, »He 's gone!« The body was instantly
borne up the ladder.
    Another hammock was soon prepared, and the dead sailor stitched up as
before. Some additional ceremony, however, was now insisted upon, and a Bible
was called for. But none was to be had, not even a Prayer Book. When this was
made known, Antone, a Portuguese, from the Cape-de-Verd Islands, stepped up,
muttered something over the corpse of his countryman, and, with his finger,
described upon the back of the hammock the figure of a large cross; whereupon it
received the dead-launch.
    These two men both perished from the proverbial indiscretions of seamen,
heightened by circumstances apparent; but had either of them been ashore under
proper treatment, he would, in all human probability, have recovered.
    Behold here the fate of a sailor! They give him the last toss, and no one
asks whose child he was.
    For the rest of that night there was no more sleep. Many stayed on deck
until broad morning, relating to each other those marvellous tales of the sea
which the occasion was calculated to call forth. Little as I believed in such
things, I could not listen to some of these stories unaffected. Above all was I
struck by one of the carpenter's.
    On a voyage to India, they had a fever aboard, which carried off nearly half
the crew in the space of a few days. After this the men never went aloft in the
night-time, except in couples. When top-sails were to be reefed, phantoms were
seen at the yard-arm ends; and in tacking ship, voices called aloud from the
tops. The carpenter himself, going with another man to furl the
main-top-gallant-sail in a squall, was nearly pushed from the rigging by an
unseen hand; and his shipmate swore that a wet hammock was flirted in his face.
    Stories like these were related as gospel truths, by those who declared
themselves eye-witnesses.
    It is a circumstance not generally known, perhaps, that, among ignorant
seamen, Finlanders, or Finns, as they are more commonly called, are regarded
with peculiar superstition. For some reason or other, which I never could get
at, they are supposed to possess the gift of second sight, and the power to
wreak supernatural vengeance upon those who offend them. On this account they
have great influence among sailors, and two or three with whom I have sailed at
different times were persons well calculated to produce this sort of impression