Two days later they were met on the Genoa-Leghorn route, six steamers then towing the Boodah, their course S. by W.
Again and again it was met, that funeral of the sea: the prone, tearing steamers, the reluctant bulk. Sometimes a captain's glass might make out a few men lost on the roof like men on a raft, smoking, seated, leaning over a balustrade.
Southward and westward it swam. On the seventh day there arrived at Ajaccio from Marseilles twenty-five bluejackets; and these, in a hired speronare, put to sea, and joined the Boodah twenty miles from the coast.
Thenceforth, a smoke would be seen at a point of the roof, indicating that she, too, was steaming: for it was known that she had a screw and a rudder; and so closely was she observed, that her now added rate could be fixed—two to three knots a day.
She must therefore have some small engines about 4,000 H. P.: and since their motif could only be one thing, resistance to ocean currents, this meant that the Boodah was intended to rest always in one spot: a startling conclusion.
Occasionally a Surveying Service warship would peep above the horizon, watching her.
As she passed through the Straits, seventy-five English blue-jackets put out from Trafalgar, and joined her.
With such reports passed the weeks. Occasionally five or six coal-ships would be seen about the Boodah; her number of tug-ships might be as low as two; sometimes nine, ten.
At night she made a fine display, and homeward-bound boats from Cape Horn, from Pernambuco, Para, Madeira, spoke highly of her two revolving-drum lighthouses: for these, from opposite corners of the roof, at the rate of a revolution per minute, poured into space two shimmering comets, like Calais and the Eddystone—rapt spinning-dervishes of the sea that hold far converse with the dark, till morning. And between these two ran a festoon of electric lanterns, Japanese and Moorish, cut in ogives; and festoons of coloured moons drooped round the balustrades, so that the blaze and complexity of it presented to ships a spectacle of speckled mystery, fresh to the sea.
After five weeks a hundred and seventeen blue-jackets put out from Portsmouth in a chartered barque and joined her, she still in tow, making now about N. by W.