Jackson looked again. “Well! What of it?” he demanded.
“This! You see how thick the weed is—thicker even than it was an hour ago. I’ve sailed these seas long enough to know what that means. It means that we have been blown a long way inside the Sargasso Sea.”
“No ships come here; sailing ships would lose nearly all their speed, and steamers would lose all of it, for their screws would soon be hopelessly fouled. No vessel will come to rescue us. If we are ever to leave the Queen, it must be by our own efforts.”
“What can we do?” asked Dorothy, quietly.
“That is it exactly. What can we do? Frankly, I don’t see that we can do anything at present. We have no boats, and nothing but a boat, and a sharp-edged one at that, could make any way through this morass. And every minute we are getting deeper in. The current below catches our sunken bow, and the wind above catches our uplifted stern, and both sweep us eastward—toward the center of the weed. If we took to a raft we would move much more slowly—but we would starve much more quickly—and our chances of being picked up would not be improved.”
“But what will become of us?”
“I don’t know. It seems likely that we will be swept into the center of the sea, where there are supposed to be thousands of derelicts, the combings of the North Atlantic for four hundred years—I say ‘supposed’ because nobody has ever seen them, but there isn’t much doubt about it.”
Jackson laughed scornfully.
“What are you givin’ us?” he demanded incredulously.
Dorothy turned to him.