A Sudden Interruption.
“Now, my boy,” said Mr Mackay, who had the “first watch,” from eight o’clock till midnight that is, I sharing it with him, speaking as we were just abreast of the light I’ve mentioned, although so far to the southward that it could only be seen very faintly glimmering on the horizon like a star, a trifle bigger than those which twinkled above it and on either side in the clear northern sky—“we’ve run exactly forty-six miles from our departure point.”
“Departure point, sir!” I repeated after him, my curiosity aroused by the use of such a term. “What is that?”
“The last land sighted before a ship gains the open sea,” replied he kindly, always willing to give me any information, although I’m afraid I caused him a good deal of trouble with my innumerable questions, in my zeal to get acquainted with everything connected with the ship and my profession as an embryo sailor. “Ours was the Lizard; didn’t you notice Cap’en Gillespie taking the bearings of it as we passed this afternoon?”
“Yes, sir. I saw him with his sextant, as you told me that queer triangular thing was,” said I; “but I didn’t know what he was doing. I thought our starting-place was the Thames? We must have gone miles and miles since we left the Downs.”
“So we have, my boy; still, that was only the threshold of our long journey, and sailors do not begin to count their run until fairly out at sea as we are now. When you came up to town the other day from that place in the country—West something or other?”
“Westham, sir,” I suggested; “that’s where we live.”
“Well, then,” he went on, accepting my correction with a smile, “when you were telling your adventures and stated that you came from Westham to London in three hours, say, you would not include the time you had taken in going from the door of your house to the garden gate and from thence to the little town or village whence you started by the railway—eh?”
“No, sir,” said I, laughing at his way of putting the matter. “I would mean from the station at Westham to the railway terminus in London.”
“Just so,” he answered; “and, similarly, we sailors in estimating the length of a voyage, do not take into consideration our passage along the river and down channel, only counting our distance from the last point of land we see of the country we are leaving and the first we sight of that we’re bound to. Our first day’s run, therefore, will be what we get over from the Lizard up to the time the cap’en takes the sun at noon to-morrow, which will tell us our latitude and longitude then, when, by the aid of this fixed starting-point or ‘point of departure,’ and calculating our dead reckoning and courses steered, we will be enabled to know our precise position on the chart.”