I heard Mr Henley issue the order to brace up the yards as I was about to enter the captain’s cabin. I could scarcely make him comprehend what had occurred.
“Make it so. Tell the second mate to do what he thinks best,” he answered, and then turned round and went off into a deep slumber again.
I told Mr Henley. “That is well; I will take him at his word,” he observed. “We will now have a look at the compass.”
Fortunately Johnny Spratt was at the helm. He took off the top of the binnacle, and examined it carefully in every direction.
“I thought so,” he exclaimed at last, unscrewing a piece of steel which had been secured to the west of the northern points, giving it a strong westerly variation.
Thus, when the man at the helm, unconscious of the trick, fancied that he was steering to the south, he was in reality steering east or south-east. The second mate having removed the steel, charged Spratt to say nothing about the matter. When breakfast was over, I saw Cobb come on deck and look up at the sails. Then he strolled carelessly aft to the compass, and in another minute he, with the same assumed look of indifference, ascended the fore-rigging. He was some time aloft, and when he came down he again went below to his companions. Our difficulties were much increased by our not being able to trust Waller, or indeed Sills and Broom. Sills, I believe, wished to be honest, but he had no discretion. Broom, I feared, was an ill-disposed fellow, without even a knowledge of what was right and wrong. I have met many such persons possessed of a perfect moral blindness, who do all sorts of wicked things, without in the slightest degree making their consciences uncomfortable, or fancying that they are doing any harm. Mr Henley again spoke to Dr Cuff, and was this time more successful in persuading him that there was something wrong going forward on board. The plotters, however, knowing that we suspected them, were on their guard, and committed no acts to betray themselves.
Soon after our discovery that the compass had been tampered with, it fell a dead calm. It continued all night and the following day. Mr Henley and I never left the deck together all the time. One or the other of us was always on the watch. At length, after sunset on the second day, he told me to turn in. I did so, for I was nearly tired out. I had been asleep some time, when I felt some one touch my hammock.
“Hist, sir,” whispered a voice close to my ear; “don’t speak, please—’tis only me, Tommy Bigg. They are going to do it this very night—I’ve heard all about it, and I thought I’d come and tell you first. There’s some use in being little, for I was stowed away in a corner where they didn’t think a human being could have got.”
“What is it, Tommy?” I asked, in a low voice.
I thought all the time he had been speaking that I had been dreaming, and could not believe that the reality of what I had so long apprehended had arrived.