"With a fa-la, fa-la, fa-la-la!
To all you ladies now at land . . ."
Next morning Captain Pomery (whose hurt was a pretty severe concussion of the skull, the explosion having flung him into the panelling of the ship's cabin, and against the knee of a beam) returned to duty, and professed himself able, with help, to take a reckoning. He relieved us of another anxiety by producing a pocket-compass from his fob.
My father held the sextant for him, while Nat, under instructions, worked out the sum. With a compass, upon a chart spread on the deck, I pricked out the bearings—with a result that astonished all as I leapt up and stared across the bows.
"Why, lad, by the look of you we should be running ashore!" exclaimed my father.
"And so we should be at this moment," said I, "were not the reckoning out."
Captain Pomery reached out for the paper. "The reckoning is right enough," said he, after studying it awhile.
"Then on what land, in Heaven's name, are we running?" my father demanded testily.
"Why, on Corsica," I answered, pointing with my compass's foot as he bent over the chart. "On Corsica. Where else?"
It wanted between three and four hours of sunset when we made the landfall and assured ourselves that what appeared so like a low cloud on the east-north-eastern horizon was indeed the wished-for island. We fell to discussing our best way to approach it; my father at first maintaining that the coast would be watched by Genoese vessels, and therefore we should do wisely to take down sail and wait for darkness.
Against this, Captain Pomery maintained—