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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.
*
* * * *
I have been looking at the timbers of the ship. She is built of a
material to which I am a stranger. There is a peculiar character about
the wood which strikes me as rendering it unfit for the purpose to
which it has been applied. I mean its extreme porousness, considered
independently by the worm-eaten condition which is a consequence of
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