Notably among these was Mick.
“Bedad!” moaned he, leaning over the side with his dark face turned to pale green that seemed a faint reflection of the water below, into which he looked apparently with the deepest interest as he sacrificed his dearly loved dinner to Neptune, paying the sea-god his dues, “Oi fale, Tom me darlint, as if Oi’d brought up iverythink, faith, since furst Oi jined the ship, an’ me boots, begorrah, same in the back of me hid! Wurrah, wurrah, why did Oi ivver come to say? Och, Tom mabouchal, kill me at onst, and be done with it!”
I could not help laughing at him, he presented such a contrast to the buoyant lad of my ordinary acquaintance; though, of course, I tried to sympathise with my woe-begone chum.
But ere long something occurred which made him, and the others in a like predicament, forget their seasickness in a hurry, all of us having to be as spry as we could.
The Martin took the ground!
I’ll tell you how this happened.
We had run up Channel, as I have told you, with a fair wind from the start; but, on our reaching the westernmost end of the Isle of Wight, this turned against us, so that after passing through the Needles we had to beat up the Solent in the teeth of a stiff sou’-easter.
This, of course, gave us plenty of exercise in tacking; and the constant going aloft, with the brig rolling and a choppy sea under her, had overset the equilibrium of poor Mick’s stomach.
We had tacked and ‘reached’ in this way for some time, making short boards between the Hampshire coast and the Island opposite; when, in going about off the Brambles, through one of the uncertain currents which infest Southampton Water taking her on the slant as we shivered our headsails to come up to the wind, the brig missed stays and struck on the edge of the shoal.