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.