One evening Samoa brought me a quarto half-sheet of yellowish, ribbed paper, much soiled and tarry, which he had discovered in a dark hole of the forecastle.  It had plainly formed part of the lost log; but all the writing thereon, at present decipherable, conveyed no information upon the subject then nearest my heart.

But one could not but be struck by a tragical occurrence, which the page very briefly recounted; as well, as by a noteworthy pictorial illustration of the event in the margin of the text.  Save the cut, there was no further allusion to the matter than the following:—­ “This day, being calm, Tooboi, one of the Lahina men, went overboard for a bath, and was eaten up by a shark.  Immediately sent forward for his bag.”

Now, this last sentence was susceptible of two meanings.  It is truth, that immediately upon the decease of a friendless sailor at sea, his shipmates oftentimes seize upon his effects, and divide them; though the dead man’s clothes are seldom worn till a subsequent voyage.  This proceeding seems heartless.  But sailors reason thus:  Better we, than the captain.  For by law, either scribbled or unscribbled, the effects of a mariner, dying on shipboard, should be held in trust by that officer.  But as sailors are mostly foundlings and castaways, and carry all their kith and kin in their arms and their legs, there hardly ever appears any heir-at-law to claim their estate; seldom worth inheriting, like Esterhazy’s.  Wherefore, the withdrawal of a dead man’s “kit” from the forecastle to the cabin, is often held tantamount to its virtual appropriation by the captain.  At any rate, in small ships on long voyages, such things have been done.

Thus much being said, then, the sentence above quoted from the Parki’s log, may be deemed somewhat ambiguous.  At the time it struck me as singular; for the poor diver’s grass bag could not have contained much of any thing valuable unless, peradventure, he had concealed therein some Cleopatra pearls, feloniously abstracted from the shells brought up from the sea.

Aside of the paragraph, copied above, was a pen-and-ink sketch of the casualty, most cruelly executed; the poor fellow’s legs being represented half way in the process of deglutition; his arms firmly grasping the monster’s teeth, as if heroically bent upon making as tough a morsel of himself as possible.

But no doubt the honest captain sketched this cenotaph to the departed in all sincerity of heart; perhaps, during the melancholy leisure which followed the catastrophe.  Half obliterated were several stains upon the page; seemingly, lingering traces of a salt tear or two.

From this unwonted embellishment of the text, I was led to infer, that the designer, at one time or other, must have been engaged in the vocation of whaling.  For, in India ink, the logs of certain whalemen are decorated by somewhat similar illustrations.