However, when I came up from tiffin some little while before two o’clock, the hulk lay bare upon the sea over the starboard cat-head, with a light like the flash of a gun breaking from her wet black side to the languid roll of her sunwards, and a crowd of steerage-passengers and sailors forward staring at her. At any time a wreck at sea, washing about in the heart of some great ocean solitude, will appeal with solemn significance to the eye of one sailing past it. What dreadful tragedy has she been the little theatre of? you wonder. You speculate upon the human anguish she memorializes, upon the dark and scaring horrors her shape _may_ entomb. But it is a sight to appeal with added force to people who have been at sea for many long weeks, without so much as the glimpse of a sail for days at a time to break the enormous monotony of the ocean, or to furnish a fugitive human interest to the ever-receding sea-line—that most mocking of all earthly limitations.
“Anybody see any signs of life aboard of her?” asked Captain Bow. “My sight is not what it was.”
There were many sharp young eyes amongst us, and some powerful glasses; but there was nothing living to be seen. She looked to have been a vessel of about two hundred and fifty tons. Her copper sheathing rose to the bends, and was fresh and bright. She had apparently been pierced for ten guns, but this could be only conjecture, seeing that her bulwarks had been torn to pieces by the fall of her spars. There was a length of topmast, or what-not, riding by its gear alongside of her, with a raffle of canvas and running rigging littering the fore-part. Her wheel stood and her rudder seemed sound. She was flush-decked, but all erections such as caboose, companion, and so forth were gone. Yet she sat with something of buoyancy on the water, and her rolling was without the stupefaction you notice in hulls gradually filling. As her stern lifted, the words, _La Mulette, Havre_, rose in long, white letters upon the counter, with a sort of ghastliness in the blank stare of them by contrast with the delicate blue of the sea. Old Bow hailed her loudly; then the mate roared to her with the voice of a bull, but to no purpose. I said to the second mate, who stood alongside of me at the rail—