{"id":"01KG6YHA8H1W60WFY3MKC9Y6CX","cid":"bafkreiepz5ldlzrf6wbvizwuubvxmo6svtzmw5poatw4qnvpoqsa6p4upu","type":"chunk","properties":{"end_line":2220,"extracted_at":"2026-01-30T07:57:55.409Z","extracted_by":"structure-extraction-lambda","label":"Chunk 1","source_file":"01KG6YDDF6PTWG4P7JTS5THSTD","start_line":2171,"text":"In the year 1799, Captain Amasa Delano, of Duxbury, in Massachusetts,\r\ncommanding a large sealer and general trader, lay at anchor with a\r\nvaluable cargo, in the harbor of St. Maria—a small, desert, uninhabited\r\nisland toward the southern extremity of the long coast of Chili. There\r\nhe had touched for water.\r\n\r\nOn the second day, not long after dawn, while lying in his berth, his\r\nmate came below, informing him that a strange sail was coming into the\r\nbay. Ships were then not so plenty in those waters as now. He rose,\r\ndressed, and went on deck.\r\n\r\nThe morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and\r\ncalm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of\r\nswells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead\r\nthat has cooled and set in the smelter’s mould. The sky seemed a gray\r\nsurtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of\r\ntroubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and\r\nfitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms.\r\nShadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.\r\n\r\nTo Captain Delano’s surprise, the stranger, viewed through the glass,\r\nshowed no colors; though to do so upon entering a haven, however\r\nuninhabited in its shores, where but a single other ship might be\r\nlying, was the custom among peaceful seamen of all nations. Considering\r\nthe lawlessness and loneliness of the spot, and the sort of stories, at\r\nthat day, associated with those seas, Captain Delano’s surprise might\r\nhave deepened into some uneasiness had he not been a person of a\r\nsingularly undistrustful good-nature, not liable, except on\r\nextraordinary and repeated incentives, and hardly then, to indulge in\r\npersonal alarms, any way involving the imputation of malign evil in\r\nman. Whether, in view of what humanity is capable, such a trait\r\nimplies, along with a benevolent heart, more than ordinary quickness\r\nand accuracy of intellectual perception, may be left to the wise to\r\ndetermine.\r\n\r\nBut whatever misgivings might have obtruded on first seeing the\r\nstranger, would almost, in any seaman’s mind, have been dissipated by\r\nobserving that, the ship, in navigating into the harbor, was drawing\r\ntoo near the land; a sunken reef making out off her bow. This seemed to\r\nprove her a stranger, indeed, not only to the sealer, but the island;\r\nconsequently, she could be no wonted freebooter on that ocean. With no\r\nsmall interest, Captain Delano continued to watch her—a proceeding not\r\nmuch facilitated by the vapors partly mantling the hull, through which\r\nthe far matin light from her cabin streamed equivocally enough; much\r\nlike the sun—by this time hemisphered on the rim of the horizon, and,\r\napparently, in company with the strange ship entering the harbor—which,\r\nwimpled by the same low, creeping clouds, showed not unlike a Lima\r\nintriguante’s one sinister eye peering across the Plaza from the Indian\r\nloop-hole of her dusk _saya-y-manta._\r\n\r","title":"Chunk 1"},"relationships":[{"peer":"01KG6YGB7Z3K8B6BYJGR83VQN5","peer_type":"chapter","predicate":"in"},{"peer":"01KG6YDDF6PTWG4P7JTS5THSTD","peer_type":"file","predicate":"extractedFrom"},{"peer":"01KG6YCG626JN4FCG8QK17CQCF","peer_type":"collection","predicate":"collection"},{"peer":"01KG6YHA8HDMMZ06KGCP22V3AM","peer_type":"chunk","predicate":"next"}],"ver":2,"created_at":"2026-01-30T07:57:57.393Z","ts":"2026-01-30T07:58:03.435Z","edited_by":{"method":"manual","user_id":"01KFF0H3YRP9ZSM033AM0QJ47H"}}