The floor of the cabin, as I found when I went in there, was so firm and solid--being laid in teak, very likely, and having been sheltered by the roof over it from the rains--that I had no fear, as I had on the open deck, that the planks would give way under me and let me through. And when I was come inside I found resting on a wooden rack set against the front wall a couple of old bell-mouthed brass fire-locks, coated thick with verdigris, and with them three smaller bell-mouthed pieces which were neither guns nor pistols but something between the two. As for the log-book, if it were the log-book, I could make nothing of it. It was so soaked and swelled by the dampness, and so rotten, that my fingers sank into it when I tried to pick it up as they would have sunk into porridge; and the slimy stuff left a horrid smell upon my hand. Therefore I cannot tell what was the name of this old ship, nor to what country she belonged, nor whither she was sailing on her last voyage; but that she was Spanish--or perhaps Portuguese--and was wrecked while on her way homeward from some port in the Indies, I do not doubt at all. When I had made my round of the cabin, finding so little, I came to the open hatch in the middle of it and gazed down into the dusky depth curiously: wondering a good deal that in what must have been almost the moment when death was setting its clutch upon the galleon, and when all aboard of her assuredly were in peril of their lives, her people should have tried to rouse out a part of her cargo--as I had proof that they had tried to do in the tackle still hanging there from the beam. And the only reasonable way to account for this strange endeavor, it seemed to me--since provisions were not likely to be carried in that part of the vessel--was that something so precious was down there in the blackness as to make the risk of death worth taking in order to try to save it from the sea. With that there came over me an itching curiosity to find out what the treasure was which the crew of the galleon--in such stress of some sort that they had been forced to give up the job suddenly--had tried to get out of their ship and carry off with them; and along with my curiosity came an eager pounding of my heart as I thought to myself--without ever stopping to think also how useless riches of any sort were to me--that by right of discovery their treasure, whatever it might be, had become mine.