'Or if so be as a doubt should come up, then heave the log, says I,' broke in Jacob.
Their manner of speaking warned me to conceal my amazement, that under other conditions could not have been without merriment. They told me they had left Penzance on the morning of Monday, while it was still blowing heavily. 'But we saw that the breeze,' Abraham said, 'was agoing to fail, and so there was no call to stop for the wedder;' yet they had hardly run the land out of sight when they sprang their mast in the jump of a very hollow sea. 'There was no use trying to ratch back agin that sea and breeze,' said Abraham; 'so we stepped our spare mast and laid the wounded chap in his place; but if the wedder be as bad off the Cape as I've heerd talk of, I allow we'll be needing a rig-out o' spars if we're to reach Australey; and what'll have to be done'll be to fall in with some wessel as'll oblige us.'
Considering they were seafaring men, this prodigious confidence in luck and chance was not less wonderful than the venture they were upon. But it was for me to question and listen, not to criticise.
'They will never reach Australia,' Helga whispered.
'They are English seamen,' said I softly.
'No, Hugh—boatmen,' said she, giving me my name as easily as though we had been brother and sister. 'And what will they do without longitude?'
'Grope their way,' I whispered, 'after the manner of the early marines who achieved everything in the shape of seamanship and discovery in "barkes," as they called them, compared to which this lugger is as a thousand-ton ship to a Gravesend wherry.'
The two boatmen were holding a small hoarse argument touching the superiority of certain galley-punts belonging to Deal, when the dawn broke along the port-beam of the lugger. The sea turned an ashen green, and throbbed darkening to the gray wall of eastern sky, against which it washed in a line of inky blackness. I sprang on to a thwart to look ahead on either bow, and Helga stood up beside me; and as upon the barque, and as upon the raft, so now we stood together sweeping the iron-gray sky and the dark line of horizon for any flaw that might denote a vessel. But the sea stretched bald to its recesses the compass round.
The heavens in the east brightened, and the sea-line changed into a steely whiteness, but this delicate distant horizontal gleam of water before sunrise gave us sight of nothing.
'Anything to be seen, sir?' cried Abraham.