“Sleep away, my lad, it’ll do ye good.”
Accompanying this piece of unnecessary advice with a sagacious nod of the head, the skipper staggered on and possessed himself of a case-bottle about three-quarters full of rum, with which he returned to the deck and began to drink.
While he was thus employed, a breeze sprang up from the north-east.
“Ease off the sheets there, you lubbers!” shouted the drunken man, as he seized the tiller and looked at the compass. “What! sleeping again, Bunks? I’ll rouse ye, I will.”
With that, in a burst of anger, he rushed forward and gave one of the sleepers a severe kick in the ribs. Bunks rose sulkily, and with a terrible imprecation advised the skipper “not to try that again”; to which the skipper retorted, that if his orders were not obeyed more sharply, he would not only try it again, but he would “chuck him overboard besides.”
Having applied a rope’s-end to the shoulders of one of the other sleepers, he repeated his orders to ease off the sheets, as the wind was fair, and staggered back to his place at the helm.
“Why, I do believe it is a sou’-wester,” he muttered to himself, attempting in vain to read the compass.
It was in reality north-east, but Jager’s intellects were muddled; he made it out to be south-west and steered accordingly, almost straight before it. The three men who formed the crew of the little vessel were so angry at the treatment they had received, that they neither cared nor knew how the ship’s head lay. A thick mist came down about the same time, and veiled the lights which would otherwise have soon revealed the fact that the skipper had made a mistake.
“Why, wot on airth ails the compass?” muttered Jager, bending forward intently to gaze at the instrument, which, to his eye, seemed to point in all directions at once; “come, I’ll have another pull at the b–bottle to steady me.”
He grasped the bottle to carry out this intention, but in doing so thrust the helm down inadvertently. The schooner came up to the wind at once, and as the wind had freshened to a stiff breeze and a great deal of canvas was set, she heeled violently over to starboard. The skipper was pitched into the lee scuppers, and the case-bottle of rum was shivered to atoms before he had time to taste a drop.