"Now we have it!" exclaimed he at the right moment.
"Two: forty-five!" shouted Louis, as he looked at his watch.
"We took our departure at one: thirty, and we have made this distance in one: fifteen, fifteen miles," added the captain.
"But that is incredible!" protested Louis; "for that gives her twelve knots an hour, and, according to your statement, we have been going against the current that always sets out of the Strait."
"The Directory does not admit that it always sets that way, though it does so nearly always," said Scott. "Besides, the statement is that the tide sets out near the shores on both sides. It is in the middle of the Strait that the great current runs into the Mediterranean, and only the last five miles of our course was anywhere near the middle. It is plain enough to me that we have been helped by the outward current near the land, and retarded the last fifteen or twenty minutes."
"Swing six and cast out noine, and ye's will come to ut," laughed Felix, who did not take so much interest in the discussion as his companions.
Captain Scott took a piece of paper from his pocket and began to figure on it, though it was quite impossible to make the correct allowances for the current inward in the middle of the Strait and the ebb-tide near the shore of Spain.
"I think we can hit it pretty near," said he at last. "The tide helped us about a knot an hour, and the middle current kept us back about half a knot in twenty minutes. This is rather rough estimating, but I put it down that the Maud has made the equivalent of ten and a half knots an hour."
"Bully for the Maud!" shouted Felix.
"What you have done?" demanded Felipe, coming forward as far as the pilot-house.