One of the first persons among the emigrant passengers aboard the Mercury to attract my attention was a tall, thin, long-haired, sickly-looking man, of about thirty years of age, clad in a suit of rusty black, whose appearance and manner generally suggested to me the idea that he must be by profession a schoolmaster. There was a certain air of exaggerated earnestness of demeanour about him, and a wildness of expression in his flashing coal-black eyes, that caused me to set him down as being somewhat crack-brained. His name, I soon ascertained, was Algernon Marcus Wilde, and he was among the first of the emigrants to speak to me. He came to me, on the morning after I joined the ship, with a complaint as to the quality and quantity of the food served out to the occupants of the ’tween-decks; and I was as much struck by the correctness of his speech, as by the excessive indignation which he infused into his manner, when stating the nature of his alleged grievance. I pointed out to him the fact that, whatever the quality of the food might be, I was certainly not responsible for it, nor, in the event of its proving to be unsuitable, could I remedy the matter away out there in mid-ocean; but I promised to investigate the affair, and to do what might be possible to remove the grievance, should I find such to exist—of which I had my doubts after my brief but highly satisfactory experience of the viands served up in the cabin.
I accordingly requested the steward to produce the dietary list which formed the basis of the agreement between the owners and the emigrants; and, upon going through it, was certainly unable to find any just cause for complaint, so far as quantity was concerned. The question of quality was of course a different matter; but here again, when, a day or two later, I unexpectedly examined the food as it was being served out at the galley, I was quite unable to discover any legitimate cause for complaint. On the contrary, the food, although plain, was as good as it was possible to obtain in those times aboard a ship that had been at sea a hundred days; and it was excellently prepared. When I sent for Wilde, and asked him to state specifically what he found wrong with the food that I had just examined, all he could say was that it was not so good or so varied in character as that which he had seen from time to time carried aft for use in the cabin; and that in his opinion no distinction whatever ought to be made in the treatment of persons occupying different parts of the ship; also that he considered I ought to give instructions for the emigrants to be fed henceforth from the stores provided for cabin use; nor would he be satisfied, although I pointed out that he was getting the food that the owners had undertaken to provide him with in exchange for his passage money. Of course to attempt to argue with so unreasonable an individual was obviously absurd, and I therefore dismissed him and thought nothing more about his complaints.
This, however, was not the matter of which I have spoken as gradually obtruding itself upon my attention, although, had I only been able to guess it, the two were not unconnected. What I noticed, almost from the first moment of boarding the Mercury, without attaching any particular importance to it, was that this man Wilde and a few of the other male emigrants were in the habit of spending practically the whole of the second dogwatch—which, in fine weather at all events, is usually a period of idleness and recreation for a ship’s crew—on the forecastle-head, smoking and chatting animatedly with the forecastle hands; while at other times the ex-schoolmaster—as Wilde actually proved to be—seemed eternally engaged in earnest discussion with his fellow emigrants. I often wondered idly what the man could possibly find to talk about so incessantly; but usually found a sufficiently satisfactory explanation in the reflection that, being a man of education, he would naturally take pleasure in extracting the ideas of others, and also probably in correcting them according to his own notions. He was evidently very fond of talking; and I frequently amused myself by watching the impassioned earnestness and the eloquent gestures with which he would hold forth upon the subject—whatever it might be—that happened to be under discussion. I soon found that Polson and Tudsbery, the boatswain and carpenter of the ship, apparently found more pleasure in spending the second dogwatch on the forecastle with their shipmates and the emigrants than they did in promenading the poop with me; but this was not surprising, for not only were they both very illiterate men, but it quickly became apparent that they and I had scarcely a single interest or idea in common, and we were consequently often hard put to it to find a topic of congenial conversation; indeed, in the course of a few days, without the slightest ill-feeling on either side, our communications became almost exclusively restricted to matters connected with the business of the ship.
Looking back, from the summit of a matured experience, as I now can, upon that first fortnight aboard the Mercury, I often feel astonished that I never, for a single instant, caught the faintest premonition of what was looming ahead; for I can recall plenty of hints and suggestions, had I only been keen-sighted enough to observe them and smart enough to read their significance; but I believe the fact to be that at that time I had no room in my mind for any other thought than that of the navigation of the ship. It is true that for more than a year it had been part of my daily duty, as a midshipman-apprentice qualifying for the position of officer, to take observations of the various heavenly bodies simultaneously with those of Captain Martin and the mates, to work them out independently, and to submit my calculations to the skipper—who examined and returned them with such written comments as he deemed called for—with the result that I had long since become proficient in the science of navigation. But this was a very different thing. If on board the Salamis I had chanced to make a mistake, the worst that could have happened would have been a sharp rebuke from the skipper for my carelessness, and an equally sharp injunction to be more careful in future; whereas now, aboard the Mercury, if I happened to make a miscalculation, there was nobody to correct it; and although subsequent observations might reveal the error, and no actual harm arise from its committal so long as the ship was in mid-ocean, a comparatively trivial mistake committed when the ship happened to be in the vicinity of rocks, or shoals, or approaching land, might easily make all the difference between perfect safety and her total loss, together with that of all hands. Hence, during those early days, when the sense of grave responsibility lay heavy upon my young shoulders, I could think of nothing but more or less abstruse astronomical problems.
Chapter Three.
An unpleasant surprise.
The revelation came upon me, with the stunning effect of a thunder-clap, on the day upon which we made the island of Saint Paul. The weather during the whole of the preceding day had been brilliantly fine, with a light air of wind that, breathing out from the south-east at daybreak, had gradually hauled round until by noon it had settled at south; so that when I took my meridian altitude of the sun for the determination of our latitude, the Mercury was heading straight for the spot where my calculations declared the island to be, with all plain sail set to her royals, and with the weather bracer slightly checked.
Upon working out my meridian altitude I found the ship’s latitude to be 38 degrees 43 minutes south and we were steering true east; consequently if my calculations were accurate, we were at that moment on the exact parallel of Saint Paul, which—also according to my calculations—then lay in line with our jibboom, eighty miles distant. This result was confirmed by a further observation of the sun taken in the course of the afternoon watch; and a very simple calculation then informed me that, if I had made no mistake, and there occurred no change in the direction or strength of the wind, the island ought to be sighted, directly ahead, fourteen miles distant, at dawn of the next day. This anticipation I communicated, in my anxiety, to Polson and Tudsbery, the former of whom remarked: