HEADING SOUTH.
Just then Helga rose through the hatch. I caught an expression of
admiration in Abraham's face at her floating, graceful manner of passing
through the little aperture.
'She might ha' been born and bred in a lugger,' said he to me in a
hoarse whisper. 'Whoy, with the werry choicest and elegantest o' females
it 'ud be no more 'n an awkward scramble to squeeze through that hole.
Has she wings to her feet? I didn't see her use her elbows, did you?
And, my precious limbs! how easily she takes them thwarts!' by which he
meant her manner of passing over the seats of the boat.
Perhaps now I could find heart to admire the girl's figure. Certainly I
had had but small spirit for observation of that kind aboard the raft,
and THERE only had her shape been revealed to me; for in the barque no
hint was conveyed by her boyish attire of the charms it rudely and
heavily concealed. The sparkling brine with which she had refreshed her
face had put something of life into her pale cheeks, and there was a
faint bloom in her complexion that was slightly deepened by a delicate
glow as she smiled in response to my smile, and took a seat at my side.
'Them rashers smells first-class,' said Abraham, with a hungry snuffle.
'It must be prime ham as 'll steal to the nose, while cooking, dead in
the vind's eye.'
'Before breakfast is ready,' said I, 'I'll imitate Miss Nielsen's
example;' and with that I went forward, drew a bucket of water, dropped
into the forepeak, and enjoyed the most refreshing wash that I can call
to mind. One needs to be shipwrecked to appreciate these seeming
trifles. For my own part, I could scarcely realize that, saving my
oilskin-coat, I had not removed a stitch of my clothes since I had run
from my mother's house to the lifeboat. I came into the light that
streamed into the little hatch, and took a view of myself in the
looking-glass, and was surprised to find how trifling were the marks I
bore of the severe, I may truly say the desperate, experiences I had
passed through. My eyes retained their brightness, my cheeks their
colour. I was bearded, and therefore able to emerge triumphantly from a
prolonged passage of marine disaster without requiring to use a razor.
It is the stubbled chin that completes the gauntness of the shipwrecked
countenance.
I have a lively recollection of that breakfast--our first meal aboard
the _Early Morn_. Rashers of ham hissed in the frying-pan: each of us
grasped a thick china mug full of black coffee; the bag of biscuits we
had brought with us from the barque lay yawning at our feet, and
everyone helped himself. The boatmen chawed away solemnly, as though
they were masticating quids of tobacco, each man falling to with a huge
clasp-knife that doubtless communicated a distinct flavour of tarred
hemp to whatever the blade came in contact with. Indeed, they cut up
their victuals as they might cut up tobacco: working at it with extended
arms and backward-leaning posture, putting bits of the food together as
though to fit their mouths, and then whipping the morsel on the tips of
their knives through their leathery lips with a slow chaw-chaw of their
under-jaws that made one think of a cow busy with the cud. Their
leisurely behaviour carried me in imagination to the English seaside;
for these were the sort of men who, swift as might be their movements in
an hour of necessity, were the most loafing of loungers in times of
idleness--men who could not stand upright, who polished the hardest
granite by constant friction with their fearnaught trousers, but who
were yet the fittest central objects imaginable for that prospect of
golden sand, calm blue sea, marble-white pier and terraces of cliff
lifting their summits of sloping green high into the sweet clear
atmosphere which one has in mind when one thinks of the holiday coast of
the old home.
The man named Thomas, having cooked the breakfast, had taken the helm,
but the obligation of steering did not interfere with his eating. In
fact, I observed that he steered with the small of his back, helping the
helm now and again by a slight touch of the tiller with his elbow, while
he fell to on the plate upon his knee. For my part, I was as hungry as
a wolf, and fed heartily, as the old voyagers would have said. Helga,
too, did very well; indeed, her grief had half starved her; and mighty
glad was I to see this fair and dainty little heart of oak making a
meal, for it was a good assurance in its way that she was fighting with
her sorrow and was beginning to look at the future without the bitter
sadness that was in her gaze yesterday.
But while we sat eating and chatting, the wind continued to slowly
freshen; the foresheet had tautened to the rigidity of iron, and now and
again the lugger made a plunge that would send a bright mass of white
water rolling away from either bow. The wind, however, was almost over
the stern, and we bowled along before it on a level keel, save when some
scend of sea, lifting her under the quarter, threw the little fabric
along with a slanting mast and a sharper drum-like rolling out of the
heart of the distended canvas as the lugger recovered herself with a
saucy swing to starboard.
