"Bo's'n," I called, "half a dozen men with buckets of sea water! Throw it around, drench everything."
And now the water flew in the cabins, in the drawers of chests, in the officers' bunks, all over my Norwegian library, water everywhere. I took my shipping papers and put each page between sheets of wet blotting paper so that not only the name of Irma and the other entries we had changed were blotted; but every line. I even soused the log book in a bucket of water.
Then I called the carpenter again.
"Now repair everything you have smashed, Chips. Nail everything."
He hammered planks over the smashed portholes and bull's-eyes, and put the smashed chairs together as well as he could.
Now, if the Britisher came aboard, he would say:
"By Joe, Captain, you must have had a hard blow to get knocked about like this."
And I would growl, "Yes, by Joe, everything is drenched, even my papers."
Two days later a southwest wind sprang up. The moment was at hand. To go raiding in a sailing ship and that sailing ship with the name of Irma painted on her bows—ah, it seemed more like a dream than like setting out on a real adventure. It seemed as though all the events of my life had been designed to converge to this one glorious point. Our one hundred-and-seventy-foot masts creaked. Our nine thousand square feet of sail bellowed before the wind. We sailed north under a full spread.