I told him. He understood me perfectly though I spoke at length, relating in fact my adventure. I then inquired who he and his companions were, and his story was to the following effect: That he was the boatswain, and the other two able seamen of a Portuguese ship called the _Mary Joseph_, bound to Singapore or to some Malay port. The vessel had been set on fire by one of the crew, an Englishman, who was skulking drunkenly below after broaching a cask of rum. They had three boats which they hoisted out; most of the people got away in the long-boat, six men were in the second boat, he and his two comrades got into the jolly-boat. They had with them four bottles of water, and a small bag of ship’s bread, and nothing more. They parted company with the other boats in the night, and had been four days adrift, sailing northwards by the sun as they reckoned, under a bit of a lug, and keeping an eager look-out though they sighted nothing; until a little before sundown that evening, they spied the speck of this wreck, and made for it, but so scant was the wind and so weak their arms that it had taken them nearly all night to measure the distance which would be a few miles only. They got their boat under the bow--she was lying there now, he said--and stepped on board one after the other. This explained to me their apparition. Of course I had not seen the boat or heard her as she approached, and to me, lying aft, the three men rising over the bows looked as though, like ghostly essences, they had shaped themselves on the forecastle out through the solid plank. I addressed the others, but the yellow man told me that their language was a jargon of base Portuguese, of which I should be able to understand no more than here and there a word, even though I had been bred and educated in Lisbon. “We mosh see to dah boat,” he exclaimed, and spoke to his mates, apparently to that effect. I extinguished the candle, and followed them on deck. It was closer upon daybreak than I had supposed. Already the gray was in the east, like a filtering of light through ash-colored silk, with the sea-line black as a sweep of India ink against it, and the moon a lumpish, distorted mass of faint dingy crimson, dying out in a sort of mistiness westwards, like the snuff of a rushlight in its own smoke. Even whilst the three fellows were manœuvring with the boat over the bow, the tropic day filled the heavens in a bound, and it was broad morning all at once, with a segment of sun levelling a long line of trembling silver from the horizon down to mid-ocean. My first glance was for the _Ruby_, but the sea lay bare in every quarter. The fellows came dragging their boat aft; I looked over and saw that the fabric was of a canoe-pattern, with a queer upcurled bow, and a stern as square as the amidship section of the boat; four thwarts, short oars with oval-shaped blades, and a small mast with a square of lugsail lying with its yard in the bottom of the boat.