An Ocean Tragedy

by William Clark Russell

‘No, your honour. There’s no call for Fidler any more than there is for me to go to the westwards of Madeira.’

‘Now, Finn, show me on this chart where, steering the course you are now heading, you will have arrived when you have run nine hundred miles?’

‘How’s her head?’ sung out Finn to the fellow at the wheel. The man answered. ‘You hear it, Sir Wilfrid?’ said Finn. My cousin nodded. The captain put his rules on the chart, adjusting them to the course the ‘Bride’ was then sailing, and the measure of nine hundred miles brought the mark he made to touch the cross that represented the ‘Shark’s’ place. ‘That’s right, I think, Mr. Monson,’ said he, turning a sober face of triumph on me.

‘Quite right,’ I answered, and I spoke no more than the truth, for the poor fellow had made his calculations with laborious anxiety.

Wilfrid clapped his hands together with a shout of laughter that carried his voice to a shriek almost, and without speaking a word he strode to the hatch and went below.

CHAPTER IX.
A SQUALL.

Although Finn’s calculations showed very well upon the chart, it will not be supposed I could find anything in them upon which to ground that hope of falling in with the ‘Shark’ which had become a conviction with Wilfrid. The look-out man at our masthead might perhaps, on a clear day, compass a range of some twenty miles, even thirty if it came to a gleam of lofty canvas hovering over a hull a league or two past the slope of waters; but what was a view of this kind to signify in so vast an ocean as we had entered? As I have elsewhere said, the difference of a quarter of a point would in a few hours, supposing a good breeze of wind to be blowing, carry the ‘Bride’ wide of the wake of the ‘Shark,’ and put the two yachts out of sight fair abreast of one another.

Finn understood this as well as I; but when I fell into a talk with him on the subject that evening—I mean the evening of the day on which we had spoken the ‘Wanderer’—he told me very honestly that the odds indeed were heavy against our heaving the ‘Shark’ into view, though he was quite sure of outsailing her if the course was to extend to the Cape of Good Hope; but that as there was a chance of our picking her up, whether by luck, if I chose to think it so, or by his hitting with accuracy upon the line of direction that Fidler would take, he had made up his mind to regard the thing as going to happen, for his own ease of mind as well as to keep my cousin’s expectations lively and trusting.

‘A man can but do his best, sir,’ he said to me. ‘Sir Wilfrid needs a deal of humouring; you can see that, sir. I knew all along, when he first came and told me what had happened and gave me my orders, that the job of keeping him pacified would have to go hand in hand with the business of sailing the “Bride” and lighting upon the “Shark,” if so be she’s discoverable. My notion is that if you’re called upon so to act as to fit an employer’s taste and keep his views and wishes gratified, though by no more than maintaining expectation in him, the best thing is to tarn to and try to think as fur as you can the same way as he do. I don’t mind saying, Mr. Monson, that I allow the whole of this here voyage to be as wague as wagueness can well be; therefore why worrit over parts of it? Suppose we overhaul the “Shark”—then it’ll be all right; suppose we don’t—then it won’t be for the want of trying.’