I now approached him as he stood alone at his wheel, his head enveloped in a foxskin cap, and his person wrapped in a white shaggy pea-jacket (for we were now in a latitude many degrees higher than New Orleans), where four days before we had worn straw hats and summer garments. Forward of the wheel-house, twenty feet from us on the part of the deck above the boilers, sat one of the passengers smoking a German pipe–a very extraordinary looking man– dark, silent, and mysterious, who had attracted much curious notice on board, both from the passengers and crew, otherwise we were alone on the vast and silent deck.