Melville's Ships: The Perseverance

I heard of one whaler, which after many years' absence was given up for lost.  The last that had been heard of her was a shadowy report of her having touched at some of those unstable islands in the far Pacific, whose eccentric wanderings are carefully noted in each new edition of the South-Sea charts.  After a long interval, however, 'The Perseverance'--for that was her name--was
spoken somewhere in the vicinity of the ends of the earth, cruising along as leisurely as ever, her sails all bepatched and be quilted with rope-yarns, her spars fixed with old pipe staves, and her rigging knotted and spliced in every possible direction.
  

Her crew was composed of some twenty venerable Greenwich-pensioner-looking old salts, who just managed to hobble about deck. The ends of all the running ropes, with the exception of the signal halyards and poop-down-haul, were rove through snatch-blocks, and led to the capstan or windlass, so that not a yard was braced or a sail set without the assistance of machinery.

Her hull was encrusted with barnacles, which completely encased her.  Three pet sharks followed in her wake, and every day came alongside to regale themselves from the contents of the cook's bucket, which were pitched over to them.  A vast shoal of bonetas and albicores always kept her company.

Such was the account I heard of this vessel and the remembrance of it always haunted me; what eventually became of her I never learned; at any rate: she never reached home, and I suppose she is
still regularly tacking twice in the twenty-four hours somewhere off Desolate Island, or the Devil's-Tail Peak.
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