“Good-morning, youngster,” he said. “How are you feeling? Didn’t make you sick, did it? There’s a pretty good sea going.”
“It made me sick as a dog,” admitted Henry, “but I’m fit as a fiddle now. A good sleep fixed me up.”
They ate breakfast and went to the chart-room. Though the ship was far out in the ocean, it was still many hours’ sail from the location given for the derelict. The captain began to study the ship’s logbook, as the sailing record is called.
“See here, Henry,” he remarked after a moment. “This logbook might interest you.” Henry looked at the book, and saw entered there a detailed record of what was done on shipboard, not only from hour to hour but even every few minutes. Glancing back, he saw that his own rescue was noted down, and the recovery of his suit-case, and the exact time the executive officer came aboard, as well as the time when the Iroquois got under way.
“Captain Hardwick,” he said presently, “what does this entry about the log mean? I see it is written down every hour.”
“That’s the way we keep our dead reckoning,” said the captain. “When we can see sun or stars, we know exactly where we are. But when it’s cloudy we have to figure our position by dead reckoning. We know by our compass which way we are heading. We can tell by the number of revolutions of our propeller how fast we ought to be moving. We have an apparatus fastened to the taffrail that drags in the sea a good many fathoms behind us, and that turns like a propeller. It turns the line with it. The line is on a swivel, and every revolution is recorded on an instrument like a speedometer. When we look at that instrument we can tell how many miles we have made. The quartermaster reads the log every hour and records the reading in this book. So we can tell pretty exactly how many miles we have traveled. We also know in what direction we went. But we can’t always tell how far wind and current have put us out of our true course. We make allowance for them when we figure our dead reckoning. Usually we hit it pretty closely. But if there comes a period when sun and stars are hidden for two or three weeks, as sometimes happens, a ship’s captain may be miles from where he thinks he is. Why, once we went after a steamer that sent an SOS for help, and we had a terrible time to find her because she was seventy miles from where she thought she was, and where we went to get her.”
“Gee whiz!” said Henry. “How did you ever find her?”
“I’ll have to tell you that some other time, Henry. I’m too busy just now.”
Henry went out on the bridge, so as to leave the captain undisturbed. It was still windy and cold, but the day fairly sparkled. The sun shone through a cloudless sky. The waves gleamed and flashed in its brilliant beams. As one spellbound Henry gazed at the scene. Always he had tried to picture to himself what the ocean looked like. Now he knew that to picture the ocean mentally one must first actually see it. This great, boundless, inconceivable body of water was too vast for the imagination alone to picture. Turn in which direction he would, Henry could see nothing but water. And this water was rolling and tossing and surging and splashing and leaping in a manner past description. Never before had Henry seen waves higher than those in the Hudson River and the New York Bay. He had read of the huge waves of the ocean, but what he now saw, though they were far from being of the largest size, awed and impressed him. He felt sure some of them must be ten feet high. The ensign, who had now come on watch, assured him that they were all of that.
No matter where he looked, Henry saw nothing but water, leagues and leagues of tossing billows, the bluish-green depths spotted everywhere with the yeasty white of foaming wavecrests. No ship was in sight. Land was many miles behind them. Not even a bit of driftwood broke the vast expanse of the heaving ocean. The only object that rose above those miles and miles of furious billows was the Iroquois herself. How tiny, how puny, how insignificant, she seemed in that vast wilderness of water. For a moment a creepy feeling again stole over Henry. Suppose something should happen to the ship. Suppose she should sink. What chance would her crew, mere pigmies, have with these giant combers? But when Henry thought of the wireless, a feeling of courage surged through his heart again, and he was thankful to the men who had labored to make the wireless possible, and thankful that he was a wireless man himself. What a wonderful thing it was, he thought, to be able to call help or to catch the cry of those who needed help. Assuredly, the wireless man carried the safety of untold lives in his hands, just as truly as the captain of the ship did. How proud an operator ought to be, and how faithful he ought to be to his trust. And again Henry frowned as he thought of the lad he had last seen on watch in the wireless shack.