Dirrik felt himself now master of the situation, and ran on gaily, as one thoroughly at ease.
"It was blinding snow on the Banks that time. The skipper was down with inflammation of the lungs, and lay in his bunk delirious; we'd shipped some heavy seas, and got four stanchions broken, and the mate with four of his ribs bashed in, so he couldn't move. And as for the crew, the less said about them the better. We'd three niggers aboard and an Irishman, and a couple of drunken gentlemen that'd never been to sea before.
"Well, I had to sail and navigate and all. It was a gale that went on day after day, till you'd think the devil himself was hard at it with a bellows. But, luckily, I'd this old watch of mine, and she's better than any of your chronometers, for it's a sixteen-ruby watch——"
"Sixteen ruby—what's that?" asked the examiner with interest.
Dirrik was proud as a peacock at the question; fancy the examiner having to ask him!
"Why, it's this way. If you look inside an ordinary watch, you'll find it's either five rubies or ten, but it's very rarely you come across one with sixteen, and the more rubies you've got in a watch, the better she goes. Well, anyway, when the watch came round to noon midday, I'd take the run and check off our course, and that way I got to windward of her deviations and magnetic variations and all the tricks there are to a compass mostly. Then, of course, I'd to look to the log, and mark off each day's run on the chart."
"Not so bad, not so bad," said the examiner, nodding to the skippers.
"No, we did none so badly, and that's the truth. For we got into Barrow at high water twelve days' sail from the Banks. The Insurance Company wanted to give me a gold watch, but I said, 'No, thank you, if t'was all the same, I'd rather have it in cash,' so they sent me what they call a testimonial, and £15. And that was doing the handsome thing, for it was no more than my duty after all. As for the crowd of rapscallions we'd aboard, I gave them a pound a-piece for themselves—the poor devils had done what they could, though it was little enough."
"Have you ever taken the sun's altitude with a sextant?"
"Surely," said Dirrik. "Meridian and latitude and all the rest of it."