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“I have often wondered if God and the angels watched that fight in mid-ocean, or only hell and the devils. The nearest land to the west must have been Cape Race, the nearest to the east the Azores, each about five hundred miles away. I did not know the longitude; but I did know that we had sailed due east since I was disrated, and that then we were on the forty-seventh parallel.

“And so, in latitude forty-seven north, longitude unknown, two weakened human brutes unable to strike a heavy and telling blow, yet animated by a fear of death and love of life that twisted their features into frenzied contortions (I judged mine by Macklin’s), struggled feebly for the possession of a mountaintop rising from the sea bed, on the diminishing chance that some ship would come along to the rescue before hunger, thirst, or a rising sea overcame them.

“I hardly know how it ended; I only knew that I found myself too weak to breast the current, and then I gave up, and drifted. I went under twice, I remember, and waited calmly for the end; but before the last sinking I heard voices; then I was clutched by the hair, and as I was dragged bodily into a boat I lost my senses. When I came to, the men lifted me up, and I saw big Finnegan at the tiller, standing erect and declaiming to something astern:

“‘Stay there an’ think it over, ye man-killin’ shlave driver! Stay there, ye devil out o’ hell, an’ may the min ye’ve killed come back to kape ye company till yer master comes fur ye!’

“I took one look at Macklin. He was standing erect, breasting the current with his arms folded, secure in the possession of the foothold he had won from me. But he sent no call for help, and soon went out of sight in the thinning fog as the boat sailed away.

“There is little more to this yarn. We never saw the other boat again, and did not know the story they told if rescued. But among ourselves we agreed to say nothing about the mutiny or the shooting or the rock–only that we had struck something submerged, that the ship had sunk, and that the captain, first mate, and three sailors had been drowned. We were picked up in a few days, told this lie, and were not questioned closely. Then I realized why the men had stood by me; they wanted a shipped officer to justify the story.

“But I knew the long arm of the law, and I did not know the fate of the other boat, or the tale they might tell. So, I shipped for the East, found and learned this strait, and have been here since, afraid to go home.”

* * * * *

This is the yarn I listened to on anchor watch thirty years ago. It pertains to events forty years farther back in the past. If that white-haired, mild-mannered old pilot is still alive, he is over ninety-five years old, and immune from earthly punishment.

But, before deciding to give this story to the world, I visited the United States Hydrographic Office for some corroborative data, and on a pilot chart of 1896 read that one Captain Lloyd, of the British ship Crompton, had lately reported seeing in latitude forty-seven north and longitude thirty-seven degrees twenty minutes west, a rock sixty feet long and eight or ten feet high in the middle. It was at a time of low spring tides, and such a menace to navigation could easily elude observation under ordinary conditions. Captain Lloyd averred that he saw it at twenty minutes to eight on a fine, sunshiny morning, so close and clear to him that he forbore lowering a boat.

Yet, as I learned from further inquiry, he was the subject of much ridicule, and his story was generally disbelieved.

Should it be disbelieved?