CHAPTER XVI.

NAVIGATING THE BRIG.

The brigantine, on which our dorymates now found themselves shipped as able seamen under the command of Captain McCloud, had been almost left to herself for nearly two weeks, during which time the current of the Gulf Stream had carried her far to the northward of her course. No observations had been taken on board in all this time, and the dense fog, through which the vessel had been drifting for the past four days, would have effectually prevented this work even had Captain McCloud been strong enough to perform it. He was therefore not surprised to learn from the boys that he was now on the Grand Bank, but he determined to try and take an observation at noon that day, and discover their exact position.

The promise of wind that interrupted the captain’s story was fulfilled by a steady breeze from the southward, which, as their general course was westerly, was favorable and satisfactory. While the captain took the wheel, Nimbus and the boys hoisted the jib, got the foresail loosed and sheeted home, shook the reefs out of the fore-topsail, swayed up the heavy yard by means of a winch, and set the royal. They got one reef out of the main-sail without much trouble, but when it came to the second they found it so difficult to hoist the great folds of heavy canvas and its weighty spar that the boys became wholly exhausted with their efforts, and even the enormous strength of Nimbus was exerted to its utmost. After bracing the yards, trimming the sheets of the head-sails, and even getting in a bit of the main-sheet, they set to work overhauling the running rigging, and bringing order out of its confused tangle.

At this last work Wolfe, having sailed before the mast on a square-rigged vessel, was more at home than Breeze, but the latter was quick to comprehend, and so learned easily; for a ready comprehension is more than half of learning. While the boys were thus employed Captain McCloud called Breeze to take the wheel, as it was nearly noon, and time to take his observation. Fortunately, amid all the trouble and disaster that had overtaken the brig, her chronometer had not been allowed to run down, and with the sextant, and other instruments belonging to her late captain, it was still in a serviceable condition.

Bringing the sextant on deck, Captain McCloud gazed through it at the sun, as reflected in a small mirror, until it had reached its greatest altitude and stood exactly above the meridian, or, in other words, until it was noon. By looking at the chronometer, which was set to Greenwich time, the difference between the noon where they then were and Greenwich noon was found to be three hours and twenty-six minutes, or two hundred and six minutes. As the earth revolves from west to east at the rate of one degree--which at the equator is sixty miles--every four minutes, the whole number of minutes divided by four gave fifty-one and a half, or 51° 30´, as the longitude of the brig west from Greenwich.

The latitude of the place--its distance north or south from the equator--was obtained by another observation of the sun, taken with the sextant, for the purpose of finding the angle between it and the zenith, or point directly overhead. A glance at the _Nautical Almanac_ under the date of that day, and a minute’s figuring, gave the required result. The latitude thus found was 43° 37´, and of course, being north of the equator, it was north latitude, or 43° 37´ north.

Having obtained these two figures, Captain McCloud got out a chart of that portion of the Atlantic, and drawing on it a fine north and south line through meridian of longitude 51° 30´ west, and a delicate east and west line to indicate parallel of latitude 43° 37´ north, he made a small cross at their point of intersection, and showed it to Breeze as the position of the brig at that moment. It was very near the southern point of the Grand Bank and almost due east from Gloucester, but over eight hundred miles from that port.

“There!” said Captain McCloud when he had finished these operations, in all of which Breeze had been greatly interested. “If we steer due west, and hold this wind, we ought to sight Sable Island by day after to-morrow, and run into port inside of three days more. How would that suit you, my boy?”

“It seems as though I couldn’t wait for the time to come, father. Won’t it be glorious to sail into Gloucester harbor and take everybody by surprise? But, father, while we are on this cruise I wish you would teach me something of navigation. I never saw an observation taken before. They don’t take them on board fishing schooners, do they?”

“Not often. Most fishing skippers trust to their lead, log, and compass. They can generally tell by the sort of bottom the lead brings up where they are. You have often, I dare say, noticed skippers examining the sand and shells that stick to the tallow in the bottom of the lead.”

Breeze said he had, but that he should think it would be pretty hard to remember what the whole bottom of the ocean was made of.

“We don’t try to,” laughed his father, “we only remember what sort of material forms a few of the principal banks and reefs. For the rest we examine the charts, where it is all laid down. Now I am going to show you an old-fashioned-log, and how to use it. It is the only one I can find aboard, though many vessels nowadays use patent self-registering logs.”

“Of course I have often heard of heaving the log,” said Breeze, casting an eye aloft at the sails, then glancing at the compass, and giving the wheel a spoke or two to keep the brig on her true westerly course, “but I never knew exactly how it was done.”

