Just at that moment the Captain—his coat and shoes off, his head tied up in a pocket handkerchief, and his eyes scarce opened, just as he had roused up from his slumbers,—showed an astonished face above the hatchway.
“Hallo! what’s the matter now? who spilt the milk?”
“Jump! and let go that main-sheet! cut it if you can’t get at it any other way! but take the sail off her at any rate, or in two minutes we shall be at Fiddler’s Green.”
The Captain was wide enough awake to see that things were rather too serious for a joke, and scrambled up to windward as well as he could. Round rattled the sheaves, as if they would set fire to their blocks; away flew the sheet through them, the slack of it whipping the deck right and left, and barely missing the Captain, while the end of the main boom plunged into the water, wetting the sail half way up. The brig, eased of the strain, slowly and reluctantly paid off, while Torgensen, still seated at the weather yard-arm, with his legs twisted round it, holding on by the earring with both hands, with his breast straining against the lift to which he seemed to be holding on with his chin, and his hat, the while, which had been secured round his neck by a lanyard, fluttering and dancing to leeward, just nodded down on deck, as if to say, “all right my boys, I knew you would do the needful,” and then went on with his work as if nothing particular had happened.
The squall, however, was only the prelude to a change of wind; in less than an hour’s time she was able, not only to shake out her reefs again, but to lie her course, and to jog along it merrily.
Towards the close of the next day they were looking out sharp for the Outer Garboard Buoy, which, out of sight of land, marks the mouth of the Thames, and, strange to say, after a cruise of three weeks’ traverse sailing, hit it to a nicety,[69] and on the following morning, when the fishermen came on deck, they had the satisfaction of seeing, for the first time since the Naze had sunk in the horizon, not only land, but land on both sides of them, of which that on their starboard beam bore a very strong resemblance to the old South Foreland.
“England again!” said the Captain. “Hurrah for England and partridges!—what the deuce are you squinting at on the French coast, Parson?”
“A very interesting sight for us,” said the Parson, putting the telescope into his hands, “though not on the French coast; look at that sail, and tell me what you make of her.”
The Captain took a long view. “A lugger I think, coming down before the wind, wing-and-wing.”
“The very thing, and of course bound for England: if all goes right, we shall nearly cross her, and that in less than an hour.”