I know not a more forlorn object, the wide world over, than an abandoned vessel encountered deep in the heart of an ocean solitude. She sucks in the desolation of the sea and grows gray, lean, and haggard with the melancholy that sometimes raves and sometimes sleeps, but that forever dwells upon the bosom of the deep. There is no fancy in this. Many ways are there in which loneliness may be personified or illustrated: the widow weeping upon the tomb of her only child, a blind man in a crowd, a prostrate figure on some wide spread of midnight moor, over whose vague and distant edge a red eye of moon is glancing under a lid of black cloud. In many ways may loneliness be represented, but there is no expression of it that equals, to my mind, the abandoned ship. Is it because the movement of the sea communicates a fancy of life to the vessel? She looks to be sentient as she sways, to be sensible that she is the only object for leagues upon the prodigious liquid waste over which the boundless heavens are spread. Some unfurled canvas flaps; the wheel revolves, or the tiller shears through the air to the blows of the seas upon the rudder: there may be the ends of gear snaking overboard; they move, they writhe like serpents; they seem to pour as though they were the life blood of the vessel draining from her heart. And terrible is the silence of the decks. It is not the silence of the empty house that was yesterday full and clamorous with merry voices. It is such a silence as you meet with nowhere else, deepened to the meditative mind by sounds which would vex and break in upon and destroy all other silence. Yes, to my mind the abandoned ship at sea is the most perfect expression of human and inanimate loneliness.
This I thought as I gazed at that little schooner. Greaves watched her with a look of uneasiness. He came to my side and said, in a low voice:
“Take a boat, will ye, Fielding, and explore that craft? She’s been abandoned for weeks; I am sure of that. You’ll find nothing alive, and if it wasn’t for that dream of mine last night I’d pass on. But I must find out whether the cabin furniture is as I beheld it in my sleep.”
A boat was lowered; three men jumped in. I followed, and gained the side of the schooner. We pulled under her stern to see her name, and read in big white letters on the slope of her counter the word Rebecca. I fastened a superstitious eye upon the two little starboard portholes, which, as I might guess, illuminated her cabin. What was inside?
“Two of you,” said I to the men, “come aboard with me. You, Travers, remain in charge of the boat.”
The men who scrambled over the side were Friend and Meehan. We stood gazing and listening. The foresail occasionally flapped as the little vessel heaved to the swell, but the water washed along the bends noiseless as quicksilver. Saving the wreckage forward, I could see nothing wrong with the schooner. There were signs of confusion, as though she had been abandoned in a hurry: the sails had come down with a run, and lay unfurled; the decks were littered with ropes’ ends. But all deck fixtures were in their place; nay, there was even a small boat chocked under the starboard gangway forward, but the bigger boat, which such a craft as this would carry, was missing.
My eye went to the skylight, and I started. It was oblong. “What more of the dream remains to be verified?” thought I. The skylight was closed, the frames secured within, the glass filthy. I peered and peered to no purpose. On this I stepped to the companion, while the two seamen moved forward to look down the hatches in obedience to my orders; but I paused when I was in the companion way. I seemed to smell a damp odor as of a vault. “Good God!” thought I, “if there should be anything horrible at the head of the table, with a pack of—— Chut! ye fool!” I said to myself, “say a prayer and shove on, and be hanged to you!” and down I went.
Well, there was no skeleton; there was nothing horrible to be seen. If the grim Feature had ever occupied the head of that table, he had found a companion; he had played his trump card: he had won of a surety, and he and his opponent were gone. But had I veritably beheld a living skeleton seated at the table and motioning as though it would deal, I could not have been more scared—no; let me say I could not have been more impressed than I was—by the sight of the furniture. of the cabin. It was precisely as Greaves had described it. It was the plainest sea interior in the world—nothing whatever worth looking at, nothing in it to detain the attention for an instant; yet it was all exactly as Greaves described it. I was revisited by the misgiving of an earlier hour. “The man is an extraordinary dreamer,” I said to myself. “He may be a little mad. A few people dream as this man has dreamt, and those few, I suspect, will be found somewhat mad at root. Has he dreamt of the ship in the island cave? Did he, that he might justify to himself his faith in his extraordinary vision by sailing on this quest—did he forge that manifest which, backed by his eloquent advocacy, no doubt, induced old Bartholomew Tulp to put his hand in his pocket?”
I stood thus thinking when I heard my name called.
“Hallo!” I exclaimed.