“Is it you, lad?” he said, giving me a smile. “I thought I saw something heaving atop of a sea. Then the sea went on, and let it down, and I lost it. There it is again, just atop of that big sea. It has the look of a cask or a barrel. Better run aft, Tim, and see what they make of it.”
I found Captain Nelson with his glass at his eye.
“A barrel,” he said to Mr. Baker, “and an oil barrel, and half full of oil, I should guess. And there ’s other wreckage. Better run down that way.”
We changed our course to southeast, and in ten minutes or so we were running through all sorts of wreckage scattered over a mile or more of ocean: barrels, many of them full, and fragments of boats, and pieces of a deckhouse, and broken oars, and splinters of some vessel’s rail, and other like evidence of destruction. They seemed worth further investigation, and we backed our main, while a boat was lowered. The boat came back without having been able to identify the vessel. There was no name on any of the fragments, and nothing which gave a clue; and although there were several barrels in sight, they seemed to be full of oil, and they floated awash, so that the name, if it was there, could not be seen without getting them out of the water. Mr. Baker suggested that, and made the further suggestion that they were full of oil anyway, and we would be killing two birds with one stone. He hated to see that good oil bound for Davy Jones.
Captain Nelson shook his head. It was near sunset, and the yards were braced around, and we filled off on our course again. We sailed through more scattered wreckage for half an hour, some fragment of the good ship here and there, broken out of her light upper works. It made us all silent, each man busy with his own thoughts. They might have been, with a few minutes’ streak of bad luck, the fragments of the Clearchus which were scattered over those miles of ocean. I was thinking of this, and looking out ahead, when I saw what seemed to be a spar with a broken end rise on a sea, then vanish again. It glistened in the light of the setting sun, but I thought that I had made out the broken end clearly.
I spoke of it, but the captain was already examining it through his glass.
“I ’ve got it, Tim,” he said. He put the glass down. “Two spars lashed together, and a man lashed to them. No sign of life in him, but we ’ll pick him up and see.”
We ran down to him, pretty close. It was a crazy apology for a raft, merely two spars lashed together loosely. The man had been sitting on them with his legs, from the knees down, in the water. Now his body had fallen backward, and his head rested on the spars. In his hand he gripped a hatchet. What could he have wanted with a hatchet? I asked the captain.
Captain Nelson was looking at the man, but he turned to me for an instant. “Sharks, I ’m afraid, Tim,” he said.
Just then our boat got to him, and somebody cut the lashings, and they lifted him into the boat. His legs were terribly bitten by sharks, and one foot was gone. I turned away, sick and faint.