iddle (though I could not see it),
and she nothing more than a hirsute green mass of old weeds and
sea-things from bowsprit-tip to poop, and from bulwarks to water-line,
stout as a hedgehog, only awaiting there the next high sea to founder.

It being near my dinner-hour and night's rest, I stopped the _Speranza_
some fifteen yards from her, and commenced to pace my spacious poop, as
usual, before eating; and as I paced, I would glance at her, wondering
at her destiny, and who were the human men that had lived on her, their
Christian names, and family names, their age, and thought, and way of
life, and beards; till the desire arose within me to go to her, and see;
and I threw off my outer garments, uncovered and unroped the cedar
cutter--the only boat, except the air-pinnace, left to me intact--and
got her down by the mizzen five-block pulley-system. But it was a
ridiculous nonsense, for having paddled to her, I was thrown into
paroxysms of rage by repeated failures to scale her bulwarks, low as
they were; my hands, indeed, could reach, but I found no hold upon the
slimy mass, and three rope-ends which I caught were also untenably
slippery: so that I jerked always back into the boat, my clothes a mass
of filth, and the only thought in my blazing brain a twenty-pound
charge of guncotton, of which I had plenty, to blow her to uttermost
Hell. I had to return to the _Speranza_, get a half-inch rope, then back
to the other, for I would not be baulked in such a way, though now the
dark was come, only slightly tempered by a half-moon, and I getting
hungry, and from minute to minute more fiendishly ferocious. Finally, by
dint of throwing, I got the rope-loop round a mast-stump, drew myself
up, and made fast the boat, my left hand cut by some cursed shell: and
all for what? the imperiousness of a whim. The faint moonlight shewed an
ample tract of deck, invisible in most parts under rolled beds of putrid
seaweed, and no bodies, and nothing but a concave, large esplanade of
seaweed. She was a ship of probably 1,500 tons, three-masted, and a
sailer. I got aft (for I had on thick outer babooshes), and saw that
only four of the companion-steps remained; by a small leap, however, I
could descend into that desolation, where the stale sea-stench seemed
concentrated into a very essence of rankness. Here I experienced a
singular ghostly awe and timorousness, lest she should sink with me, or
something: but striking matches, I saw an ordinary