“Aye, aye,” grunted out the man; and Captain Dinks went down the rigging even more carefully than he had ascended, finding great difficulty in preventing his unaccustomed feet from slipping off the ratlines, which were like rungs of the smoothest and most polished ice.
“You were right, and I was wrong,” he said to Mr Meldrum, as soon as he had regained the poop. “There is land in sight, sure enough, although I can at present only see it faintly towards the north-east. It must be, as you say, either the Crozet Islands or Kerguelen Land, for there’s nothing else between us and the Australian continent, as we haven’t yet got quite so far south as the Antarctic regions.”
“It’s probably Kerguelen Land,” observed Mr Meldrum, “for you couldn’t see the Crozets nearly so far off; but I hope there’s not going to be another change of the weather. It seems clouding over again.”
“Not before we get an observation, I trust,” replied the captain; “I don’t like knocking about any longer without knowing where I am.”
“Nor I, sorr,” put in the first mate heartily. “Sure it’s like goin’ in the dark to Bandon Fair, for all the worruld over.”
“It’s not what we like,” interposed Mr Meldrum somewhat dryly. “We have got to put up with what we can get.”
“True for you, sorr,” said Mr McCarthy, not to be beaten; “sure, but isn’t it best to make the best on it.”
“That’s incontestable,” replied Mr Meldrum with a laugh; and there the conversation ended, Kate and her father going below to breakfast.
The weather got thicker, with the wind coming in gusts and now and then shifting a bit, so that the solitary mizzen-topsail of the Nancy Bell had now again to be close reefed, and her course directed more towards the land, which they did not seem to near so rapidly as they had thought they would—owing probably to some current that was all the time carrying them southwards while they were steering towards the east.
They were actuated, however, by no vulgar curiosity to inspect this ocean land in thus seeking to approach it.