“Faith, an’ I make it the same, sir,” also put in Garry O’Neil, the twain having worked out the reckoning long before the poor skipper. “Both of us agree to the virry minnit, sure, lavin’ out the sicconds, sir!”
“By George!” exclaimed the skipper. “It’s even worse than I thought.”
“How, sir?” asked Mr Fosset with a smile on his face, no doubt chuckling to himself at being cleverer and wiser than Captain Applegarth, who would not believe we were in the Gulf Stream. “Don’t you think us right, sir?”
“Oh, yes, Fosset; I agree with you myself. The reckoning is right enough, but father’s the devil to pay!”
The skipper couldn’t sacrifice the joke, though he was terribly put out.
“See here,” he continued, “jabbing,” with great noise and force the compasses with which he was measuring off our position, into the chart, as if that was in fault, while Fosset and O’Neil laughed. “Look where we are! I shouldn’t have thought it possible for us to have been driven so far south, right into the Gulf Stream, as we are, for the current generally runs to the nor’-east’ards below the Banks.”
“The stream has done it, though, sure enough,” said Mr Fosset; “that and the gale, for the one has drifted us to the coast and the other pressed us down southwards; and between the two we’re just fetched where we are, sir!”
“Well,” replied the skipper, shrugging his shoulders, “you were right, Fosset, and I was wrong this morning. Let me see, though, how we have fetched here, if we can trace our course so far, from when we last took the sun.”
“Sure, an’ that was Friday, that baste of a day!” interposed Garry O’Neil, pointing to a place on the chart. “I worked at the rickonin’ and I put it down meself, marking it with a red pencil.”
“Yes; here it is, 42° 35 minutes north latitude, and longitude 50° 10 minutes west,” said the skipper. “I worked it out also, on my own hook, and you and I tallied, if you recollect?”