The foot of the fore-sail having a very large curve, I had a clear view of the sea on both bows under it, and the moment I ran my naked eye from the windward to the leeward side, then I saw, fair betwixt the cathead and the knighthead, the flashing of what was unquestionably the wet side of a dismasted ship rolling to the sun. The regular coming and going of the sparkling was like the discharge of a piece fired and quickly loaded and fired again. I pointed the telescope, and the small magnification aiding my fairly keen sight I distinctly made out the hull of a vessel of between three hundred and four hundred tons, rolling with a very sluggish regularity and shooting out a strong blaze of light whenever the swell gave her streaming sides to the glory. I was pretty sure, by the power and broadness of this darting radiance, that her decks were not submerged, that indeed she would still show an indifferently good height of side above the water, and thereupon threw the glass over my back for the descent, pausing, however, to take a view of the ship from the height I occupied, and wondering not a little, with something of amusement, too, at the extraordinary figure her body offered thus surveyed. In fact, she was not three times as long as she was broad, and she had the sawn-off look of a wagon down there. After every swimming lift of her head by the swell, the droop of her bows hove a smearing of froth into the large blue folds, that might have passed for an overflowing of soap-suds from a wash-tub; and upon that whiteness all the forward part of her stood out in a sort of jumble of pondrous catheads, curved headboards sinking into a well, out of which forked the massive boltsprit, as the people who fashioned it would have spelt it, with its heavy confusion of gear, yards, stays for the sprit-topmast, and the like. I had a good sight of the sails up here, and perceived they were like the famous stocking of which Dr. Arbuthnot, or Pope, or one of the wits of Queen Anne's reign, wrote; that is, that though they might have been the same cloths which the Braave sheeted home when she set sail from Batavia, yet they had been so patched, so darned, and over and over again so repaired, that to prove they were the same sails would be as nice a piece of metaphysical puzzling as to show that they were not.