Sea-sickness had not troubled Bob in the slightest. When he saw the ’Ral standing in the lee-scuppers, with his neck hitched right round till the head lay right on the top of his tail, Bob looked at him comically with his head cocked funnily to one side.
Then he seemed to laugh right away down both sides, so to speak. Bob was a droll dog.
“My eyes, Admiral,” he said, “what a ridiculous figure you do cut, to be sure! Why, at first I couldn’t tell which was the one end of you and which was the other.”
“I don’t care what becomes of me,” the Admiral replied, talking over his tail. “It is a very ordinary world. I’ll never dance again.”
But, nevertheless, in three days’ time the Hal did dance, and so droll and comical were his capers on the heaving deck that the crew lay aft in a body and laughed till they nearly burst their belts. The Admiral took kindly to his meal-worms after that, and didn’t despise potted salmon and morsels of mutton.
Now it must not be supposed that the Sea Flower was going out in ballast, on the mere chance of filling up with gold. They might never see the Isle of Misfortune, and all their dreams of gold might yet turn out as dreams so often do.
Halcott and Tandy were good sailors, and but little likely to trust overmuch to blind chance. They took out with them, therefore, a good-paying cargo of knick-knacks and notions to barter with the natives along the coast of Africa. Having made a good voyage—and they knew they should—and having filled up with copal, nutmegs, arrowroot, spices, ivory, and perhaps even gold-dust and ostrich feathers from the far interior, they would stretch away out and over the broad Atlantic, and rounding the Horn, make search for the Isle of Misfortune, which they hoped to find an island of gold.
If unsuccessful, they should then bear up for the northern Pacific Islands, taking their chance of doing something with pearls or mother-of-pearl, and so on and away to San Francisco, where they were sure of a market, even if they wished to sell the Sea Flower herself.
But the best of sailors get disheartened far sooner in calms than even in tempests.