"It would have been merciful to kill him there in the boat; hunger and thirst of the body are nothing, are soon over with. But think of the surpassing cruelty of saving him! Great pains were taken to that end; winds were manipulated, a ship was selected and driven from her course; it was as if the elements had conspired together and the whole machinery of the universe had paused a moment for the consummation of the act. On a certain morning he was sighted from the quarter-deck of the _Vanguard_; an hour later he was picked up, half dead from thirst, and babbling of an island—as mad as a hatter, of course, since the nearest land was the Marquesas, five hundred miles away" *III* "I’ve often tried to imagine Devereux’s outlook on life, as he begged the captain of the _Vanguard_ that morning to turn his ship about and institute a search for an uncharted island. How the refusal must have stunned him, with the reality still a living presence in his heart. By Jove, you know, the smell of the land lingered in his nostrils as if he’d just that moment left it; he could hear the voices, could feel the touch of lips that were barely parted from his.... But they were rough and practical on board the _Vanguard_; they had to be, for weren’t they sailing in the employment of a strictly ordered enterprise? They laughed at him, and held their course. It was then that he began to hate a world that wouldn’t listen. He’s used to it now; like the savages, he has learned his lesson. And his interpretation of it is accepted only as a further indication of his madness. He says simply that we have lost our souls. "On the top of this, came the experience in San Francisco. To have his hopes raised so high, only to be shattered overnight when public interest threw down the new plaything, was the final stroke of disillusionment. He went back to the sea; this was his only means of livelihood, and in spite of the romantic hallucination he remained a good sailor. The ship on which he sailed from San Francisco took him south through the Pacific, along the route of homeward bound vessels. This, of all Pacific sailing routes, strikes nearest to the region where Devereux had been lost and found. But it doesn’t run quite far enough to the westward actually to cross it. Devereux went to the captain, told him straight-forwardly the inwardness of his trouble and adventure, and begged him to shift the course a little—just to run to leeward, so that they might strike the longitude of the place. He didn’t ask to waste any time in search. But the captain, who’d heard about his mate before he shipped him, saw nothing in this but a mild outcropping of the madness, and of course couldn’t listen to the appeal. Running a ship to leeward was a matter of dollars and cents.... So they drew near the island, passed it a few hundred miles away, and left it astern as they picked up the southeast trades.