The trustworthy author of "Eight Months in Japan," N. Lühdorf, tells us
(p. 158) a remarkable instance of unconscious foreboding on the part of
a common sailor. The American barque _Greta_ was in 1855 chartered to
carry a great number of Russians, who had been shipwrecked on board the
frigate _Diana_ during an earthquake at Simoda to the Russian port of
Ayan. A sailor on board was very ill, and shortly before his death told
his comrades that he would soon die, but that he was rather glad of it,
as they would all be captured by the English, with whom Russia was then
at war. The report of his prediction reached the captain's cabin, but
all the officers agreed that such an event was next to impossible; a
dense fog was making the ship perfectly invisible, and no English fleet
had as yet appeared in the Sea of Okhotsk, where the Russians had
neither vessels nor forts to tempt the British. The whole force of
England in those waters was at that moment engaged in blockading the
Russian fleet in the Bay of Castris in the Gulf of Tartary. Nevertheless
it so chanced that a British steamer, the corvette _Barracouta_, hove in
sight on the 1st of August and captured the vessel, making the Russians
prisoners of war.
SECOND SIGHT.
A special kind of divination, which has at times been evidenced in
certain parts of Europe, and is not unknown to our North-western
Indians, consists in the perception of contemporaneous or future events,
during a brief trance. Generally the seer looks with painfully raised
eyelids, fixedly into space, evidently utterly unconscious of all around
him, and engaged in watching a distant occurrence. A peculiar feature of
this phenomenon, familiar to all readers as second sight, is the
exclusion of religious or supernatural matters; the visions are always
strictly limited to events of daily life: deaths and births, battles and
skirmishes, baptisms and weddings. The actors in these scenes are often
personally unknown to the seer, and the transactions are as frequently
beheld in symbols as in reality. A man who is to die a violent death,
may be seen with a rope around his neck or headless, with a dagger
plunged into his breast, or sinking into the water up to his neck; the
sick man who is to expire in his bed, will appear wrapped up in his
winding sheet, in which case his person is more or less completely
concealed as his death is nearer or farther off. A friend or a messenger
coming from a great distance, is seen as a faint shadow, and a murderer
or a thief, as a wolf or a fox. Another peculiar feature of second sight
is the fact that the same visions are very frequently beheld by several
persons, although the latter may live far apart and have nothing in
common with each other. The phenomena are sporadic in Germany and
Switzerland, in the Dauphiné and the Cevennes; they occur in larger
numbers and are often hereditary in certain families, in Denmark, the
Scotch Highlands and the Faroe Islands. In Gaelic, the persons thus
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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