Some sail was now got on the ship, and she was found to steer very well. Dodd tried her on every tack, and at last ordered Sharpe to make all sail and head for the Cape.
This electrified the first mate. The breeze was very faint but southerly, and the Mauritius under their lee. They could make it in a night and there refit, and ship a new rudder. He suggested the danger of sailing sixteen hundred miles steered by a gimcrack; and implored Dodd to put into port.
Dodd answered with a roughness and a certain wildness never seen in him before: “Danger, sir! There will be no more foul weather this voyage; Jonah is overboard.” Sharpe stared an inquiry. “I tell you we shan't lower our topgallants once from this to the Cape: Jonah is overboard:” and he slapped his forehead in despair; then, stamping impatiently with his foot, told Sharpe his duty was to obey orders, not discuss them.
“Certainly, sir,” said Sharpe sullenly, and went out of the cabin with serious thoughts of communicating to the other mates an alarming suspicion about Dodd, that now, for the first time, crossed his mind. But long habit of discipline prevailed, and he made all sail on the ship, and bore away for the Cape with a heavy heart. The sea was like a mill-pond, but in that he saw only its well-known treachery, to lead them on to this unparalleled act of madness: each sail he hoisted seemed one more agent of Destruction rising at his own suicidal command.
Towards evening it became nearly dead calm. The sea heaved a little, but was waveless, glassy, and the colour of a rose, incredibly brave and delicate.
The look-out reported pieces of wreck to windward. As the ship was making so little way, Dodd beat up towards them: he feared it was a British ship that had foundered in the storm, and thought it his duty to ascertain and carry the sad news home. In two tacks they got near enough to see with their glasses that the fragments belonged, not to a stranger, but to the Agra herself. There was one of her waterbutts, and a broken mast with some rigging: and as more wreck was descried coming in at a little distance, Dodd kept the ship close to the wind to inspect it: on drifting near, it proved to be several pieces of the bulwark, and a mahogany table out of the cuddy This sort of flotsam was not worth delaying the ship to pick it up; so Dodd made sail again, steering now south-east.
He had sailed about half a mile when the look-out hailed the deck again.
“A man in the water!”
“Whereabouts?”
“A short league on the weather quarter.”