she turned out to be a small, slatternly-looking
craft, her hull and spars a dingy black, rigging all slack and
bleached nearly white, and everything denoting an ill state of
affairs aboard. The four boats hanging from her sides proclaimed her
a whaler. Leaning carelessly over the bulwarks were the sailors,
wild, haggard-looking fellows in Scotch caps and faded blue frocks;
some of them with cheeks of a mottled bronze, to which sickness soon
changes the rich berry-brown of a seaman's complexion in the tropics.

On the quarter-deck was one whom I took for the chief mate. He wore a
broad-brimmed Panama hat, and his spy-glass was levelled as we
advanced.

When we came alongside, a low cry ran fore and aft the deck, and
everybody gazed at us with inquiring eyes. And well they might. To
say nothing of the savage boat's crew, panting with excitement, all
gesture and vociferation, my own appearance was calculated to excite
curiosity. A robe of the native cloth was thrown over my shoulders,
my hair and beard were uncut, and I betrayed other evidences of my
recent adventure. Immediately on gaining the deck, they beset me on
all sides with questions, the half of which I could not answer, so
incessantly were they put.

As an instance of the curious coincidences which often befall the
sailor, I must here mention that two countenances before me were
familiar. One was that of an old man-of-war's-man, whose acquaintance
I had made in Rio de Janeiro, at which place touched the ship in
which I sailed from home. The other was a young man whom, four years
previous, I had frequently met in a sailor boarding-house in
Liverpool. I remembered parting with him at Prince's Dock Gates, in
the midst of a swarm of police-officers, trackmen, stevedores,
beggars, and the like. And here we were again:--years had rolled by,
many a league of ocean had been traversed, and we were thrown
together under circumstances which almost made me doubt my own
existence.

But a few moments passed ere I was sent for into the cabin by the
captain.

He was quite a young man, pale and slender, more like a sickly
counting-house clerk than a bluff sea-captain. Bidding me be seated,
he ordered the steward to hand me a glass of Pisco. In the state I
was, this stimulus almost made me delirious; so that of all I then
went on to relate concerning my residence on the island I can
scarcely remember a word. After this I was asked whether I desired to
"ship"; of course I