Dan turned his face, with his bandage dripping water, toward me and nodded,
“Yes, Melville. You should have done it long ago!” he yelled back.
That startled me, for if he thought so, Dan should certainly have made the suggestion himself. Why had he chosen instead to keep his mouth shut? But it was no time to argue why or wherefor. We must heave to.
“Get hold of Jack Cole!” I roared. “We’ll try it now!”
Soon in the sternsheets, Cole, Danenhower, and I were debating what we should use for the sea anchor, or drag, to which the boat must ride. Dan advised making the drag of three of our oars with our sail lashed between them, but this I refused to do, for if we lost the sea anchor, our oars and sails would both be gone and then we would be helpless indeed. Canvassing what little else we had in the boat to stretch out the sides of a drag, I hit on three brass-tipped tent poles, and these I ordered used, with a section of tent cloth as the drag itself.
Working in the half-swamped boat, Cole and Manson together made the drag, lashing the ends of the three tent poles into a six-foot triangle, and then lacing inside it the piece of tent. Meantime Danenhower unrove a small block and fall to get a line and from that manila line made up a short three-legged bridle, one leg of which went to each corner of the triangular drag, while all the rest of the line was to serve as our anchor cable. The result of all this, when we were through (which working under bad conditions in the darkness took two hours) was that we had what looked like a large triangular kite at the end of a long manila line, the main difference being that our kite or sea anchor we were going to fly in water instead of in air, and as it dragged vertically through the water, it was to hold us head to the oncoming seas that we might ride them bows-on.
On one matter at the end of all this, Cole and I differed. The drag had to be heavy enough to sink beneath the surface, for if it floated, it would be ineffective. But if it were too heavy, it would sink too far and instead of streaming out ahead of us, would hang vertically beneath our bows, keeping them from rising to the seas, and helping to swamp us. Cole stoutly maintained that the completed drag was not heavy enough to sink. While somewhat inclined to agree, I refused to add more weight, for to a buoyant drag I could always add more ballast, but it was doubtful in that storm that I could ever get my hands again on a sunken drag to remove excess weight, until the boat having swamped, I caught up with the submerged drag on my own way to the bottom. However, to appease Jack, I got a copper fire-pot ready to slide out on the line if it should be necessary to add more weight, and we were ready to proceed.
At this point, Lieutenant Danenhower, who had been busy making the bridle, spoke up again.
“Melville!” he sang out in my ear above the howling wind. “Will you let me heave her to?”
I hesitated. Dan was over half blinded. But, I thought to myself, in this darkness that was no great handicap; he could probably see as much as anyone. And certainly as a deck officer, he should know more about handling a boat in a seaway than anyone else in her, including me, an engineer. Our lives depended on that maneuver; I should be derelict in my duty not to use the best talent available.