'Who says we ain't going to reach Australey?' exclaimed Abraham, pulling
out a short pipe and filling it, with a slow, satisfied grin at the
yeasty dazzle over the lee-rail, to which the eye, fastened upon it,
was stooped at times so close that the brain seemed to dance to the wild
and brilliant gyrations of the milky race.
'A strange fancy,' said I, 'for a man to buy a Deal lugger for Sydney
Bay.'
'If it warn't for strange fancies,' said Thomas, with a sour glance, 'it
'ud be a poor look-out for the likes of such as me.'
'Tell ye what I'm agoing to miss in this here ramble,' exclaimed Jacob.
'That's beer, mates!'
'Beer 'll come the sweeter for the want of it,' said Abraham, with a
sympathetic face. 'Still, I must say, when a man feels down there's
nothin' like a point o' beer.'
'What's drunk in your country, mum?' said Jacob.
'Everything that you drink in England,' Helga answered.
'But I allow,' grunted Thomas, fixing a morose eye upon the horizon,
'that the Scandinavians, as the Danes and likevise the Svedes, along
with other nations, incloodin' of the Roosians, is called, ben't so
particular in the matter o' drink as the English, to say nothen o' Deal
men. Whoy,' he added, with a voice of contempt, 'they're often content
to do without it. Capt'ns and owners know that. The Scandinavian fancies
is so cheap that you may fill your fo'k'sle with twenty sailors on tarms
that'ud starve six Englishmen.'
'The Danes are good sailors,' said Helga, looking at him, 'and they are
the better sailors because they are a sober people.'
'I've got nothen to say agin 'em as sailors,' retorted Thomas; 'but they
ships too cheap, mum--they ships too cheap.'
'They will take what an Englishman will take!' exclaimed Helga, with a
little sparkle in her eye.
'So they will, mum--so they will!' exclaimed Abraham soothingly. 'The
Dane's a fust-class sailor and a temperate man, and when Tommy there'll
give me an opportunity of saying as much for _him_ I'll proclaim it.'
I was standing up, peering round the sea, for perhaps the tenth time
that morning, when, happening to have my eyes directed astern, as the
lugger ran in one of her graceful, buoyant, soaring launches to the
summit of a little surge--for the freshening of the wind had already
set the water running in heaps, noticeable even now for weight and
velocity aboard that open craft of eighteen tons, though from the height
of a big ship the seas would have been no more than a pleasant wrinkling
of the northerly swell--I say, happening to look astern at that moment,
I caught sight of a flake of white poised starlike over the rim of the
ocean. The lugger sank, then rose again, and again I spied that bland
moonlike point of canvas.
'A sail!' said I; 'but unhappily in chase of us. Always, in such times
as these, whatever shows shows at the wrong end.'
Abraham stood up to look, saw the object, and seated himself in silence.
'How are you heading the lugger?' cried I.
'Sou'-sou'-west,' he answered.
'What course have you determined on?' said I, anxious to gather from the
character of his navigation what might be our chances of falling in with
the homeward-bounders.
'Why, keep on heading as we go,' he answered, 'till we strike the
north-east trades, which are to be met with a-blowing at about
two-and-twenty degrees no'the; then bring the _Airly Marn_ to about
south. When the hequator's crossed,' continued he, smoking, with his
head well sunk between his coat-collars, 'we strikes off to the west'ard
again for the hisland of Trinidad--not to soight it; but when we gits
into its latitude we starboards for the south-east trades, and goes away
for the Cape o' Good Hope. Are ye anything of a navigator yourself?'
'No,' I answered, which was true enough, though I was not so wholly
ignorant of the art of conducting a ship from one place to another, as
not to listen with the utmost degree of astonishment to this simple
boatman's programme of the voyage to Australia.
He whipped open the same locker from which he had taken the rough toilet
articles, and extracted a little blue-backed track-chart of the world,
which he opened and laid across his knees.
'I suppose ye can read, sir?' said he, not at all designing to be
offensive, as was readily gatherable from his countenance, merely
putting the question, as I easily saw, out of his experience of the
culture of Deal beach.
Helga laughed.
'Yes, I can read a little,' said I.
