1831.] The Lonely Man of the Ocean. 141 



German. But they brought with them the most fearful and appalling 

 sensations. 



The sun was blazing in the midst of heaven, and seemed to be sending 

 its noontide ardour on an atmosphere loaded with pestilential vapour. 

 With returned strength, Loeffler called aloud ; but no voice answered 

 him. He began to listen with breathless attention ; not a sound, either 

 of feet or voices, met his ear. A thought of horror, that for a moment 

 half-stilled the pulsation at his heart, rushed on Loeffler's mind. He 

 lay for a moment to recover himself, and collecting those powers of mind 

 and body, over which a certain moral firmness of character, already 

 noticed (joined, be it observed, with the better strength of good prin- 

 ciples), had given him a master s command he quitted his couch, and 

 stood on deck. God of mercy ! what a sight met Loeffler' s eye ! The 

 whole deck was strewed with lifeless and pestilential corpses, presenting 

 every variety of hue which could mark the greater or less progress of 

 the hand of putrefaction, and every conceivable attitude which might 

 indicate either the state of frantic anguish, or utter and hopeless exhaus- 

 tion, in which the sufferers had expired. The hand, fast stiffening in its 

 fixed clasp on the hair ; the set teeth and starting eyeballs shewed where 

 death had come as the reliever of those insupportable torments which 

 attend the plague when it bears down its victim by the accumulated 

 mass of its indurated and baleful ulcerations. Others, who had suc- 

 cumbed to its milder, more insidious, yet still more fatal (because more 

 sudden and utterly hopeless) attack, lay in the helpless and composed 

 attitude which might have passed for sleep ; but the livid and purple 

 marks of these last corpses, scarce capable of being borne to their grave 

 in the ' ' integrity of their dimensions," shewed that the hand of corrup- 

 tion had been even more bus)'' with them than with the fiercer and more 

 tortured victims of the pestilence. The Invincible, once the proudest 

 and most gallant vessel which ever rode out a storm, or defied an enemy, 

 now floated like a vast pest-house on the waters j while the sun of that 

 burning zone poured its merciless and unbroken beams on the still and 

 pestiferous atmosphere. Not a sound, not a breeze, awoke the silence 

 of the sullen and baleful air ; not a single sail broke the desolate uni- 

 formity of the horizon : sea and sky seemed to meet only to close 

 in that hemisphere of poisonous exhalations. Christian sic ened ; 

 he turned round with a feeling of despair, and burying his face in the 

 couch he had just quitted, sought a moment's refuge from the scene of 

 horror. That moment was one of prayer ; the next was that of stern 

 resolution. He forced down his throat a potation, from which his long- 

 confirmed habits of sobriety would formerly have shrunk with disgust ; 

 and, under the stimulus of this excitement, compelled himself to the 

 revolting office of swallowing a food which he felt necessary to carry 

 him through the task he contemplated. This task was twofold and tre- 

 mendous. First, he determined to descend to the lower-decks, and see 

 whether any convalescent, or even expiring, victim yet survived to whom 

 he could tender his assistance ; and, secondly, if all had fallen, he would 

 essay the revolting, perhaps the impracticable, office of performing their 

 watery sepulture. 



Loeffler made several attempts to descend into those close and cor- 

 rupted regions ere he could summon strength of heart or nerve to enter 

 them. A profound stillness reigned there. He passed through long 

 rows of hammocks, either the receptacle of decaying humanity, or as 



