“I ’ve got it, Tim,” he said. He put the glass down. “Two spars lashed together, and a man lashed to them. No sign of life in him, but we ’ll pick him up and see.” We ran down to him, pretty close. It was a crazy apology for a raft, merely two spars lashed together loosely. The man had been sitting on them with his legs, from the knees down, in the water. Now his body had fallen backward, and his head rested on the spars. In his hand he gripped a hatchet. What could he have wanted with a hatchet? I asked the captain. Captain Nelson was looking at the man, but he turned to me for an instant. “Sharks, I ’m afraid, Tim,” he said. Just then our boat got to him, and somebody cut the lashings, and they lifted him into the boat. His legs were terribly bitten by sharks, and one foot was gone. I turned away, sick and faint. It was dusk when they brought him aboard, still gripping his hatchet. He was breathing, but the life was almost out of him. He was carried below, and they did what they could for him, and he was still alive when I turned in after writing what I considered a very solemn {113} and arresting passage in my journal. I do not reproduce that passage. It seems like betraying the confidence of a well-meaning boy who seldom felt deeply on such matters, and still more seldom gave utterance to thoughts of the kind when he had them. To me it would seem much on the same order as publishing love-letters—to be ridiculed. But the passage in my journal is funny, while it brings tears to my eyes as I remember my feelings as I wrote it. When I got on deck in the morning I saw the four Kanakas gathered about the sailmaker, who was just finishing the job of sewing up a long bundle done up in a piece of old canvas. It was the body of the man we had rescued the evening before. He had died in the night without regaining consciousness. He was a Kanaka, but beyond that one evident fact we never knew who he was, or what ship he came from, for by the time we got back to New Bedford so many things had happened that the incident had slipped from our minds. Many things slip from the minds of sailors in that way, and are recalled only in the course of recounting some yarn, as I am doing.