This made me so sick, that for either two or three days I lay without
eating in the chair near the wheel, only rarely waking to sufficient
sense to see to it that she was making westward from that place; and on
the morning when I finally roused myself I did not know whether it was
the second or the third morning: so that my calendar, so scrupulously
kept, may be a day out, for to this day I have never been at the pains
to ascertain whether I am here writing now on the 5th or the 6th of
June.
* * * * *
Well, on the fourth, or the fifth, evening after this, just as the sun
was sinking beyond the rim of the sea, I happened to look where he hung
motionless on the starboard bow: and there I saw a clean-cut black-green
spot against his red--a most unusual sight here and now--a ship: a poor
thing, as it turned out when I got near her, without any sign of mast,
heavily water-logged, some relics of old rigging hanging over, even her
bowsprit apparently broken in the middle (though I could not see it),
and she nothing more than a hirsute green mass of old weeds and
sea-things from bowsprit-tip to poop, and from bulwarks to water-line,
stout as a hedgehog, only awaiting there the next high sea to founder.
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