Swimming near boat
I have often left home—perhaps too often—but this was the first occasion on which home looked as if it were leaving me, and in mid-Atlantic at that. Alternately we yelled and swam, but without gaining a foot until to our infinite relief a small, pyjamaed figure appeared on deck, threw up its arms in horror, and brought the dream ship into the wind.
An hour later we were bowling along at seven knots, revelling in the blessed motion of air, and planning what we should do when we reached Barbados, a mere fifteen hundred miles distant.
It was in mid-Atlantic, too, that we received visitors. The first were Mr. and Mrs. Smith, a devoted couple of fish about the size of a sprat, each decorated similarly with vivid green bands on an electric blue background. For four days they remained with us, swimming closely side by side under our idle propeller, presumably for shade. To lie on deck looking down into the limitless blue depths and watching our companions became the king of pastimes aboard the dream ship. We even tried to catch them with a minute hook and the tastiest of baits, but they would suffer no nearer acquaintance. They were too busy getting somewhere for some reason to swerve an iota from their course. During a squall we lost them, or they lost us; in any case, we never saw them again, and I have often wondered since what Mr. and Mrs. Smith are doing now.
The next guest was a black bird about the size of a crow, with webbed feet, a wicked-looking beak, and white circles round the eyes. He was a sick and sorry bird when he fluttered on to the rudder top during a rain squall, edged slowly along the tiller, and over Peter's hand into her lap, where she covered him with her oilskin and he lay content. But his was a flying visit in more than one sense of the word, for he refused to eat. Bread crumbs, morsels of flying fish, and meat were offered him, but he spurned them all, and grew so weak that when carried into the scuppers by the ship's lurching two days later, he rose in the air and was carried off into the turmoil of wind and wave. The last we saw of him was a bunch of black feathers on the face of a comber, still struggling to rise.
What with weather ranging all the way from stark calms to vicious squalls, and a correspondingly varied progress of anything from ten to two hundred miles in the twenty-four hours, it took us thirty days to cross the Atlantic, and when it was done we spent the best part of a day trying to find the proof of our accomplishment in the island of Barbados. Faulty navigation again? Yes, but it is not the easiest thing in life to make a "bow on" landfall of a clod of earth twenty-one miles by twelve after a three-thousand-mile jaunt to reach it. Also, we suspected our chronometer.
When Barbados, after the fashion of Grand Canary, failed to materialize, we of the dream ship held one of our now familiar board meetings. There were two courses open: to emulate the mariner of old who knew nothing of longitude, and cruise along our latitude until Barbados appeared; or to head for Trinidad instead, and so have the coastline of South America as a buffer if we failed to make it.
We had decided on the latter course, and were actually standing away for Trinidad, when Barbados, a mere wraith of land that we scarce dared to believe in, beckoned us from the southern horizon. We accepted the invitation.
The first human face other than our own that we had seen for a solid month was that of the "outside man" of Messrs. —— & Co., and as a change we welcomed it. He came to us in a natty whaleboat propelled by a crew of hefty Negro oarsmen, showed us the best anchorage, and saw us safely berthed before allowing the fact to emerge that he was an "outside man," that his particular firm could do anything for a ship cheaper, quicker, and better than any in Bridgetown, and that our patronage was the one thing he had been craving ever since our approach had been made known from the signal station. I shall be surprised on my next visit to Barbados, which I hope will not be long delayed, if that "outside man" is not a director of Messrs. —— & Co.