'Well, then,' said he, laying a twisted stump of thumb upon the chart,
'here's the whole blooming woyage wrote down by Capt'n Israel Brown, of
the _Turk's Head_, a wessel that was in the Downs when my mates and me
agreed for to undertake this job. He took me into his cabin, and pulling
out this here chart he marked these lines as you see down upon it.
"There, Abraham!" he says, says he; "you steer according to these here
directions, and your lugger 'll hit Sydney Bay like threading a
needle."'
I looked at the chart, and discovered that the course marked upon it
would carry the lugger to the westward of Madeira. It was not suggested
by the indications that any port was to be touched at, or, indeed, any
land to be made until Table Bay was reached. The two men, Jacob and
Tommy, were eyeing me eagerly, as though thirsting for an argument. This
determined me not to hazard any criticism. I merely said:
'I understood from you, I think, that you depend upon ships supplying
you with your wants.'
Abraham responded with an emphatic nod.
Well, thought I, I suppose the fellows know what they are about; but in
the face of that chart I could not but feel mightily thankful that Helga
and I stood the chance of being transhipped long before experience
should have taught the men that charity was as little to be depended
upon at sea as ashore. They talked of five months, and even of six, in
making the run, and who was to question such a possibility when the
distance, the size of the boat, the vast areas of furious tempest and of
rotting calm which lay ahead, were considered? The mere notion of the
sense of profound tediousness, of sickening wearisomeness, which must
speedily come, sent a shudder through me when I looked at the open
craft, whose length might have been measured by an active jumper in a
couple of bounds, in which there was no space for walking, and, for the
matter of that, not very much room for moving, what with the contiguity
of the thwarts and the incumbrances of lockers, spare masts and oars,
the pump, the stove, the little deck forward, the boat, and the rest of
the furniture.
I asked Abraham how they managed in the matter of keeping a look-out.
'One tarns in for four hours, and t'other two keep the watch, one
a-steering for two hours and the other relieving him arterwards.'
'That gives you eight hours on deck and four hours' sleep,' said Helga.
'Quite right, mum.'
'Eight hours of deck is too much,' she cried; 'there should have been
four of you. Then it would have been watch and watch.'
'Ay, and another share to bring down ourn,' exclaimed Thomas.
'Mr. Abraham,' said Helga, 'Mr. Tregarthen has told you that I can
steer. I promise you that while I am at the helm the lugger's course
shall be as true as a hair, as you sailors say. I can also keep a
look-out. Many and many a time have I kept watch on board my father's
ship. While we are with you, you must let me make one of your crew.'
'I, too, am reckoned a middling hand at the helm,' said I; 'so while we
are here, there will be five of us to do the lugger's work.'
Abraham looked at the girl admiringly.
'You're werry good, lady,' he said: 'I dorn't doubt your willingness.
On board a ship I shouldn't doubt your capacity; but the handling of
these here luggers is a job as needs the eddication of years. Us Deal
boatmen are born into the work, and them as ain't, commonly perish when
they tries their hand at it.'
''Sides, it's a long woyage,' growled Thomas, 'and if more shares is to
be made of it I'm for going home.'
'You're always a-thinking of the shares, Tommy,' cried Abraham; 'the
gent and the lady means nothing but koindness. No, mum, thanking you all
the same,' continued he, giving Helga an ungainly but respectful
sea-bow. 'You're shipwrecked passengers, and our duty is to put ye in
the way of getting home. That's what you expect of us; and what we
expect of you is that you'll make your minds easy and keep comfortable
ontil ye leave us.'
I thanked him warmly, and then stood up to take another look at the
vessel that was overhauling us astern. She was rising fast, already
dashing the sky past the blue ridges of the ocean with a broad gleam of
canvas.
'Helga,' said I softly, 'there's a large ship rapidly coming up astern.
Shall we ask these men to put us aboard her?'
She fastened her pretty blue eyes thoughtfully upon me.
'She is not going home, Hugh.'
'No, nor is the lugger. That ship should make us a more comfortable home
than this little craft, until we can get aboard another vessel.'
She continued to eye me thoughtfully, and then said: 'This lugger will
give us a better chance of getting home quickly than that ship. These
men will run down to a vessel, or even chase one to oblige us and to get
rid of us; but a ship like that,' said she, looking astern, 'is always
in a hurry when the wind blows, and is rarely very willing to back her
topsail. And then think what a swift ship she must be, to judge from her
manner of overtaking us! The swifter, the worse for us, Hugh--I mean,
the farther you will be carried away from your home.'
