“Bravo, youngster,” put in Mr Stormcock. “That’s the only way to become a good navigator. Fudging your reckoning will never teach you how to work out your altitudes; you stick to it, my boy, and do it on your own hook.”
Nor did the master’s mate content himself with merely giving me this sound advice; for, sitting down by my side, he overhauled my figures and, being an expert mathematician, soon put me in the right road to arriving at a solution of my difficulties.
Really, he explained the various steps necessary in order to work out the reckoning in such a simple way that I understood it thoroughly; learning more in this one lesson from Mr Stormcock than I had done, I think, during the three months that I had studied navigation while on board the training-ship Illustrious.
I learnt even yet more.
That was, not to judge by appearances and form hasty conclusions as to the character of my messmates; as, up to the moment of his coming thus to my aid, I had always considered Mr Stormcock an ill-tempered and soured man—whereas I now saw he was at bottom a good-natured fellow and one ready enough to help another when opportunity offered!
It was a lesson which, like the one he had just taught me in navigation, I never forgot.
Towards sunset that afternoon, when we were entering the Bay of Biscay, the lookout man on the foretopsail yard hailed the deck.
“Sail in sight, sir!” he sang out loudly. “She’s on our port bow, sir.”
“All right,” answered the officer of the watch, Mr Jellaby, who was up on the poop and I below on the quarter-deck at the time; and then, turning to the yeoman of signals, he cried, “Signalman, a vessel’s in sight on our port bow, go and look at her and see what she is.”
“Ay, ay, sir,” replied the seaman, putting his telescope to his eye; when, scanning in the direction pointed out to him, he soon made out the ship. “She appears like a strange man-of-war, sir.”