At some hour of the night, but whether before or after midnight I could not have told, I was looking over the right side of the boat when a large shadow burst out of the darkness close to. It swept by wrapped in gloom. It was a vessel, and she whitened the throbbing dusky surface over which she passed with a confused tumble of froth. There was not a single spot of light upon her. Her sails blended with the midnight obscurity, and were indistinguishable. Indeed she was to be heard rather than seen, for the noise of the wind was strong and shrill in her rigging, and the sound of her passage through the water was like a rending of satin. She was visible, and then she was gone even as I looked. All night long it rained, and it was raining at daybreak in a fine thin drizzle. The sea was shrouded as on the previous afternoon. When the cold and iron grey of the dawn was upon the atmosphere, I feebly lifted up my head, marvelling to find myself alive. I looked about me with my eyes as languid as those of a dying person’s, and beheld nothing but the streaming waters running out of the haze on one side and vanishing in the haze on the other side. Had I then possessed the knowledge of the sea that I afterwards gained, I might have known by the character of the waves that during the night the boat had been swept a long distance out. The billows were large and heavy, and the movements of the boat, whose sails were too small to steady her, were wild. Yet she rose and fell buoyantly. These things I afterwards recollected. I was without hunger, but the presence of daylight sharpening my faculties somewhat I felt thirsty, and no sooner was I conscious of the sensation of thirst than the perception that it was not to be assuaged raised it into a torment. There was water in the bottom of the boat; I dipped my finger into one of the puddles and put the moisture to my lips. It was brackish, almost indeed as salt as the water of the sea. I pressed my parched lips to the sodden sail, which I had pulled over my shoulders, and the moisture of it was as salt as the puddle I had dipped my finger into. And now, after this time, I have but a very indistinct recollection of what followed. All my memories are vague, as though I had dimly dreamed of what I saw and suffered. I recollect that I felt shockingly ill, and that I believed I was dying. I recollect that during some hour of this day I beheld a smudge in the grey shadow of mist and rain on my right, that it kindled an instant’s hope in me, that I held open with difficulty my heavy wet eyelids and watched it in a sickly and fainting way, believing it might prove a boat sent in search of me. I followed it with my gaze until it melted away in the thickness. I recollect that the day passed, and that the blackness of a second night came; but, this remembered, all else is a blank in my brain.