My Shipmate Louise, Volume III

I am arrived now at a passage of this singular adventure that will admit only of brief indications of certain features of it. To write down all the incidents of the time which followed could but run me into several volumes of very insipid matter. I own that when I look back upon this experience, it offers itself as something so amazing, something so beside the most astonishing romantic incidents of sea-life which my memory carries, that, though I was the chief actor in it, I often at this hour find myself pausing as in doubt of the actuality of the events I have related and have yet to narrate.

Sometimes I wonder whether I might not have brought this kidnapping business-for thus it may fairly be called so far as Miss Temple and I were concerned-to a speedy end by peremptory refusal to navigate the ship to Captain Braine's island. But I have only to close my eyes and recall the faces and recollect the behaviour of the men who formed that barque's crew, to know better; I have only to repeople that now timeworn canvas with the countenances of those seamen, to witness afresh the looks and bearing of the carpenter, to recollect my defencelessness, the helplessness of my companion, whose life and whose more than life were absolutely dependent upon my judgment; to think of the wild greed raised in the men by their dream of thousands, their resolution to get the money, the sense of lawlessness that would increase upon them with the growing perception of their irresponsibility as a crew deprived of their officers by no crime of their own: I have only to recall all this along with my own thoughts and fears and bitter nerve-sapping anxieties, to understand that the course I adopted was the only practicable one open to me, and that what I did no other man situated as I then was but must have also done. But enough of this.