Read "The Death Ship, Volume I" by W. Clark Russell online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The news had spread quickly; the watch below had roused out and most of the men were on deck, and they moved about in groups striving to find out all about the suicide. The death of a captain of a ship at sea is sure always to fill the crew with uneasiness; a sense of uncertainty is excited, and then again there is that darkening of the spirits which the shadow of death particularly causes among a slender community who have been for months associated as a family, and amid whom, every man's face, speech, and manner are, maybe, more familiar than his own brother's or father's.
Yet of all the souls on board I suspect I felt the captain's self-murder most sorely, for owing to there being in my mind much more that was akin to his own moods than he could find in Mr. Hall, we had had many and long conversations together. Then there was the Death Ship for me to recall, with his thoughts on it and his conviction that evil was sure to follow his boarding the Plymouth snow. Moreover, I was the last with whom he had exchanged words that night, and in his manner of quitting me, after looking at the moon, there was positively nothing that even my startled and imaginative mind could witness to indicate the intention that had destroyed him.