Captain McCloud called upon Nimbus to bring him the log and the glass, and made ready to use them. The log was a triangular piece of thin board, having its base rounded and weighted with lead. Three short lines extending from the three corners fastened it to the log-line, much as a kite is hung. The log-line was about a thousand feet long, and had a number of red rags, or “knots,” tied to it, at distances of fifty-one feet apart. Each of these long spaces was divided into ten short spaces, called “fathoms,” by bits of leather twisted into the line.

The glass, which was to mark the time of the log’s running, was shaped like an hour-glass, but was much smaller, and the sand contained in it occupied only half a minute in running from one end to the other. Now, half a minute is the one hundred and twentieth part of an hour, and fifty-one feet is the same portion of a nautical mile, which is 6120 feet, or 840 feet longer than a geographical or land mile. Thus, when we say that a vessel sails six knots (or miles) an hour, we mean that six knots, or three hundred and six feet, of the log-line ran out in half a minute. The log-line is wound on a reel that turns very easily.

In the present instance Nimbus dropped the log into the water over the lee quarter of the brig, and held the reel in his hands. When the first fifty feet, which is called the “stray-line,” and is sufficient to carry the log clear of the vessel’s eddy, had run out, and Nimbus saw the first red rag touch the water, he sang out, “Turn!” Captain McCloud turned the half-minute glass, so that the sand in it began to drop to the other end, and answered, “Done!” The instant it stopped running he cried, “Stop!” and Nimbus held the reel, so that no more line should run out.

“Seben knot, five fadom, sah,” he reported to the captain.

“Very good,” said the captain; “reel in.” Then to Breeze and Wolfe he said, "That shows that we are running at the rate of seven and a half knots, or miles, an hour. By heaving the log every hour, and keeping note of all the courses steered, we shall not only know pretty nearly the distance run, but can determine our position at the end of each sea, or nautical, day, which is at noon. This is called ‘dead-reckoning,’ and is useful as a check on observations, and also when on account of cloudy weather no observation can be taken. Of course, for such reckoning we must have some fixed point to start from, or ‘point of departure,’ as it is called. Ours in the present case is the point, back here a few miles, that we established by finding its latitude and longitude, and marking it on the chart.

“There is one more thing to be thought of in our dead-reckoning, and that is the leeway. This may be caused by ocean currents, or by a beam wind, which not only acts upon the sails, so as to force the vessel ahead, but to a certain extent drives her sidewise. This must be allowed for, and every captain must use his own judgment to determine what leeway his vessel is making, and how much her course should be altered to allow for it. Now I am going to allow a couple of points for leeway, and instead of keeping her due west, Breeze, you may make it west-south-west.”

“Ay, ay, sir!” answered Breeze, promptly; “west-sou’west,” and he altered the brig’s course slightly in obedience to these instructions.

“At the same time,” continued the captain, “we shall mark the course on the chart, as though we were heading due west.”

All this had been so interesting to the young sailors that, though already quite hungry again, they were almost sorry to hear Nimbus announce dinner just at this point.

After dinner, and after Captain McCloud had rested for an hour in the cabin, the boys asked him to tell them how he escaped from his awful position in the forecastle of the capsized _Sea Robin_, and of his experiences, since that time.

“Well,” he replied, “of course I will tell you the whole story; but I hate so to think of that time that I shall make my yarn as brief as possible.”

“You left off,” said Breeze, “just where poor Dick Simonds had dived out of the forecastle, and you didn’t hear anything more of him.”

"Yes, I remember. Well, as you can imagine, I felt badly enough in that place, all alone, with the water steadily gaining on me, and not the faintest hope of escaping. I would have followed Dick Simonds in a moment, but that I knew there was no chance of getting out that way. To do so would simply have been to commit suicide, and that has always seemed to me a pretty mean and cowardly way of escaping trouble.

"When we were first shut in there we could sit on the edge of the lower bunks; but before Dick left the water had risen so that we were sitting in it, and I soon had to stand on the bunks to keep out of it. It must have been night again, for no ray of light came in through the broken hatch, when I found the water so deep that I was obliged to climb up on the foremast, and sit there with my head between two of the bunks on the upper side. I knew this was the last move I could make, and I fully expected to die there. I had no way of knowing how long I sat there; but it seemed like many hours, and doubtless was.

"All of a sudden, I seemed to hear faint, far-away voices, then some heavy object struck the hull of the schooner, and directly I heard footsteps, as though men were walking upon the bottom above me. I nearly suffocated in my efforts to shout; but somehow I couldn’t utter a sound. I don’t know whether it was from excitement or weakness, but my voice had left me. Then I tried to make them hear by pounding with my fists on the planking overhead; but though I kept it up until my hands were bleeding and numb, the sound did not reach them. At last I ceased to hear the footsteps, and imagined that the men, having satisfied their curiosity, were going to leave, which, as I afterwards found out, was the case.

