“That I can’t explain, sir,” replied Jorrocks meaningly. “Perhaps, though, as how there was something wrong in the ship’s position on the chart to-day.”
“Ha, humph!” muttered the skipper to himself. “This comes of my being ill and entrusting my duties to other hands; but I’ll never do it again, I’ll take care! Mr Macdougall,” he added aloud, “I beg your pardon for what I said just now in the heat of the moment, and I hope you’ll excuse it, as I was greatly flurried, and do not feel very well yet. What position did you place the vessel in to-day, by the way, when you took your observation at noon?”
This was a ticklish question, and the mate hardly knew how to answer it, recollecting, as he did in an instant, what I had said—of our being much further westwards than the skipper thought. Even if he did not agree with me, the point should have been referred to Captain Billings, as it so vitally concerned the interests of all on board. Almost tongue-tied, therefore, now by his former silence on the subject, he temporised with the difficulty, determined not to be cornered if he could help it.
“’Deed an’ I mad’ it e’en the same as the deed reck’nin’ cam’ to, Cap’en, a wee bit to the westwar’ o’ twenty-seven, and close to the leen.”
“Then your sextant must have been out of order, or your calculations wrong,” replied the skipper, shortly. “We are evidently much to the westwards of your reckoning. How did you observe the danger—was there a man on the look-out?”
“Nae, sir, I didna think we required yon,” answered Macdougall, now at his wit’s end for a reply.
“No, I should think not,” said Captain Billings, in his dry way; “but who was it that warned you in time to wear the ship?”
“Mister Leigh, sir,” put in Jorrocks, thinking the time now come to speak up for me. “He heard the noise of the breakers first, and called my ’tention to ’em, and I then sung out to put the helm up.”
“Oh!” ejaculated the skipper, quite taken aback by my name being thus suddenly brought up by Jorrocks—just as he was thinking of me and my recent shortcomings, as he afterwards explained to me.
“Yes, sir,” continued my old friend the boatswain, believing it best to push the matter home, now he had once introduced me on the carpet; “and he begged me to tell you, sir, as how he’d left his chart on the cabin sky-light, where he’d jotted down summat as he’d diskivered when taking the sun, before the rumpus arose ’twixt him and Muster Macdougall.”