The Extraordinary Adventure of a Chief Mate

I am Michael Balfour; I it was who fell overboard; and it is needless
for me to say here that I was not drowned. The volcanic island was
only reported by one other ship, and the reason why will be read at
large in this account of my strange adventure and merciful
deliverance.

It was the evening of the 23d of March, 1876. Our passage to the
equator from Sydney had been good, but for three days we had been
bothered with light head winds and calms, and since four o'clock this
day the ocean had stretched in oil-smooth undulations to its margin,
with never a sigh of air to crispen its marvelous serenity into
shadow. The courses were hauled up, the staysails down, the mizzen
brailed up; the canvas delicately beat the masts to the soft swing of
the tall spars, and sent a small rippling thunder through the still
air, like a roll of drums heard at a distance. The heat was great; I
had never remembered a more biting sun. The pitch in the seams was
soft as putty, the atmosphere was full of the smell of blistered
paint, and it was like putting your hand on a red-hot stove to touch
the binnacle hood or grasp for an instant an iron belaying-pin.

A sort of loathing comes into a man with a calm like this. "The very
deep did rot," says the poet; and you understood the fancy when you
marked the blind heave of the swell to the sun standing in the midst
of a sky of brass, with his wake under him sinking in a sinuous
dazzle, as though it was his fiery glance piercing to the green depths
a thousand fathoms deep. It was hot enough to slacken the nerves and
give the imagination a longer scope than sanity would have it ride by.
That was why, perhaps, I found something awful and forbidding in the
sunset, though at another time it might scarcely have detained my gaze
a minute. But it is true, nevertheless, that others besides me gaped
at the wonderful gushings of hot purple,--arrested whirlpools of
crimson haze, they looked,--in the heart of which the orb sat rayless,
flooding the sea with blood under him, so magnificently fell was the
hue, and flushing the sky with twenty dies of gold and orange, till,
in the far east, the radiance fainted into the delicacy of pale amber.

"Yon's a sunset," said Captain Matthews, a North of England man, to
me, "to make a fellow think of the last day."