She lay there on the sleeping
ocean like a dream ship, her masts and rigging black against the
pallid sky, the mist that rested upon the sea enfolding half her hull.
She might have been of three hundred tons burthen; she was black
and two-decked, and very high at poop and forecastle, and she was
heavily armed. My eyes traveled from the ship to the shore, and
there dragged up on the point, the oars within it, was a boat.
At the head of the beach, beyond the line of shell and weed, the
sand lay piled in heaps. With these friendly hillocks between me
and the sea, I crept on as silently as I might, until I reached a point
just above the boat. Here I first heard voices. I went a little
further, then knelt, and, parting the long coarse grass that filled the
hollow between two hillocks, looked out upon two men who were
digging a grave.
They dug in a furious hurry, throwing the sand to left and right,
and cursing as they dug. They were powerful men, of a most
villainous cast of countenance, and dressed very oddly. One with a
shirt of coarsest dowlas, and a filthy rag tying up a broken head,
yet wore velvet breeches, and wiped the sweat from his face with a
wrought handkerchief; the other topped a suit of shreds and
patches with a fine bushy ruff, and swung from one ragged
shoulder a cloak of grogram lined with taffeta.
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