Epigraph: 'Fancy', said Halbert, 'one of those old Dutch voyagers driving on this unknown coast on a dark night. What a sudden end to their voyage! Yet that must have happened to many ships which have never come home. Perhaps when they come to explore this coast a little more they may find some of the old ship's ribs jammed on a reef; the ribs of some ship whose name and memory has perished.'
'The very thing you mention is the case,' said the Doctor. 'Down the coast here, under a hopeless, black basaltic cliff, is to be seen the wreck of a very, very old ship, now covered with coral and seaweed. I waited down there for a spring tide, to examine her, but could determine nothing, save that she was very old; whether Dutch or Spanish I know not. You English should never sneer at those two nations; they were before you everywhere.'
Henry Kinglsey in The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn.