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There have been so many queer yams in the newspapers about the sinking of the Nautilus that I, being skipper of the four-masted schooner Brant, which picked up Professor Charles Randolph, her only survivor, had better set down what really did happen down there in the Sargasso Sea.
The Nautilus was a steam yacht owned by Professor Amos Tyrrel, a wealthy English naturalist who had built a laboratory on the Cornish coast for the study of fish and seaweed. He and Randolph, who had been his assistant for twenty years, sailed in the Nautilus on the fifth of last February to do some research work in the Sargasso.
About this time the Brant was rounding the Horn out of Santiago, Chile, with a load of nitrates bound for Charleston, South Carolina. We struck a blow off the River Platte, and my old hooker lost her rudder. When things cleared up a bit we found oursslves pretty well out in the South Atlantic, but we rigged a jury rudder and headed northwest, figuring on dropping into some Cuban port to refit.
We struck the Sargasso about fifteen days later, and one fine morning we picked up this Professor Randolph, who was bobbing about in the open sea without the sign of a stick to keep him up. He was delirious when we brought him aboard, but after he came to his right senses he told me the queerest yarn I ever heard in my life—and I’ve heard some rather good ones in the forty years I’ve been following the sea. At first I put him down as crazy, but we’d no sooner got him aboard than hell began a-popping all around us right there on the Brant. When she finally got through, with two of her sticks missing and some of those hard-boiled birds in the fo’c’sl a-praying to the Almighty to save ’em from the devils of the deep, I made up my mind that maybe he wasn’t so crazy after all. Then I had Randolph write down his story in his own words. I turned the original over to the authorities, and I suppose the British Admiralty has it now, but I copied the whole thing, word for word, in the Brant’s log. The professor headed his story in big letters: STATEMENT OF DR. CHARLES WILLIAMS RANDOLPH CONCERNING THE SINKING OF THE NAUTILUS. And this is how it read:
