Chapter 10

HE IS VERY MUCH FRIGHTENED; THE SAILORS ABUSE HIM; AND HE BECOMES
MISERABLE AND FORLORN

While the scene last described was going on, we were all startled by a
horrid groaning noise down in the forecastle; and all at once some one
came rushing up the scuttle in his shirt, clutching something in his
hand, and trembling and shrieking in the most frightful manner, so that
I thought one of the sailors must be murdered below.

But it all passed in a moment; and while we stood aghast at the sight,
and almost before we knew what it was, the shrieking man jumped over
the bows into the sea, and we saw him no more. Then there was a great
uproar; the sailors came running up on deck; and the chief mate ran
forward, and learning what had happened, began to yell out his orders
about the sails and yards; and we all went to pulling and hauling the
ropes, till at last the ship lay almost still on the water. Then they
loosed a boat, which kept pulling round the ship for more than an hour,
but they never caught sight of the man. It seemed that he was one of the
sailors who had been brought aboard dead drunk, and tumbled into his
bunk by his landlord; and there he had lain till now. He must have
suddenly waked up, I suppose, raging mad with the delirium tremens, as
the chief mate called it, and finding himself in a strange silent place,
and knowing not how he had got there, he rushed on deck, and so, in a
fit of frenzy, put an end to himself.

This event, happening at the dead of night, had a wonderfully solemn and
almost awful effect upon me. I would have given the whole world, and the
sun and moon, and all the stars in heaven, if they had been mine, had I
been safe back at Mr. Jones', or still better, in my home on the Hudson
River. I thought it an ill-omened voyage, and railed at the folly which
had sent me to sea, sore against the advice of my best friends, that is
to say, my mother and sisters.

Alas! poor Wellingborough, thought I, you will never see your home any
more. And in this melancholy mood I went below, when the watch had
expired, which happened soon after. But to my terror, I found that the
suicide had been occupying the very bunk which I had appropriated to
myself, and there was no other place for me to sleep in. The thought of
lying down there now, seemed too horrible to me, and what made it worse,
was the way in which the sailors spoke of my being frightened. And they
took this opportunity to tell me what a hard and wicked Me I had entered
upon, and how that such things happened frequently at sea, and they were
used to it. But I did not believe this; for when the suicide came
rushing and shrieking up the scuttle, they looked as frightened as I
did; and besides that, and what makes their being