“All hands, shorten sail! Look alive there, lads. Tumble up. Tumble up.”
A fiercer squall than any the vessel had yet encountered struck her before the men had time to reach the yards, and the sails they would have furled were rent into ribbons, and the noise they made as they fluttered out in the breeze was like the volley-firing of a company of soldiers. It was two hours before those whose watch was not on deck got back to the galley fire. It had just gone eight bells in the last dog watch, so the evening was still young.
Chapter Fifteen.
Christmas Day in the Doldrums.
“See the pudding, hear the fun;
The laugh and joke and glee;
The ship may in the Doldrums lie,
But—’tis Christmas Day at sea.”
Anon.
Scene: A ship in the Doldrums. It is the saucy Brilliant. She has been to Calcutta, and is now on her way back to the Cape. And it is Christmas Day, and she ship is in the Doldrums. Longitude 90 degrees East; latitude nothing at all, for she is as nearly “on top o’ the ’quator,” as Jack calls it, as possible. She encountered a tornado farther north, which gives the reason for her being now somewhat out of her course. But she stood it well, and to see her now, with her long black lines, her tapering spars, and snow-white decks, you could not believe that but a fortnight before she had hardly a morsel of bulwark left, that, in fact, the bulwarks were more like sheep hurdles than anything shipshape.
The Doldrums! There isn’t a breath of wind; the surface of the great rolling waves is as smooth as polished steel, and much about the same colour. The sun is beating straight down from a blue but cruelly hot sky. The pitch is soft in the deck seams; the men in the stoke-hole are to be pitied.