“No: sometimes the boat don’t throw the water at all, but sometimes it does ten times as bad as now. I have been out in this boat when one hand had to keep baling all the time. We call this a quiet sail.”
“Of course it’s a quiet sail,” added Oscar Chester, who had once been on a steamer. “There isn’t any thing to be afraid of.”
“I can stand it as long as the rest of you,” replied Ben Ludlow, who thought the last speaker had cast an imputation upon his courage. “When Dory is frightened, it will be time enough for the rest of us to get scared.”
“I had no idea that a boat made such a fuss in going along,” said Dave Windsor.
“It don’t always; but we are sailing against the wind as near as we can go,” Dory explained. “I suppose all you fellows are going to learn how to sail a boat, and you might as well begin now.”
The skipper of the Goldwing proceeded to show in what manner the mouth of Beaver River was to be reached. When he had gone far enough to
weather Willsborough Point, he could lay his course to Thompson’s Point; and from there he must beat about dead to windward. Most of the new pupils were interested, and asked a great many questions. Dory explained every thing very minutely; and it was not his fault if they did not understand, at least the theory of sailing a boat against the wind.
“But I can’t see what makes the boat go ahead when the wind is against her,” suggested John Brattle. “I can understand how the wind pushes the boat along when it is blowing from behind her, but not when it comes from the way it does now.”
“It is the friction of the wind against the sails. Did you ever see a ferry-boat cross a river by the force of the current?”
John Brattle happened to be the only one of the party who had seen a current-boat. He had crossed the Androscoggin River, in Maine, in a stage on such a craft.