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An incident has occurred which has given me new room for meditation.  Are such things the operation of ungoverned Chance?  I had ventured upon deck and thrown myself down, without attracting any notice, among a pile of ratlin-stuff and old sails in the bottom of the yawl.  While musing upon the singularity of my fate, I unwittingly daubed with a tar-brush the edges of a neatly-folded studding-sail which lay near me on a barrel.  The studding-sail is now bent upon the ship, and the thoughtless touches of the brush are spread out into the word DISCOVERY.

I have made many observations lately upon the structure of the vessel.  Although well armed, she is not, I think, a ship of war.  Her rigging, build, and general equipment, all negative a supposition of this kind.  What she is not, I can easily perceive —­ what she is I fear it is impossible to say.  I know not how it is, but in scrutinizing her strange model and singular cast of spars, her huge size and overgrown suits of canvas, her severely simple bow and antiquated stern, there will occasionally flash across my mind a sensation of familiar things, and there is always mixed up with such indistinct shadows of recollection, an unaccountable memory of old foreign chronicles and ages long ago.

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I have been looking at the timbers of the ship.  She is built of a material to which I am a stranger.  There is a peculiar character about the wood which strikes me as rendering it unfit for the purpose to which it has been applied.  I mean its extreme porousness, considered independently by the worm-eaten condition which is a consequence of navigation in these seas, and apart from the rottenness attendant upon age.  It will appear perhaps an observation somewhat over-curious, but this wood would have every characteristic of Spanish oak, if Spanish oak were distended by any unnatural means.

In reading the above sentence a curious apothegm of an old weather-beaten Dutch navigator comes full upon my recollection.  “It is as sure,” he was wont to say, when any doubt was entertained of his veracity, “as sure as there is a sea where the ship itself will grow in bulk like the living body of the seaman.”

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About an hour ago, I made bold to thrust myself among a group of the crew.  They paid me no manner of attention, and, although I stood in the very midst of them all, seemed utterly unconscious of my presence.  Like the one I had at first seen in the hold, they all bore about them the marks of a hoary old age.  Their knees trembled with infirmity; their shoulders were bent double with decrepitude; their shrivelled skins rattled in the wind; their voices were low, tremulous and broken; their eyes glistened with the rheum of years; and their gray hairs streamed terribly in the tempest.  Around them, on every part of the deck, lay scattered mathematical instruments of the most quaint and obsolete construction.