CHAMBERS'S JOURNAL
OF
POPULAR
LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART.

DERELICTS.

Has the idea ever occurred to any one that at all times there are shipsof one kind or other floating about at sea without a living creatureon board? They have been abandoned by their officers and crew in whatseemed a hopeless condition. Some are dismantled and mere hulks. Someare swimming keel upwards. Some are water-logged, but being laden withtimber will not sink. There they are driving hither and thither onthe ocean, as wind and waves direct, a dread to the mariner, who mayunawares come against them in the dark. We remember seeing an accountof one of these derelicts, as they are called, being fallen in withafter having been abandoned for weeks. It was water-logged up to thevery deck, and sitting on a scrap of the exposed bulwarks was a poorcat, still alive, in the last degree of attenuation. We have often withcommiseration thought of that accidentally deserted cat, its hunger,its misery, its hopelessness night and day in the midst of the drearyand spacious ocean. How the creature must have been delighted whenrescued from its floating prison! Occasionally derelicts are takenin tow and brought into port, where they are broken up, or if of anyvalue, are reclaimed by owners, to whom they are delivered on a paymentof 'salvage.'

We are going to speak of a kind of derelicts out of ordinary experience.

On the 17th of September 1855, while sailing in the American whalerGeorge Henry, in Davis's Strait, and when about forty miles from CapeMercy, Captain Buddington descried a vessel having something peculiarin her appearance. No signals were hoisted, none answered, and nocrew visible when he approached. Going on board, he found no livingbeing in the ship; but in the best cabin were documents declaring theabandonment of the ship, and explaining the circumstances under whichit had taken place. The wastrel, the treasure-trove, the lost-found,was the famous Resolute, whose story we shall tell presently.

Jurists and legislators have had to determine the ownership ofproperty that seems for the time to belong to no one. Derelict is thelawyers' name for such property, so far at anyrate as regards abandonedships. Where a crew merely quit their ship to obtain assistance,

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