The Boats of the "Glen Carrig": Being an account of their Adventures in the Strange places of the Earth, after the foundering of the good ship Glen Carrig through striking upon a hidden rock in the unknown seas to the Southward; as told by John Winterstraw, Gent., to his son James Winterstraw, in the year 1757, and by him committed very properly and legibly to manuscriptHodgson, William Hope
Science
The Boats of the "Glen Carrig": Being an account of their Adventures in the Strange places of the Earth, after the foundering of the good ship Glen Carrig through striking upon a hidden rock in the unknown seas to the Southward; as told by John Winterstraw, Gent., to his son James Winterstraw, in the year 1757, and by him committed very properly and legibly to manuscript
At that, I stared out over the breadth of the weed, showing very ghostly
in the moonlight; but, for the moment, I saw not the thing to which he
purposed to draw my attention. Then, suddenly, it fell within the circle
of my gaze--a little light out in the lonesomeness. For the space of some
moments, I stared with bewildered eyes; then it came to me with
abruptness that the light shone from the lone derelict lying out in the
weed, the same that upon that very evening, I had looked with sorrow and
awe, because of the end of those who had been in her--and now, behold, a
light burning, seemingly within one of her after cabins; though the moon
was scarce powerful enough to enable the outline of the hulk to be seen
clear of the rounding wilderness.
And from this time, until the day, we had no more sleep; but made up the
fire, and sat round it, full of excitement and wonder, and getting up
continually to discover if the light still burned. This it ceased to do
about an hour after I had first seen it; but it was the more proof that
some of our kind were no more than the half of a mile from our camp.
And at last the day came.
XI
The Signals from the Ship
Now so soon as it was clearly light, we went all of us to the leeward
brow of the hill to stare upon the derelict, which now we had cause to
believe no derelict, but an inhabited vessel. Yet though we watched her
for upwards of two hours, we could discover no sign of any living
creature, the which, indeed, had we been in cooler minds, we had not
thought strange, seeing that she was all so shut in by the great
superstructure; but we were hot to see a fellow creature, after so much
lonesomeness and terror in strange lands and seas, and so could not by
any means contain ourselves in patience until those aboard the hulk
should choose to discover themselves to us.
And so, at last, being wearied with watching, we made it up together to
shout when the bo'sun should give us the signal, by this means making a
good volume of sound which we conceived the wind might carry down to the
vessel. Yet though we raised many shouts, making as it seemed to us a
very great noise, there came no response from the ship, and at last we
were fain to cease from our calling, and ponder some other way of
bringing ourselves to the notice of those within the hulk.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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