The flag dipped again in the breeze, and several natives, joining hands, danced wildly to and fro.
“Keep her off!” bawled the skipper, with a broad smile on his face. “Done by a nigger chief,” he muttered to himself. “I want’er know, I want’er know.”
THE LE MAIRE LIGHT
IT had been calm all day, and the dull light of the overcast sky made the sea have that peculiar black tint seen in this latitude. It rolled silently with the swell, like a heaving world of oily ink, and, although we were almost midway between the Falklands and the Straits of Magellan, Captain Green determined to try a deep-sea sounding. This proved barren of result with a hundred-fathom line on end.
The silent calm continued, and the weird, lonesome cry of a penguin greeted our ears for the first time on the voyage.
Late in the afternoon a light breeze sprang up from the westward. As the ship gathered headway, a school of Antarctic porpoises came plunging and jumping after her. The toggle-iron was brought out, and the carpenter tried his luck at harpooning one on the jump. After lacerating the backs of several he gave it up and turned the iron over to Gantline, with the hope that he might do better.
The old mate took the iron in his right hand and balanced it carefully. Then he took several short coils of line in his left hand, and, bracing himself firmly on the backstays just forward of the cathead, waited for a “throw.” Almost instantly a big fellow came jumping and plunging towards the vessel, swerving from side to side with lightning-like rapidity. He passed under the bowsprit end so quickly that Gantline’s half-raised arm was hardly rigid before it was too late to throw. Suddenly back he came like a flash across the ship’s cut-water. There was a sharp “swish,” and the line was trailing taut through the snatch-block with three men heaving on it as hard as they could. It was done so quickly that it seemed less than a second from the time the animal flashed past to when he hung transfixed a few feet above the sea beneath the bowsprit end.
Chips, who had harpooned many a porpoise in the low latitudes, was filled with admiration, and instantly lent a hand to get the striped fellow on deck.
I went aft, for it was my watch on deck, and we expected to sight land before darkness compelled us to stand off to the eastward. At five o’clock a man stationed in the mizzen-top sung out that he could see something on the weather-beam to the westward, and soon by the aid of the glass we made out the high, grim cliffs of Staten Land looming indistinctly through the haze on the horizon. The first land sighted for seventy days.
The ship’s head was again pointed well up to the wind to try and turn the “last corner” of the world,—Cape Horn.