She met my eyes with a faint wistful smile upon her face, as though she
feared I would think her forward.
'You are right, Helga,' said I. 'You are every inch a sailor. We will
stick to the lugger.'
Abraham went forward to lie down, after instructing Jacob to arouse him
at a quarter before noon, that he might shoot the sun. Thomas sat with a
sulky countenance at the helm, and Jacob overhung the rail close against
the foresheet, his chin upon his hairy wrist, and his gaze levelled at
the horizon, after the mechanical fashion of the 'longshoreman afloat.
At intervals the wind continued to freshen in small 'guns,' to use the
expressive old term--in little blasts or shocks of squall, which flashed
with a shriek into the concavity of the lug, leaving the wind steady
again, but stronger, with a higher tone in the moan of it above and a
stormier boiling of the waters round about the lugger, that seemed to be
swirling along as though a comet had got her in tow, though this sense
of speed was no doubt sharpened by the closeness of the hissing white
waters to the rail. Yet shortly after ten o'clock the ship astern had
risen to her waterline, and was picking us up as though, forsooth, we
were riding to a sea-anchor.
A nobler ocean picture never delighted a landsman's vision. The
snow-white spires of the oncoming ship swayed with solemn and stately
motions to the underrun of the quartering sea. She had studdingsails out
to starboard, one mounting to another in a very pyramid of soft milky
cloths, and her wings of jibs, almost becalmed, floated airily from
masthead to bowsprit and jibboom-end like symmetric fragments of fleecy
cloud rent from the stately mass of fabric that soared behind them
brilliant in the flashing sunshine. Each time our lugger was hove
upwards I would spy the dazzling smother of the foam, which the shearing
cutwater of the clipper, driven by a power greater than steam, was
piling to the hawse-pipes, even to the very burying of the
forecastle-head to some of the majestic structure's curtseys.
Helga watched her with clasped hands and parted lips and glowing blue
eyes full of spirit and delight. The glorious sea-piece seemed to
suspend memory in her; all look of grief was gone out of her face; her
very being appeared to have blent itself with that windy, flying,
triumphant oceanic show, and her looks of elation--the abandonment of
herself to the impulse and the spirit of what she viewed, assured me
that if ever old Ocean owned a daughter, its child was the pale,
blue-eyed, yellow-haired maiden who sat with rapt gaze and swift
respiration at my side.
Jacob, who had been eyeing the ship listlessly, suddenly started into an
air of life and astonishment.
'Whoy, Tommy,' cried he, grasping the rail and staring over the stern,
out of his hunched shoulders, 'pisen me, mate, if she ain't the
_Thermoppilly_!'
Thomas slowly and sulkily turned his chin upon his shoulder, and after a
short stare, put his back again on the ship, and said: 'Yes, that's the
_Thermoppilly_, right enough!'
'The _Thermopylæ_?' said I. 'Do you mean the famous Aberdeen clipper?'
'Ay,' cried Jacob, 'that's her! Ain't she a beauty? My oye, what a run!
What's agoing to touch her? Look at them mastheads! Tall enough to foul
the stars, Tommy, and _de_-range the blooming solar system.'
He beat his thigh in his enjoyment of the sight, and continued to
deliver himself of a number of nautical observations expressive of his
admiration and of the merits of the approaching vessel.
She had slightly shifted her helm, as I might take it, to have a look at
us, and would pass us close. The thunder of the wind in her towering
heights came along to our ears in the sweep of the air in a low
continuous note of thunder. You could hear the boiling of the water
bursting and pouring from her bows: her copper gleamed to every
starboard roll on the white peaks of the sea along her bends in dull
flashes as of a stormy sunset, with a frequent starlike sparkling about
her from brass or glass. How swiftly she was passing us I could not have
imagined until she was on our quarter, and then abreast of us--so close
that I could distinguish the face of a man standing aft looking at us,
of the fellow at the wheel, of a man at the break of the short poop
singing out orders in a voice whose every syllable rang clearly to our
hearing. A crowd of seamen were engaged in getting in the lower
studdingsail, and this great sail went melting out against the hard
mottled-blue of the sky as the clipper stormed past.
