Page:Twenty Thousand Verne Frith 1876.pdf/46

 kept us in a state of “jumpiness,” too violent not to bring upon us a reaction at no distant date.

And the reaction did not fail to set in. For three months—three months of which every day seemed a century—the Abraham Lincoln traversed the South Pacific, running up when a whale was signalled, making sudden turns, going first on one tack then on the other, stopping suddenly, “backing and filling,” or reversing, and going ahead, in a manner calculated to put the engine altogether out of gear; and thus did not leave a point unexplored on the American side of the Japanese coast. And nothing—nothing after all was to be seen but the watery waste. No sign of a gigantic narwhal, nor a moving rock, nor of anything at all out of the common.

The reaction came. Discouragement seized upon all, and incredulity began to appear. A new feeling arose on board, which was composed of three-tenths shame and seven-tenths anger. They all felt very foolish, but were much more annoyed at having been taken in by a chimera. The mountains of argument which had been piled up for a year, crumbled away at once, and no one had any thought, except to make up for lost time, in the matters of food and sleep.

With the natural fickleness of the human mind, they went from one extreme to the other. The warmest adherents of the enterprise became, as a matter of course, the most ardent detractors. Reaction set in from the lowest ranks to the highest, and certainly, had it not been for the firmness of Commodore Farragut, the frigate's head would have been put to the south again.

However, this useless search could not go on for ever. The Abraham Lincoln had nothing to reproach itself with,