The sailors made a press at the caboose door, some in and some out, and those who were out stood in hearkening postures, their heads eagerly bent forward, the hand of the hindmost upon the shoulder of his fellow in front of him. Bol’s voice rumbled. It was clear he was reading aloud, so continuous was the rumbling, and presently I found that I had guessed right when I saw the outermost man hand his paper in through the caboose door. In short, every sailor wanted his document read aloud, two men only being able to read, and of these two Yan Bol was the more intelligible to the Englishmen. Well, after this for some days I find nothing worth noting. A thing then happened, a trifling ocean incident some might deem it, but it left an odd strong impression upon me, and after all these years I can live through it again in memory as though now was the hour of its happening. We had sailed out of the northeast trade wind, and had entered that zone of equatorial calms and baffling winds which is termed by sailors the doldrums. To this point we had made a fine run. Such another run down the South Atlantic must promise us a prompt arrival at the island, unless we should meet with the Dutchman Vanderdecken’s devil’s luck off the Horn. Neither Bol nor I spared the men, when our forefoot smote the greasy waters of the creeping and sneaking parallels. To every breath that tarnished the white surface of the sea we braced the yards, making nothing of running a studding sail aloft, though five minutes afterward the watch might be hauling it down with all aback forward and the brig going astern. By this sort of watchfulness, and by the willingness of the men, and by the slipperiness of our coppered bends, we sneaked our keel forward, every twenty-four hours showing what sometimes rose to a “run.” It was in about one degree north, that down east at sunrise, in the heart of the dazzle there, we spied a sail, a topsail schooner, that as the morning advanced lifted toward us as though she were set our way by a current, for, often as I looked at her, I never could see that she shifted her helm to close us whenever a draught of air swept the shadows out of her canvas and held them steadily shining and gave her life for a while. A serene cloudless day was that, the light azure of the sky whitening into a look of quicksilver where it sloped to the brim of the sea, and the sea floating thick and hushed and white, with a long and lazy heave that ran a drowsy shudder through our canvas. Greaves thought the schooner a man-of-war, something British stationed on the West African coast, well out in the Atlantic for a sniff of mid-ocean air, brought there by a chase, and now bound inward again, though subtly lifting toward us at present, attracted by the smartness of our rig, and inspired by a dream of slaves. But I did not think her a man-of-war, I did not believe her English. A Yankee I did not reckon her. In short, I seemed to know what she was not.