but nothing was to be found. Devereux couldn't remember the Evening Star's exact latitude and longitude on the day before the disaster; his records and instruments had vanished along with his crew in the heart of a deep mystery. And the second mate, who alone came in in regular order, was a poor navigator, you'll remember, and may easily have made an error about the place of his departure. At any rate, nothing was to be found. On the charts of the Hydrographic Office to-day you'll see, in that position, a dotted circle, marked Evening Star Rock, with an interrogation point after the name.
"Devereux's story was a nine days' wonder in San Francisco, confirmed in substance as it was by the recent authentic report from Callao. The newspapers made good copy of it. Many believed him outright; a man doesn't float about in the Pacific for over a year and emerge from the experience in robust health, without there being some simple and practical explanation. Yet sensational publicity quickly prejudiced the case, as it invariably does. After the first flush of pleasurable excitement, public interest began to put him down either as a hoax or a madman, and then promptly forgot him. One of the papers tried to start a subscription for a schooner, so that he might search for his island, but it met with little response. The return wave of prosaic life rolled over him, left him submerged and helpless. For a while he went about seeking sympathy and assistance, but his melancholy tale soon came to be a nuisance, doors were shut in his face, and men avoided him.
"At length he had the good sense to go away. He wandered to the East, moved about from place to place. The story followed him, distorted in the passage of time. And so we meet him here, a man with a strange hallucination—an interesting case, and romantic, but unquestionably mad"