be quilted with rope-yarns, her spars fished with old pipe
staves, and her rigging knotted and spliced in every possible
direction. Her crew was composed of some twenty venerable
Greenwich-pensioner-looking old salts, who just managed to hobble
about deck. The ends of all the running ropes, with the
exception of the signal halyards and poop-down-haul, were rove
through snatch-blocks, and led to the capstan or windlass, so
that not a yard was braced or a sail set without the assistance
of machinery.

Her hull was encrusted with barnacles, which completely encased
her. Three pet sharks followed in her wake, and every day came
alongside to regale themselves from the contents of the cook's
bucket, which were pitched over to them. A vast shoal of bonetas
and albicores always kept her company.

Such was the account I heard of this vessel and the remembrance
of it always haunted me; what eventually became of her I never
learned; at any rate: he never reached home, and I suppose she is
still regularly tacking twice in the twenty-four hours somewhere
off Desolate Island, or the Devil's-Tail Peak.

Having said thus much touching the usual length of these voyages,
when I inform the reader that ours had as it were just commenced,
we being only fifteen months out, and even at that time hailed as
a late arrival and boarded for news, he will readily perceive
that there was little to encourage one in looking forward to the
future, especially as I had always had a presentiment that we
should make an unfortunate voyage, and our experience so far had
justified the expectation.