Alone on a Wide Sea, Volume III

The days rolled into weeks and the weeks into months, and still my memory remained clothed as with midnight. No whisper broke its silence. I recollected with almost phenomenal accuracy everything that had befallen me since my rescue; but all that had gone before was darkness, hushed and impenetrable. I cannot remember that I was visited by the dimmest intimation -- that the dullest gleam, however instantaneous, touched my inward gloom.

My story and condition created great interest in Newcastle; for a time I was much talked about. Mrs. Lee had friends who were concerned in the shipping trade, and two or three of them good-naturedly wrote to correspondents at various parts of our coast, and to agents and representatives abroad; but it was all one. Nobody gave information that was in the slightest degree useful. A gentleman at Havre wrote that he met with a sailor who had formed one of the crew of _Notre Dame de Boulogne_, but the man could not tell so much of what happened after the collision as I, because, when the _Notre Dame_ was struck, they launched and crowded into their only boat, and were swept away in the blackness of the night, losing sight of the brig, and the ship which had run into her, and seeing nothing of the flares which the _Deal Castle_ had burnt and the rockets she had sent up. They were rescued next morning by a Spanish schooner, bound to the Mediterranean, and safely landed at Toulon, their original destination, but with the loss of all they possessed in the world. It was quite true, this man added, that the _Notre Dame_ had fallen in with an open boat, and rescued a woman whom they found unconscious, and severely wounded about the head.