"My mother's made two West India trips," replied Vine. "She knows all about it. Likes it, too."
"It's the laziest kind of cruising, though," said Guert. "We've dodged away from some sails, and we've run after some, but we haven't taken anything."
"Our chances'll come, boys," put in Captain Avery himself, as he came strolling along the deck. "Not just 'bout here, maybe. Yonder on the easterly Bahamas. Not many British traders are likely to be met hereaway."
"What are we here for, then, father?" asked Vine. "What's your notions?"
"We had to," said the captain. "The Frenchman we spoke, told me the Florida Channel's alive with British cruisers. We sighted two of 'em, you know, and had to run for it."
"Where next?" asked Vine.
"We'll take a course toward Porto Rico," said his father; "then up the coast of Cuba. We'll try the Bahama Channel, and the Santaren, and the Nicholas. I want to send home some prizes, pretty soon, on British account."
Day after day, the Noank had been hunting, hunting, farther and farther into the southern sea, through good weather and bad. All the while Guert Ten Eyck had been at school. Up-na-tan had laboriously tried to teach him whatever he himself knew about guns, large and small. The other sailors had done their duty by him, concerning ropes and sails and points of seamanship. Captain Avery had driven him hard at his books on navigation. Therefore, if the cruising had been more or less lazy business for others, it had contained a good deal of hard work for the young sea apprentice. He was in a fair way to be made a good sailor of, and to be ready in due season to handle a ship.
"What you want most," Captain Avery had said, "is a long v'y'ge on a square-rigged vessel, under a hard captain. I'll find a chance for you one o' these days. You can't learn everything on board a schooner."
That idea was growing steadily in Guert's mind, and he now and then found himself dreaming of all sorts of perilous cruises in great American three-masters. By these splendid ships of his imagination, all of which were as yet unlaunched from any shipyard, the best keels of England were to be met and beaten. He was to command one of them, and was to become a captain first, and then a commodore. It was all an entirely natural young sailor's ambition, but it was looking far away into the future of his country. All it was good for now was the help it gave him in his pretty severe schooling.