I shall
from time to time continue this Journal. It is true that I may not
find an opportunity of transmitting it to the world, but I will not
fall to make the endeavour. At the last moment I will enclose the
MS. in a bottle, and cast it within the sea.
An incident has occurred which has given me new room for meditation.
Are such things the operation of ungoverned Chance? I had ventured
upon deck and thrown myself down, without attracting any notice, among
a pile of ratlin-stuff and old sails in the bottom of the yawl.
While musing upon the singularity of my fate, I unwittingly daubed
with a tar-brush the edges of a neatly-folded studding-sail which
lay near me on a barrel. The studding-sail is now bent upon the
ship, and the thoughtless touches of the brush are spread out into the
word DISCOVERY.
I have made many observations lately upon the structure of the
vessel. Although well armed, she is not, I think, a ship of war. Her
rigging, build, and general equipment, all negative a supposition of
this kind. What she is not, I can easily perceive --what she is I fear
it is impossible to say. I know not how it is, but in scrutinizing her
strange model and singular cast of spars, her huge size and
overgrown suits of canvas, her severely simple bow and antiquated
stern, there will occasionally flash across my mind a sensation of
familiar things, and there is always mixed up with such indistinct
shadows of recollection, an unaccountable memory of old foreign
chronicles and ages long ago.
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