“I say, Larkyns,” I asked, in an undertone of my friend the senior mid, as a string of square flags went up on our side—a yellow on top, a red square with a yellow cross in the middle, and a white flag with a blue centre the lowermost—“what does our signal mean, eh?”
“It means,” he whispered back, keeping his starboard eye still glued to his telescope, “‘whereabouts is that wreck you’re speaking of?’”
Some considerable delay now occurred on board the corvette; the Frenchies, in spite of their taking the initiative in the matter, being not as handy as our man in the manipulation of their flags.
At last, however, they sent up two hoists in rather a slovenly fashion, one going up after the other.
“Ha, that’s the latitude,” said Captain Farmer. “‘F K S’ and ‘G I V’ Signalman, what does that make, eh?”
“Forty-seven degrees, and fifteen minutes north latitude, sir.”
“Good, my man,” returned the captain, approvingly. “You’ve read that pretty smartly! Now, hoist the answering pennant; though, I suppose we’ll have to wait another month of Sundays for their longitude. No, by Jove! Messieurs les Français are a trifle quicker this time. ‘F N J’ and ‘G V L.’ How do you make them out, signalman? See if you can be as smart again as you were just now.”
“Ay, ay, sir,” returned the yeoman, all on his mettle and his eye the quicker to scan the alphabetical pages of his flag lexicon where the signals were catalogued in groups according to their subjects, this one being a numeral and, therefore, all the easier to read. “It’s longitude 9 degrees 15 minutes west, sir.”
“All right, put it down correctly, signalman,” said Captain Farmer; and, turning to the commander, he added, “Why, Nesbitt, it’s nearly in our direct course across the Bay, only we shall have a tighter squeeze, perhaps, in weathering Finisterre.”
“But, we can go a couple of points more free, sir,” observed Mr Quadrant, who had busied himself shaping a course on a chart by the binnacle as soon as he heard the latitude and longitude given. “That’ll be better than going about on the port tack, as I thought we should have to do, sir.”