Originally published in Terrific Register (Sherwood, Jones, and Co.; 1825).
While Sir Michael Seymour was in the command of the Amethyst frigate, and was cruizing in the Bay of Biscay, the wreck of a merchant ship drove past. Her deck was just above water; her lower mast alone standing. Not a soul could be seen on board; but there was a cub-house on deck, which had the appearance of having been recently patched with old canvass and tarpauling, as if to afford shelter to some forlorn remnant of the crew.
It blew at this time a strong gale, but Sir Michael, listening only to the dictates of humanity, ordered the ship to be put about, and sent off a boat with instructions to board the wreck, and ascertain whether there was any being still surviving, whom the help of his fellow men might save from the grasp of death.
The boat rowed towards the drifting mass; and while struggling with the difficulty of getting through a high running sea close alongside, the crew shouting all the time as loud as they could, an object resembling in appearance a bundle of clothes was observed to roll out of the cub-house against the lee shrouds of the mast. With the end of a boat-hook they managed to get hold of it, and hauled it into the boat, when it proved to be the trunk of a man, bent head and knees together, and so wasted away, as scarcely to be felt within the ample clothes which had once fitted it in a state of life and strength.
The boat's crew hastened back to the Amethyst with this miserable remnant of mortality; and so small was it in bulk, that a lad of fourteen years of age was able with his own hands to lift it into the ship. When placed on deck, it shewed for the first time, to the astonishment of all, signs oft remaining life; it tried to move, and next moment muttered, in a hollow sepulchral tone, "There is another man."
The instant these words were heard, Sir Michael ordered the boat to shove off again for the wreck. The sea having now become somewhat smoother, they succeeded this time in boarding the wreck; and on looking into the cub-house, they found two other human bodies, wasted like the one they had saved to very bones, but without the least spark of life remaining. They were sitting in a shrunk-up posture, a hand of one resting on a tin pot, in which there was about a gill of water; and a hand of the other reaching to the deck, as if to regain a bit of raw salt beef of the size of a walnut, which had dropped from its nerveless grasp. Unfortunate men! They had starved on their scanty store till they had not strength remaining to lift the last morsel to their mouths!
The boat’s crew having completed their melancholy survey, returned on board, where they found the attention of the ship's company engrossed by the efforts made to preserve the generous skeleton, who seemed to have had just life enough to breath the remembrance that there was still "another man," his companion in suffering, to be saved. Captain S. committed him to the special charge of the surgeon, who spared no means which humanity or skill could suggest, to achieve the noble object of creating anew, as it were, a fellow creature, whom famine had stripped of almost every living energy.
For three weeks he scarcely ever left his patient, giving him nourishment with his own hand every five or ten minutes, and at the end of three weeks more, the "skeleton of the wreck" was seen walking on the deck of the Amethyst; and, to the surprise of all who recollected that he had been lifted into the ship by a cabin boy, presented the stately figure of a man nearly six feet high!