Then, whatever mark you can distinguish on the line nearest to your hand at the expiration of the allotted twenty-eight or fourteen seconds, when the man holding the glass sings out “Stop!” as the last grain of sand empties itself out of the bulb, that will be the speed of the ship.
The division of knots on the log-line bear the same proportion to a mile, as the twenty-eight or fourteen seconds of the glass does to an hour of time; so, if the four-knot mark be to hand, and the “long” glass be used, she is going four knots, or nautical miles, per hour. It will be eight knots if the “short glass” be the standard of measurement; the time the line has taken being only half the former, and the number of the knots having to be doubled to keep the proportion between the length of line and the space of time equal.
It did not take me long to master what the old quartermaster had to teach me on this point; but some of the other cadets were awfully stupid at first, I must say, particularly that brute Andrews, in spite of his bumptiousness and conceit.
He gave old Ricketts a lot of trouble before he remembered to put in the pin prior to pitching the log-ship overboard; though without this it could not float upright, and was as good as useless to gauge our speed.
The ass could not be made to understand this, and omitted putting in the pin time after time so persistently, that Ricketts had to tell the commander that he “could make nothing out of him.”
In addition to these details of ’boardship life, we were also instructed in practical seamanship by one of the boatswain’s mates.
He was an old hand who had been at sea so long that he seemed to smell of salt water and tar; while his face was like a piece of pickled beef covered with a quantity of hair that resembled spunyarn more than anything else, being as stiff and wiry as an untwisted rope.
Old Oakum, however, was a thorough sailor, every inch of him, and he taught me much more than I had learned on board the Illustrious, not only in “knotting and splicing” and other things.
Under this worthy’s guidance I practised the “goose step” of going aloft, as it might be described by a drill sergeant, the mizzenmast being placed at our disposal every fine afternoon, and it was pretty nearly good weather all the time of our passage southwards, to learn the art of reefing and furling sails and to send down or cross upper yards; so that we became in the end almost as expert as our tutor, the old salt one day telling Tommy Mills and myself that we took in a royal “as good and better as any two able seamen could a done it, blow me!”
It was not “all work and no play,” either, for we had plenty of fun and skylarking down in the gunroom; making the oldsters there, like Mr Stormcock and the assistant-paymaster, Mr Fortescue Jones, frequently wish they, or rather that we, had never been born to come to sea to torment them.