“A dozen men are shut up together in a little bark upon the wide, wide sea, and for months and months see no forms and hear no voices but their own, and one is taken suddenly from among them, and they miss him at every turn. It is like losing a limb. There are no new faces of new scenes to fill up the gap. . . . You miss his form, and the sound of his voice, for habit had made them almost necessary to you, and each of your senses feels the loss.”

George Ballmer, a fellow-sailor, is working high above the deck of a ship on the maintop masthead, when he falls into the ocean with his equipment. He is lost completely; Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative (New York: Signet, 2000), 31.