The Death Ship, Volume I by W. Clark Russell

There was nothing in sight. Indeed, in that thick gale a vessel would have had to come within a mile of us to be visible. As Vanderdecken neither stirred nor spoke to me, I feared he might take it ill if I hung by his side, for how was I to tell but that he might consider I should regard the withdrawal of his attention as a hint to begone. I therefore walked aft, the second mate no more heeding me than if I had been as viewless as the air, whilst the helmsman, after turning a small pair of glassy eyes upon me, stained with veins, directed them again at the sea over the bow, his face as sullenly thoughtful as the others, albeit he handled the tiller with good judgment, "meeting her," as we sailors say, when she needed it, and holding a very clean and careful luff.

My curiosity being great I ventured to peep into the binnacle, or "bittacle" as it was formerly called, a fixed box or case for holding the mariner's compass. The card was very old-fashioned, as may be supposed, yet it swung to the movement of the ship, and I could not suppose that it was very inaccurate since by the aid of it they periodically made the land where they hunted for meat and filled their casks. As neither Vanderdecken nor Antony Arents offered to hinder me from roaming about, I determined, since I was about it, to take a good look at this Death Ship. I examined the swivels which were very green with decay, and tried to revolve one on its pivot, but found that it was not to be stirred. The tiller had been a very noble piece of timber, but now presented the aspect of rottenness that all the rest of the wood in the ship had, yet it had been very elegantly carved, and numerous flourishes still overran it, though the meaning of the devices was not to be come at. The rudder head worked in a great helm-port, through which a corpulent man of eighteen stone might have slipped fair into the sea underneath. The gale made a melancholy screeching in the skeleton lantern, and I wondered they did not unship the worthless thing and heave it overboard. I looked over the side and as far down as I could carry my sight, and I observed that the ship was of a sickly sallow colour, not yellow -- indeed, of no hue that I could give a name to, though the original tint a painter might conjecture by guessing what colour would yield this nameless pallidness after years and years of washing seas and the burning of the sun.