In Search of an Unknown Race — page 205: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

J % VAN. 1gt And now occurred one of those strange incidents that to the average landsman seem to border on the incred- ible, yet which the sailor, accustomed to the marvelous in various forms, regards as only a verification of the well-worn saying that truth is stronger than fiction. Van had fallen into a doze, if such it could be called. Though his eyes were closed and his senses half-dor- mant, he was conscious of the perpetual hiss of the sea, and his own perpetual upheavals and down-slidings. The contact of his arm with something hard roused him from his partial stupor, Opening his eyes, he saw slowly moving past him a broken spar, apparently the targer half of a ship’s royal-yard. To reach out and grasp the iron jackstay was, of course, his immediate action. But, as Van did so, he nearly relaxed his hold in a paroxysm of instinctive fear. For the spar, which at first he had presumed to be drifting, was moving steadily forward through some unseen agency, and drawing him with it. What to make of this strange phenomenon Van at first did not know, and I had almost said he did not care. Unreeving one of the cord beckets on the rim of the buoy, he made it fast to the jackstay, and suffered himself to be towed passively with the spar. As another day dawned, faint with hunger and chok- ing with thirst, Van languidly rubbed his eyes free of salt crystals. Then, upborne on a heavy roller, he stared vacantly about him. Not half a mile distant, coming down toward him, with all sails set, was a great ship, occasionally rolling from windward to leeward, and showing the bright EOmicdoo “S (E(0) im