Jacob sprang on to a thwart, and in an ecstasy of greeting that made a
very windmill of his arms shrieked rather than roared out, 'How d'ye do,
sir?--how d'ye do, sir? How are ye, sir? Glad to see ye, sir!'
The man that he addressed stared a moment, and hastily withdrew, and
returned with a binocular glass which he levelled at us for a moment,
then flourished his hand.
'What are you doing down here, Jacob?' he bawled.
'Going to Australey!' shouted Jacob.
'_Where?_' roared the other.
'To Sydney, New South Vales!' shouted Jacob.
The man, who was probably the captain, put his finger against his nose
and wagged his head; but further speech was no longer possible.
'He don't believe us!' roared Jacob to his mate, and forthwith fell to
making twenty extravagant gestures towards the ship in notification of
his sincerity.
The wonderful squareness of the ship's canvas stole out as she gave us
her stern, with the foam of her wake rushing from under the counter like
to the dazzling backwash of a huge paddle-wheel, and she seemed to fill
the south-west heaven with her cloths, so high and broad did those
complicated pinions, soaring to the trucks, look to us from the low seat
of the bounding and sputtering lugger.
'Lord now!' cried Jacob, 'if she'd only give us the end of a tow-rope!'
'Yes,' said I, gazing with admiration at the beautiful figure of the
ship rapidly forging ahead, and already diminishing into an exquisite
daintiness and delicacy of shape and tint, 'you would not, in that case,
have to talk of five and six months to Australia.'
At a quarter before twelve she was the merest toy ahead--just a glance
of mother-of-pearl upon the horizon; but by this hour it was blowing a
strong breeze of wind, and when Abraham came out of the forepeak he
called to Jacob, and between them they eased up the fore-halliards and
hooked the sheet to the second staken--in other words, to a sort of
cringle or loop, of which there were four; then, having knotted the reef
points, Abraham came aft to seek for the sun.
My humour was not a little pensive, for the sea that was now running
was a verification of the boatman's words to me, and I could not keep my
thoughts away from what must have happened to Helga and me had we not
been mercifully taken off the raft. The lugger rose buoyantly to each
flickering, seething head; but, in spite of my lifeboat experiences, I
could not help watching with a certain anxiety the headlong rush of foam
to her counter, nor could I feel the wild, ball-like toss the strong
Atlantic surge would give to our eggshell of a boat, without misgiving
as to the sort of weather she was likely to make should such another
storm as had foundered the _Anine_ come down upon the ocean. I was also
vexed to the heart by the speed at which we were driving, and by the
assurance--I was seafarer enough to understand--that in such a lump of a
sea as was now running there would be a very small probability indeed of
our being able to board, or even to get alongside of, a
homeward-bounder, though twenty vessels, close-hauled for England,
should travel past us in an hour. How far were we to be transported into
this great ocean before the luck of the sea should put us in the way of
returning home? These were considerations to greatly subdue my spirits;
and there was also the horror that memory brought when I glanced at the
rushing headlong waters and thought of the raft.
I looked at Helga: her eyes were slowly sweeping the horizon, and on
their coming to mine the tender blue of them seemed to darken to a
gentle smile. Whatever her heart might be thinking of, assuredly no
trace of the misgivings which were worrying me were discernible in her.
The shadow of the grief that had been upon her face during the morning
had returned with the passing away of the life the noble picture of the
ship had kindled in her; but there was nothing in it to weaken in her
lineaments their characteristic expression of firmness and resolution
and spirit. Her tremorless lips lay parted to the sweep of the wind; her
admirable little figure yielded to the bounding, often violent, jerking
motions of the lugger with the grace of a consummate horsewoman, who is
one with the brave swift creature she rides; her short yellow hair
trembled under the dark velvet-like skin of her turban-shaped hat, as
though each gust raised a showering of gold-dust about her neck and
cheeks.
Yet I believe, had I been under sentence of death, I must have laughed
outright at the spectacle of Abraham bobbing at the sun with an
old-fashioned quadrant that might well have been in use for forty years.
He stood up on straddled legs, with the aged instrument at his eye,
mopping and mowing at the luminary in the south, and biting hard in his
puzzlement and efforts at a piece of tobacco that stood out in his
cheeks like a knob.
'He's a blazing long time in making height bells, hain't he, to-day!'
said Jacob, addressing Abraham, and referring to the sun.
'He's all right,' answered Abraham, talking with his eye at the little
telescope. 'You leave him to me, mate; keep you quiet, and I'll be
telling you what o'clock it is presently.'
