On 16 July in the morning the mate told me that one of the crew was missing. The missing person was a sailor called Petrofsky. He could not explain how it happened. Last night Petrofsky took a four-hour watch. Abramoff took the next watch, but Petrofsky did not go to his bunk. The men were even more upset. They all said they expected that something like this would happen. All they would tell us was that there was something on the ship with us. The mate is getting very impatient with them; he thinks there will soon be trouble.

On 17 July, yesterday, Olgaren, one of the men, came to my cabin. He was astonished and upset. He whispered that he thought there was a strange man on the ship. He said that he had been sheltering from a rain-storm behind the deck-house. Then he saw a tall, thin man, who did not look like any of the crew. This man came up from inside the ship, and went forward along the deck. Then he disappeared.

Olgaren followed very carefully, but when he got to the bows he found no one, and there was nowhere the man could have gone. Olgaren was very frightened, and I am afraid the rest of the crew will panic. Today I shall search the entire ship carefully from end to end.