The motion of a vessel lying-to is far more easy than what would be supposed possible. When you are rocked in a boat making progress by sails or steam, the pressure of each wave is more or less of a blow, for the ship is going forward, and it resists the mass of water often with violence. At anchor, too, though in a modified degree, the action is the same, and in a swell without wind the oscillations are jerky and short, for they are not softened by the sails then merely hanging. But if a boat is staunch and strong, and the deck is tight, and she has plenty of keel, so as not to swerve round right and left, but to preserve a general average direction towards the wind, then she may lie-to in a very stiff gale and high sea with a wonderfully gentle motion. Her head then is slightly off the sea, and there is but little rolling. The sails are so set that they ease every lateral heave. She forges forward just a little between the wave tops, and when the crest of one lifts her up she courteously yields for the time, but will soon again recover lost ground by this well-managed “compromise.”
When we saw how admirably the Rob Roy behaved in lying-to, and that scarcely a wave broke over her deck, we felt that if it came to the worst we might thus pass a whole week in her safely.
Now I must make my bed. Undoubtedly this was a risky deed about to be done; but pray what else could we do?
“You ought not to have come there at all,” may be replied.
Say that to the huntsman who has got into a field with the only way out of it over a chasm to leap. Tell it to the mountain climber scrambling down, who pauses before a crevasse; and do not forget to say the same to the poor old fisherman overtaken in the midnight winter’s gale with his life in one hand and in the other a tangled net that has caught the fried sole for your comfortable dinner.
It would not do of course to go into my cabin. In the first place, the dingey was there, and then if I were to be enclosed inside when anything like a “run down” had to be dealt with, the cabin might be my coffin.
First I tried to crouch down in the well, but the constraint on limbs and joints was unbearable. My head slept while my knees ached with the pressure. No! there must be a positive lying down to sleep, if the sleep is to give true refreshment when you are rocked about on the waters; and this you have no doubt been convinced of any time at sea.
The strange twists of body I tried to fit into comfortably where the space (in the well) was only three feet each way, reached at last to the grotesque—the absurd contortions of a man miserable on a pleasure jaunt—and I laughed aloud, but somehow it sounded hollow and uncanny.
As to the exact spot where the Rob Roy was at this particular time we had of course no possible idea, but judging from after circumstances, the position must have been about ten miles south of St. Catherine’s Head, and she drifted twenty miles east while I dreamed.