Helga turned her head to conceal her face, and, indeed, no countenance
more comical than Abraham's could be imagined, what with the mastication
of his jaws, which kept his ears and the muscles of his forehead moving,
and what with the intensity of the screwed-up expression of his closed
eye and the slow wagging of his beard, like the tail of a pigeon newly
alighted.
'Height bells!' he suddenly roared in a voice of triumph, at the same
time whipping out a huge silver watch, at which he stared for some
moments, holding the watch out at arm's-length, as though time was not
to be very easily read. 'Blowed if it ben't one o'clock at Deal!' he
cried. 'Only fancy being able to make or lose time as ye loike. Werry
useful ashore, sir, that 'ud be, 'ticularly when you've got a bill
afalling doo.'
He then seated himself in the stern-sheets, and, producing a small book
and a lead pencil from the locker, went to work to calculate his
latitude. It was a very rough, ready, and primitive sort of reckoning.
He eyed the paper with a knowing face, often scratching the hair over
his ear and looking up at the sky with counting lips; then, being
satisfied, he administered a nod all round, took out his chart, and,
having made a mark upon it, exclaimed, while he returned it to the
locker, 'There, that job's over till twelve o'clock to-morrow.' This
said, he extracted a log-book that already looked as though it had been
twice round the world, together with a little penny bottle of ink and a
pen, and, with the book open upon his knee, forthwith entered the
latitude (as he made it) in the column ruled for that purpose; but I
could not see that he made any attempt even at guessing at his
longitude, though I noticed that he wrote down the speed of his little
craft, which he obtained--and I dare say as correctly as if he had hove
the log--by casting his eye over the side.
'How d'ye spell _Thermoppilly_?' said he, addressing us generally.
I told him.
'Just want to state here that we sighted her, that's all,' said he;
'this here space with "Remarks" wrote atop has got to be filled up, I
suppose? At about wan o'clock this marning,' he exclaimed, speaking very
slowly, and writing as he spoke, 'fell in with a raft--how's raft spelt,
master?--two r's?' I spelt the word for him.--'Thank'ee! Fell in with a
raft, and took off a lady and gent. There, that'll be the noose for
twenty-four hours! Now let's go to dinner.'
This mid-day meal was composed of a piece of corned beef, some ship's
biscuit and cheese. I might have found a better appetite had there been
less wind, and had the boat's head been pointed the other way. All the
time now the lugger was swarming through it at the rate of steam. There
was already a strong sea running too, the storminess of which we should
have felt had we had it on the bow; but our arrowy speeding before it
softened the fierceness of its sweeping hurls, and the wind for the same
reason came with half the weight it really had, though we must have been
reefed down to a mere strip of canvas had we been close-hauled. The sun
shone with a dim and windy light out of the sky that was hard with a
pie-balding of cloud.
'What is the weather going to prove?' I asked Abraham.
He munched leisurely, with a slow look to windward, and answered,
''Tain't going to be worse nor ye see it.'
'Have you a barometer?' said I.
'No,' he answered; 'they're no good. In a boat arter this here pattern,
what's the use of knowing what's agoing to come? It's only a-letting go
a rope an' you're under bare poles. Marcury's all very well in a big
ship, where ye may be taken aback clean out o' the sky, and lose every
spar down to the stumps of the lower masts.'
Though I constantly kept a look-out, sending my eyes roaming over either
bow past the smooth and foaming curves of seas rushing ahead of us, I
was very sensible, as I have said, that nothing was to be done in such
hollow waters as we were now rushing through, though we should sight a
score of homeward-bounders. Yet, spite of the wonderful life that strong
northerly wind swept into the ocean, nothing whatever showed during the
rest of the day, if I except a single tip of canvas that hovered for
about a quarter of an hour some two or three leagues down in the east,
like a little wreath of mountain mist. The incessant pouring of the wind
past the ear, the shouting and whistling of it as it flashed spray-laden
off each foaming peak in chase of us, grew inexpressibly sickening and
wearying to me, coming as it did after our long exposure to the fierce
weather of the earlier days. The thwarts or lockers brought our heads
above the line of the gunwale, and to remedy this I asked leave to drag
a spare sail aft into the bottom of the boat, and there Helga and I sat,
somewhat sheltered at least, and capable of conversing without being
obliged to cry out.