Conjectures were endless; a sharp look-out was kept from aloft, but no boats were seen, and as the _Amethyst_ hauled her wind and pursued her course, every eye was turned ever and anon to the floating derelict till she was hull down, and even till her topsails sank beneath the dim and blue horizon astern. Derval recalled to memory the old and sea-worn wreck he had seen floating in Barnstaple Bay, and the mysterious interest it had excited in his childish mind, when he never thought that a day would come and find him a sailor and far away on tropical waters. The episode was duly recorded in the ship's log, and it formed the staple object for comment in the forecastle for the next twenty-four hours, eliciting the narration of many a quaint personal adventure from the seamen, and one of these, a somewhat ghastly one, was told by Joe Grummet. "You must know, Mates," said he, "that when I was a foremastman aboard the _Boomerang_ of Liverpool, bound from Newfoundland to Waterford, in latitude 47 north and longitude 45 west, the look-out men reported a boat in sight, on a dark-grey squally day in April, and bearing about half a mile on the lee-bow, and in the stern-sheets of that identical boat, far out in mid-ocean, sat a man, steering it with an oar! There warn't no vessels in sight, but an iceberg or two, for we were leaving the floes astern going north with the Gulf stream, so the air, you may believe, was bitterly keen and cold. We edged down towards him, but as he seemed to take no notice of us, or heeded a shout or two, I was sent off with three hands in the quarter-boat to overhaul him. My eye! we found as that 'ere boat was steered by a corpse! In her stern-sheets he sat stiff, motionless, lifeless, frozen hard as a rock, but with his head drooping a little forward. He was rigidly upright, with the oar over the back-board of the stern, as if he had been a-sculling, and so hard were his hands frozen to it, that we failed to get it from the death-grasp. The boat had been half full of water that had turned to ice, in which he was wedged to his knees. Over his head and shoulders the spray and spoon-drift of the sea had been washing again and again, freezing as it came. How long he must have been dead, or whence or how he came there, there was nothing to tell us. We held the water with our oars, and held our breath too, as the boat with its terrible occupant, on a current and before the impetus of the wind, went bobbing past us, and we struck out for the ship, anxious only to see the last of that ghastly boatman." Clear, warm, and sunny was the weather as the _Amethyst_ ploughed the tropical seas, when Derval saw in the sky the wonderful constellation of six stars named the Southern Cross, which, though coeval with the universe, was first seen with awe by Christian eyes in the fifteenth century, when Cada Mosto, the Venetian, steered his caravel into the Southern Sea.