‘Drawing on to the Wight, sir,’ he answered, with a sort of groping look in the little moist blue eyes he turned over the lee bow into the thickness beyond.
‘Well, we’re blowing through it, anyway,’ said I. ‘I shouldn’t have allowed these heels for any conceivable structure born with such bows as the Countess Ida. What is it?’ I asked with a glance at the broad dazzle of yeast dancing and whipping and slinging off the Indiaman’s tall side against the hurl of the weather surge.
‘It’ll be all eight,’ answered the second officer: ‘it would be ten had she worked herself loose of the grip of the stevedores. She wants the mainsail and foreto’garn’sail. These old buckets are manufactured to creak, and whilst they creak, they hold, it is said.’
His face crumpled up into a grin that made him look twenty years older under the thatch of his sou’-wester curling to his eyebrows, with the broad flaps over his ears like a nightcap for his sea-helmet to sit upon.
‘Pray, Mr. Cocker,’ said I, ‘was any damage done to the ship by the collision last night?’
‘There wasn’t so much as a rope-yarn parted,’ he answered. ‘I looked to see the spritsail yard sprung, for it’ll have been that spar, I reckon, which dragged the lugger’s masts overboard by the shrouds of them. But it’s as sound as anything else aboard the ship.’
He shifted uneasily, as though to make off, and, turning my head, I spied the captain looking into the binnacle. So, having had already enough of the deck, I stepped below for a smoke in the cuddy recess, where I found Mr. Emmett in a long cloak, such as mysterious assassins and renegade noblemen used to wear at the Coburg Theatre, sucking at a large curled meerschaum pipe, and arguing on the subject of longitude with a little man almost a dwarf, an honest and highly intelligent pigmy, with the head of a giant supported on the legs of a boy of six, an amiable earnest little creature, with a trick of looking up wistfully into your face. His name was Richard Saunders: and I afterwards understood that he was proceeding to India on behalf of some Pharmaceutical Society, to collect information on and examples of Hindu and other medicines, drugs, charms, and so forth.
Well, all that day it continued to blow a very strong wind. The ship’s plunging increased as the Channel opened under her bow and admitted something of the weight of the Atlantic in the run of its seas. There was a constant sharp-shooting of spray forward over the forecastle, and the wet came sobbing along; the lee scuppers to where the cuddy front checked it under the poop ladder. Very few of us assembled at lunch or at dinner.
During the progress of this last meal, Colonel Bannister left the table and went below, and after an interval, uprose through the hatch, with his large distinguished-looking wife holding on to him. Mynheer Peter Hemskirk, on seeing her, cried out: ‘Ah, Meestrees Bannister, boot dot iss vot I call plooky!’ and Mr. Johnson came near to breaking his neck whilst starting to his legs to stand as she passed. She took a chair next her husband, and sat grimly staring around her, her lips pale with the compression of them. She shook her head to every suggestion made by the steward, and then, being unable to hold out any longer, seized hold of her little ramrod of a husband and went staggering and rolling below with him. When he returned, he tossed down a glass of wine with an angry gesture and a fierce countenance, and looking at Hemskirk, cried out: ‘I’ve a great respect for my wife, sir, and she’s a fine woman in every sense of the word.’—The Dutchman nodded.—‘But,’ continued the colonel, clenching his fist, ‘if ever I go to sea with a woman again, be she wife, aunt, or grandmother, may I be poisoned for a lunatic, and my remains committed to the deep. This is the fourth time I’ve sworn it—my mind is now resolved!’
Out of all this sort of thing one could get a laugh here and there; but on the whole it was desperately weary work, and continued so till we had blown clear of soundings. Altogether, it was as ugly a down Channel run as any man would pray to be preserved from; the atmosphere grey, the seas a muddy green, the howling blast chill as a November morn, often darkening to a squall, that would sweep between the masts in horizontal lines of rain sparkling like steel, and with spite enough in the lancing of them to compel the strongest to turn his back. Now and again a lady passenger would show in the cuddy; but though there were some twenty-eight of us in all, not reckoning a couple of ayahs, and a Chinaman in the garb of his country, who acted as nurse to one Mrs. Trevor’s baby, never once in those days did above seven of us, barring the skipper and his mates, sit down to a meal.