We were within a day’s sail of Jamaica. At the setting of the sun we had seen, even from our low vessel, the distant outline of the Blue Mountains. Peralta had the middle watch. I roused up about an hour and a half before sunrise, and found the piragua heaving upon smooth, oily swells, all unruffled even by a puff of wind. There was a great dank mist around us, packing upon the water as thick as smoke from a man-of-war’s broadside, and the very air seemed loaded with chill damp. I walked up and down the small fore deck of the piragua, trying, in my thin garments, to keep myself warm, and whistling for a breeze to blow away to leeward the filthy fog, which seemed, as it were, to enclose us round, and to cling and settle in its densest volume about the piragua. Standing at the bows, I could not see the stern, and as for the heads of the sails they were lost in the thick opaque air. It was curious to gaze out upon the water as the black looking undulations of the sea rolled under us, the mist seeming to rise and fall with them, and sometimes boiling and eddying from the motion of the waves, although not a breath of wind strayed over the ocean. I might have been upon duty about half an hour, when I almost leaped from the deck with amazement to hear suddenly, coming from whence I knew not, but ringing shrilly through the thick air, a loud cry or scream, like that uttered by a man in mortal anguish. ‘Disco,’ I shouted, ‘did you hear that? What was that cry?’ But the Indian, instead of answering me, stood dumb and trembling, as though struck with terror. Instantly the cry was repeated, and even louder and more vehemently than before. ‘It is a spirit,’ said the Indian. ‘It is some bad spirit of the fog. It will come to us and kill us.’