Imagine You are Standing on a Boat Deck--Write Something from that Perspective

It was noon before Scratch saw anything of interest. Most of the morning I felt hungry and a little sick, and I pinched my arm and cooled my face in the spray, beating off the sun and distracting myself so I wouldn’t eat another biscuit. I loved the biscuits. If there was any peace and comfort on the sea it was a biscuit.

There wasn’t much to do on a calm day. I leaned my torso over the railing, getting the spray, and I shrugged my shoulders up, as if the ocean would call my name if it saw a huskier man. One saw belts of blue.

What Scratch found was indeed interesting, a post of wood. It was so interesting, in fact, to a bunch of men lost at sea, that we took the effort of getting the boat down into the water to grab this post; and, having taken it up, we set ourselves around it as at a dining table, to touch it carefully and look into its grooves. It was more of a plank than a post actually, seeming to have been shattered at both ends. When bearded Jenkins mumbled that he had found something, I anticipated it with some trepidation; but it was just initials, two sets, encased in a rough heart, the blithe initials of lovers on some island a thousand miles away.