A voice hailed us from her; our captain sprang on to the grating abaft the wheel, and roared back, “What d’ye say?” But no response was made to this. She swept past to leeward, within a musket-shot. You could hear the thunder of the wind in her canvas, and the roaring of the water crushed into yeast at her stem. It was like hearkening to the beating of surf on a stormy night on the sea-coast. She showed no light of any kind, not a spot of brightness on her deck or in her side to relieve the deep dye of blackness her hull made upon the obscurity. In a few minutes she had forged ahead, and a little later she had melted out upon the gloom over the port bow.
CHAPTER VI.
HE IS STRUCK BY LIGHTNING.
This was an incident to kill the tediousness of my first watch on deck very pleasantly. It was seeing life at sea too, tasting the excitement of it, and when eight bells sounded, and I went below, I began in good truth to feel myself something of a sailor.
But it was “watch and watch,” with us on board that ship, as in all other ships of those days, though what the practice is now in this age of steamboats I will not undertake to say. By “watch and watch,” I mean that one division of the crew went below for four hours, whilst the other division kept the deck. Those below then came up again for another four hours’ duty, and so on till the dog watches came round, when each watch had two hours of duty only, the object of the change being to vary the time of the four hours’ watches; so that, for example, if one division had to keep the middle watch, say on a Monday the dog watches contrived that that spell of duty would next night fall to the lot of the other division.
What “watch and watch” signified I never could have imagined till four o’clock in the morning was struck on the ship’s bell, and the midshipmen who had been on deck since midnight came in their headlong way below to rout us up.
“Eight bells! eight bells, my honeys!” they roared. “Out you come, and up you go! It rains beautifully, and is still as black as thunder all round.”
I was in a dead sleep, and could scarcely open my eyes. By way of helping me to wake up, one of the lads who had just descended threw his streaming sou’-wester at my face.
“Who’d be a sailor?” yawned the long midshipman named Poole. “This is a part of the life that they know nothing about ashore.”