as perfectly conscious there was a million to
one against its occurring a second time. I came on deck to relieve
Wilkinson, at midnight, after a half-hour's nodding doze by the furnace
below. He went to his cabin; I stood under the lee of a cloth seized in
the weather main rigging. Pitt arrived, and I told him he could return
to the cook-house and stay there till I called him. The helm being
lashed, and the schooner doing very well, nothing wanted watching in
particular, yet I would not have the deck abandoned, and meant to keep a
look-out, turn and turn about with Pitt, as Wilkinson and Cromwell had.
The snow had ceased; but it was very dark and thick, the ocean a roaring
shadow, palpitating upon the eyes in rolling folds of blackness, with
the quick expiring flash of foam to windward. On a sudden, looking over
the weather quarter, methought I discerned a deeper shade in the night
there than was elsewhere perceptible. It was like a great blot of ink
upon the darkness. Even whilst I speculated, it drew out in the shape of
a ship running before the gale. She seemed to be heading directly for
us. The roof of my mouth turned dry as desert-sand; my tongue and limbs
refused their office; I could neither cry nor stir, being indeed
paralyzed by the terrible suddenness of that apparition and the
imminence of our peril. It all happened whilst you could have told
thirty. The great black mass surged up with the water boiling about the
bows; she brought a thunder along with her in her rigging and sails as
she soared to the crowns of the seas she was sweeping before. I could
not tell what canvas she was under, but her speed was a full ten knots,
and as I did not see her till she was close, she looked to come upon us
as with a single bound. She passed us to windward within a stone's
throw, and vanished like a dark cloud melting into the surrounding
blackness. Not a gleam of light broke from her; you heard nothing but
the boiling at her bows and the thunderous pealing of the gale in her
canvas. A quarter turn of the wheel would have sent us to the bottom,
and her, no doubt, on top of us. Whether she was the _Susan Tucker_, or
some other whaler, or a big South-Sea-man driven low and getting what
easting she could out of the gale, I know not. She was as complete a
mystery of the ocean night as any spectral fabric, and a heavier terror
to me than a phantasm worked by ghosts could have proved.

I knew such a thing could not happen again, y