Edwin K. Buttolph

“ On the deck by the captain's side was a little heap of pebbles which had evidently been brought up from the ballast, and carefully piled in one corner of the despatch-box beside the ship's papers were seventeen of these same pebbles. It is not unlikely that each pebble represented a day of thirst and watching. It makes me shudder, even now—the picture of that red-shirted captain sitting in the waist of the ship watching for a sail, and seeing his crew, maddened by thirst or by salt water, jump down one by one into the jaws of the sharks waiting below. ”

“ Four men lay on the deck around the forward hatch. They had been dead a longtime, and the burning sun poured down upon ghastly bodies which were almost skeletons, they were so thin.
"The crew of the cutter were ordered up, and they searched the ship from stem to stern. They found no one in the forecastle or the hold, and no one in the cabin; but in the galley they found the Malay cook and the cabin-boy, both dead, the cook lying upon his face with his fingers twisted in his long black hair. All the men except the captain seemed to have died in agony, for their bodies were writhed and twisted. ”

“ We had passed Ceylon, catching a glimpse of the distant island and a whiff of the spicy breeze offshore, and were nearing the treacherous chain of coral reefs known as the Maldive Islands, when I came up from the cabin after dinner for a stroll on deck. The evening sky glowed with the beauty of a rich sunset such as is rarely seen outside the tropics. ”