"Well," said he, smoking very slowly, "the master of that snow, one Samuel Bullock, of Rotherhithe, whom I recollect as mate of a privateer some time since, told me that when he was off the Agulhas Bank, he made out a sail upon his starboard bow, braced up, and standing west-sou'-west. There was something so unusual and surprising about her rig that the probability of her being an enemy went clean out of his mind, and he held on, influenced by the sort of curiosity a man might feel who follows a sheeted figure at night, not liking the job, yet constrained to it by sheer force of unnatural relish. 'Twas the first dogwatch; the sun drawing down; but daylight was yet abroad, when the stranger was within hail upon their starboard quarter, keeping a close luff, yet points off, on account of the antique fit of her canvas. Bullock, as he talked, fell a-trembling, though no stouter-hearted man sails the ocean, and I could see the memory of the thing working in him like a bloody conscience. He cried out, 'May the bountiful God grant that my ship reaches home in safety!' I said, 'What vessel was she, think you?' 'Why, captain,' says he, 'what but the vessel which 'tis God's will should continue sailing about these seas?' I started to hear this, and asked if he saw any of the crew. He replied that only two men were to be seen—one steering at a long tiller on the poop deck, and the other pacing near him on the weather side. 'I seized the glass,' said he, 'and knelt down, that those I viewed should not observe me, and plainly catched the face of him who walked.'"
"How did Bullock describe him, sir?" said I.
"He said he wore a great beard and was very tall, and that he was like a man that had died and that when dug up preserved his death-bed aspect; he was like such a corpse artificially animated, and most terrible to behold from his suggestions of death-in-life. I pressed him to tell me more, but he is a person scanty of words for the want of learning. However, his fears were the clearest relation he could give me of what he had seen."
"It was the Phantom Ship he saw, you think, sir?" said I.
"I am sure. He bid me dread the sight of it more than the combined navies of the French and the Dutch. The apparition was encountered in latitude twenty miles south of thirty-six degrees. 'Tis a spectre to be shunned, Fenton, though it cost us every rag of sail we own to keep clear."
"Then what you would say, captain," said I, "is, that the people who work that ship have ceased to be living men by reason of their great age, which exceeds by many years our bodies' capacity of wear and tear; and that they are actually corpses influenced by the Devil—who is warranted by the same Divine permission we find recorded in the Book of Job, to pursue frightful and unholy ends?"
"It is the only rational view," he answered. "If the Phantom Ship be still afloat, and navigated by a crew, they cannot be men in the sense that this ship's company are men."
"Well, sir," said I, cheerfully, "I reckon it will be all one whether they be fiends, or flesh and blood miraculously wrought to last unto the world's end, for it is a million to nothing that we don't meet her. The Southern Ocean is a mighty sea, a ship is but a little speck, and once we get the Madagascar coast on our bow we shall be out of the Death Ship's preserves."