"At that moment I thought of my watch, which was still in my pocket, and which, as you know, Breeze, had a very heavy silver case. Pounding on the planking with it, I succeeded in making a sound that attracted their attention just as they were about to pull away. I never stopped my pounding for a moment until somebody sung out, ‘Hello in the schooner! Is anybody inside there?’

"I found voice then to answer that I was in there all alone, that the water had nearly reached me, and to beg them not to go away without trying to do something for me.

"‘All right, shipmate,’ came the answer; ‘we won’t leave you as long as there’s a chance of saving you. You may count on that. We are only going for some tools to cut a hole with, and will be back in a few minutes. So keep up a good heart.’

"I heard them go away and then return again; and by rapping on the planking with my watch, I managed to show them a place between two ribs where there was no inside sheathing. Here they began to cut, after asking me how thick the planking was. They did not break through in any one place until they had cut very nearly through all around, for fear of making holes out of which the air would rush. In that case, you see, the schooner would quickly sink, taking me with her.

“At last they sang out for me to keep from under, as they were ready to break in. Then came three or four quick blows, a section about two feet square was crushed in, and somehow I got out through the opening. I think I must have been almost shot out by the confined air that rushed out with a roar. At any rate, there was barely time for the men to drag me into their boat and push back a few yards from the wreck when she sank like a stone. The boat was spun around and around like a straw in the vortex that it made, and for a moment they were afraid that it was going to be sucked under. I knew nothing of this until afterwards, for I became unconscious the moment I got into the fresh air and out of the foul gases I had been breathing so long. When I recovered I was lying in a berth in the _Esmeralda’s_ cabin.”

“The _Esmeralda’s_ cabin!” interrupted Breeze. “Was it this very brig, father?”

"Yes; I was lying in the cabin of this very brig, which was bound for the west coast of Africa, with a cargo of salt fish from the Provinces. It seemed that, while lying becalmed that morning, they had drifted close to the wreck of the _Sea Robin_, and the mate, with a couple of men, had boarded it out of curiosity. They had got into their boat again to leave, without a suspicion that anybody was in her, when they heard the noise I made pounding with the old watch. The men said it was only rats, and wanted to go on; but the mate insisted on finding out what it really was.

"All hands, from the captain down, did everything for me; but it was a long time before I recovered from the horror of those two days shut up with the rats in that wreck. I was always on the lookout for some vessel on which I might get a passage to the United States, but we only spoke two on the whole voyage. One of these was bound for South America and the other around the Horn, so I stuck by the brig.

"We made a quick run out, discharged our cargo promptly, and tried to take in our return cargo of palm-oil quickly, so as to start back before the sickly season set in. Somehow, though, everything seemed to work against us. One delay followed another, until we had spent three months on the coast cruising from the mouth of one pestiferous river to another, picking up our cargo in small lots here and there.

"At last the fever broke out among us, and the captain was the first one to go. Then the cook died, and we got Nimbus in his place. Fortunately for us, he was visiting his old home at that time, and ever since he came aboard he has proved one of the best all-round hands I ever had on a vessel. The mate and crew begged me to act as captain and take the brig home, which I finally consented to do. I got away from the coast as quickly as possible, in hopes of saving the rest of them; but having once got its hold, the fever would not let go, and they dropped off one after another. I was taken down nearly a month ago, and the first mate not until two weeks later; but the fever made short work with him, poor fellow! When I got about again I found that Nimbus and I were the only ones left, and nothing but his constant care and good nursing pulled me through. The vessel has been left to drift for I don’t know how long; but, fortunately, we have had no very severe weather, and with such help as Nimbus could give her, she has taken care of herself.

“It’s a sad story, but it’s all past and done with now. After this wonderful meeting with you, I think the hard luck of the old brig must have left her, and within a few days more we’ll carry her, safe and sound, into Gloucester harbor.”

Captain McCloud and Wolfe Brady stood watch for the first half of that night, and at midnight they turned in, while Breeze and Nimbus came on deck.

Two hours later Nimbus, who was steering, lashed his wheel, and said they must heave the log, as the wind had freshened considerably. They got a lantern on deck, and Breeze was to turn and watch the glass, while Nimbus held the reel.

The line had run about half out when it was suddenly slacked by the rising of the brig on a heavy sea. The slack caught on something, and Breeze leaned far over the taffrail to clear it. As he did so the big sea that had lifted her seemed to slide out from under the vessel, she dropped into the hollow with a sharp lurch, and the boy was flung far from her. Without a sound he disappeared, and the blackness of the night closed over him as the brig swept on her course.