It was about noon one day, while I was trying to nerve myself to make this hard expedition, that I called a halt in order to eat my dinner--which I knew would be a very little one--being just then come aboard of a great ungainly galleon that from the look of her I thought could not be less than two centuries and a half old: she being more curiously ancient in her build than any vessel that I had got upon, and her timbers so rotten that I had ticklish climbing as I worked my way up her high quarter--and, indeed, one of her galleries giving way under me, was near to spilling down her tall side to my death beneath the tangled weed. And when at last I got to her deck I found it so soft, partly with rottenness and partly with a sort of moss growing over it, that I was fearful at each step that it would give way under me and let me down with a crash into her hold. I would have been glad of a better place to eat my dinner in--she being sodden wet everywhere, and with a chill about her for all the warmth of the misty air shimmering with dull sunshine, and with a rank unwholesome smell rising from her rotting mass. But all the hulks thereabouts were in so much the same condition that by going on I was not likely greatly to better myself; and I was so tired and so hungry that I had no heart to attempt any more hard scrambling until I had had both rest and food. And so I hunted out a spot on her deck where the moss was thinnest and least oozy with moisture--being a place a little sheltered by a sort of porch above her cabin doorway--and there I seated myself and with a good deal of satisfaction fell to upon my very scanty ration of beans. For a while I was busied wholly with my eating, being mighty sharp set after my morning's walk; but when my short meal was ended I began to look about me, and especially to peer into the deep old cabin--that was pretty well lighted through the stern-windows and through the doorway at my shoulder, of which the door had rotted away. From where I was seated I could see nearly the whole of it; and what I first noted was that a little hatch in the middle of the floor was open, and that dangling down into it from one of the roof-beams was a double-purchase--as though an attempt to haul up some heavy thing from that place had come to a short end. For the rest, there was little to see: only a clumsy table set fast between fixed benches close under the stern windows; a locker in which I found, when I looked into it, a sodden thing that very likely had been the ship's log-book along with a queer old Jacob's staff (as they were called) such as mariners took their observations with before quadrants were known; and against the wall were hanging a couple of long old rusty swords and a rusty thing that I took at first to be a wash-basin, but made out was a deep-curved breast-plate that must have belonged to a very round-bellied little man.