have been taken from contemporary data and can be relied upon implicitly.
The story opens in the year 1821, and the hero is an English seaman named Aaron Smith. In the month of June, Smith departed from England and embarked on the merchant ship Harrington, which carried him safely over the Atlantic to the West Indies. Subsequent events induced him to resign his billet on that vessel, and as he found that the West Indian climate was impairing his health, he made arrangements to get back home to England. Being then at Kingston in the island of Jamaica, he interviewed the captain of the British merchant ship Zephyr and was appointed first mate. The Zephyr, like many of the ships of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was rigged as a brig, that is to say with square sails on each of her two masts, with triangular headsails and a quadrilateral sail abaft the second mast much like the mainsail of a cutter-rigged craft. Brigs nowadays are practically obsolete, but at the time we are speaking of they were immensely popular in the merchant service and for carrying coals from Newcastle-on-Tyne to London.
The Zephyr, after taking on board her West Indian cargo together with a few passengers, weighed anchor in the month of June 1822—just a year after Smith had left Europe—and set sail for England. From the very first Smith saw that things were not quite as they should be. The pilot who took the ship out into the open sea was a very incapable man, but his duties were soon ended and he left the ship. The name of the Zephyr's captain was Lumsden, and even he was far from being the capable mariner which one would have expected in a man whose duty it was to take a ship across the broad Atlantic. Presently, before they had left Kingston far astern, a strong breeze
