The plain-going ideas of the honest mate were open to a reasoning which the reader may find a little obscure:  for his mind contained a sort of chart of the ocean, to which he could at any time refer, with a proper discrimination between the various winds, and all the different points of the compass.  When properly directed, he was not slow to see, as a mariner, the probable justice of his young Commander’s inferences; and then wonder, in its turn began to take possession of his more obtuse faculties.

“It is downright unnatural, truly, that the fellow should be there!” he replied, shaking his head, but meaning no more than that it was entirely out of the order of nautical propriety; “I see the philosophy of what you say, Captain Wilder; and little do I know how to explain it.  It is a ship, to a mortal certainty!”

“Of that there is no doubt.  But a ship most strangely placed!”

“I doubled the Good-Hope in the year ’46,” continued the other, “and saw a vessel lying, as it might be, here, on our weather-bow—­which is just opposite to this fellow, since he is on our lee-quarter—­but there I saw a ship standing for an hour across our fore-foot, and yet, though we set the azimuth, not a degree did he budge, starboard or larboard, during all that time, which, as it was heavy weather, was, to say the least, something out of the common order.”

“It was remarkable!” returned Wilder, with an air so vacant, as to prove that he rather communed with himself than attended to his companion.

“There are mariners who say that the flying Dutchman cruises off that Cape, and that he often gets on the weather side of a stranger, and bears down upon him, like a ship about to lay him aboard.  Many is the King’s cruiser, as they say, that has turned her hands up from a sweet sleep, when the look-outs have seen a double decker coming down in the night, with ports up, and batteries lighted but then this can’t be any such craft as the Dutchman, since she is, at the most, no more than a large sloop of war, if a cruiser at all.”

“No, no,” said Wilder, “this can never be the Dutchman.”

“Yon vessel shows no lights; and, for that matter, she has such a misty look, that one might well question its being a ship at all.  Then, again, the Dutchman is always seen to windward, and the strange sail we have here lies broad upon our lee-quarter!”

“It is no Dutchman,” said Wilder, drawing a long breath, like a man awaking from a trance.  “Main topmast-cross-trees, there!”

The man who was stationed aloft answered to this hail in the customary manner, the short conversation that succeeded being necessarily maintained in shouts, rather than in speeches.

“How long have you seen the stranger?” was the first demand of Wilder.

“I have just come aloft, sir; but the man I relieved tells me more than an hour.”

“And has the man you relieved come down? or what is that I see sitting on the lee side of the mast-head?”