The Ghost Ship/Chapter Twelve.

Chapter Twelve. Boat Ahoy!

By the time the sun was near the meridian our top-masts were up and the upper yards swayed aloft and crossed, making the old barquey all ataunto again and pretty nearly her old self, our broken bulwarks and smashed skylight betraying the only damage done by the storm, on deck, at all events.

“I ‘calculate,’ Fosset, as our Yankee friends would say, we may now cry spell O!” observed the skipper, who was highly pleased with the progress made in refitting the ship. “Tell the bo’sun to pipe the hands to dinner, and you and I had better go up on the bridge and see what we can do in the way of determining our position on the chart. That gulf-weed must have lost its bearings, I’m sure. It seems impossible to me that we could have drifted so far to the south as to bring us in the Stream!”

“An observation will soon settle the point, sir,” replied the first mate, passing the word to Masters to knock off work. “Run down, Haldane, and get my sextant for me, there’s a good chap! I left it on the cabin table, all ready. You’ll find it there!”

“Belay, there!” sang out the skipper, as I started off towards the companion-way. “You may as well bring mine, too, while you’re about it. Two heads are better than one, eh, Fosset?”

“Yes, sir, perhaps so,” rejoined the other, before I got out of earshot. “It seems, though, as if we’re going to have three on the job; for here comes Mr O’Neil with his sextant under his arm, evidently bent on the same errand!”

I soon was back with the instruments for the other two, and presently all three were at work taking the sun’s altitude and measuring off the angle made by the luminary with the horizon.

A short delay ensued from our clocks being fast on account of our having drifted to the eastward of where they had last been set.

Then all at once Mr Fosset sang out.

“It’s just noon, sir, now. The sun’s crossing the meridian!”

“All right, make it so,” replied the skipper. “Bos’un, strike eight bells.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” came back from old Masters away forward, and then followed the melodious chime of the ship’s bell that hung immediately under the beak of the fo’c’s’le. “Ting-ting, ting-ting, ting-ting, ting-ting.”

“Now,” going into the wheel-house, “let us look at the chronometer and see what Greenwich time says, and then tot up our reckonings!”

The two others followed him into the little room on the bridge, sitting down to a table in which the track chart of the ship’s course lay, and all were busy for some few moments calculating and working out our latitude and longitude.

I was standing by the doorway after bringing up the correct time of the chronometers, which the skipper kept locked up in his own cabin to prevent their being meddled with, and I could see he looked puzzled, adding up and subtracting his figures over and over again, as if he thought he must have made some error, though he found that he invariably came to the same result.

“Well, Fosset,” he cried at length, unable to restrain himself any longer. “What do you make it?”

“39° 20 minutes north latitude sir, and 47° 15 minutes west longitude.”

“Faith, an’ I make it the same, sir,” also put in Garry O’Neil, the twain having worked out the reckoning long before the poor skipper. “Both of us agree to the virry minnit, sure, lavin’ out the sicconds, sir!”

“By George!” exclaimed the skipper. “It’s even worse than I thought.”

“How, sir?” asked Mr Fosset with a smile on his face, no doubt chuckling to himself at being cleverer and wiser than Captain Applegarth, who would not believe we were in the Gulf Stream. “Don’t you think us right, sir?”

“Oh, yes, Fosset; I agree with you myself. The reckoning is right enough, but father’s the devil to pay!”

The skipper couldn’t sacrifice the joke, though he was terribly put out.

“See here,” he continued, “jabbing,” with great noise and force the compasses with which he was measuring off our position, into the chart, as if that was in fault, while Fosset and O’Neil laughed. “Look where we are! I shouldn’t have thought it possible for us to have been driven so far south, right into the Gulf Stream, as we are, for the current generally runs to the nor’-east’ards below the Banks.”

“The stream has done it, though, sure enough,” said Mr Fosset; “that and the gale, for the one has drifted us to the coast and the other pressed us down southwards; and between the two we’re just fetched where we are, sir!”

“Well,” replied the skipper, shrugging his shoulders, “you were right, Fosset, and I was wrong this morning. Let me see, though, how we have fetched here, if we can trace our course so far, from when we last took the sun.”

“Sure, an’ that was Friday, that baste of a day!” interposed Garry O’Neil, pointing to a place on the chart. “I worked at the rickonin’ and I put it down meself, marking it with a red pencil.”

“Yes; here it is, 42° 35 minutes north latitude, and longitude 50° 10 minutes west,” said the skipper. “I worked it out also, on my own hook, and you and I tallied, if you recollect?”

“Of course we did, the divvil doubt it, sir,” answered the second mate in his usual Irish fashion. “Thin, sor, we ran for five hours from that p’int on a west by south course, going between ten and twelve knots; for, though I didn’t say it meself, Mister Fosset tould me the wind was freshinin’ all the toime, so that we must have travelled about sixty miles, more or less.”

“So that brings us to this blue mark here?”

“Yes, sor, to 42° 28 minutes north, and 51° 12 minutes west.”

“Then we sailed right before the wind, due south?”

“Sure, an’ we did that same afther Mister Haldane’s will-o’-the-wisp for three hours, bedad!”

“Oh, Mr O’Neil,” I pleaded, “please leave me out of it. I’m sure I’ve seen and heard enough of the ship already!”

“Be aisy, me darlint! It’s only me fun, sure; and I mean ye no harrum,” said he in his jocular way. “Arrah how can I lave ye out of the story when ye’re the howl h’id and tail of it, sure, and without ye there’d be none to tile. Yes, cap’en, dear, sure, an’ as I was a-saying when Haldane broke in upon me yarn, thray hours on this southerly course brought us here right where ye see me little finger, now!”

“About 51° 5 minutes west longitude and 41° 40 minutes north latitude. How did you get this, eh?”

“Faith, sor, the ould moon looked so moighty plisint that night that I took a lunar or two, jist to divart mesilf with, when Spokeshave wint below and there was nobody lift to poke fun at, sure!”

“A very useful sort of amusement,” said the skipper drily. “And I see, too, you’ve put in the distance we’ve run, by dead reckoning, as about another fifty miles or so?”

“Yes, sor. The bo’sun hove the log ivery half hour till the engines stopped, an’ he made out we were going sixteen knots an’ more, bedad, so he s’id, whin we were running before the wind with full shtame on.”

“That was very likely, O’Neil,” replied the skipper, “but, after that, we altered course again, you know!”

“In course we did, sor, an’ you’ll say it marked roight down there on that line! We thin sailed west, a quarter south by compass, close-hauled on the starboard track, for two hours longer after you altered course ag’in an’ bore up to the west’ard, keeping on till the ingines bhroke down, bad cess to ’em!”

“When was that?” asked the skipper slowly. “I was so worried and flurried at the moment that I forgot to take the time.”

“Four bells in the first watch, sor,” replied the Irishman quickly. “It was after we’d brought up poor Jackson from below, as Stoddart, the engineer, faith, was a sittin’ near, jist before me, attindin’ on the poor chap in the cabin, whin the rush of shtame came flyin’ up the hatchway, faith, an’ the sekrew stopped. We both of us looked at the saloon clock on the instant, sure, an’ saw the toime, sor.”

“That is the last mark on the chart, then?” said the old skipper meaningly, pencil and compass in hand, and still bending over the tell-tale track map spread out on the wheel-house table. “Since that, nobody knows how we’ve drifted!”

“Faith, no one, sor,” returned Garry O’Neil, thinking the question was addressed to him. “Only, perhaps, the Pope, God bless him, or the Imporor of Chainy!”

All laughed at this, Captain Applegarth now losing his preoccupied air as if there were nothing to be gained, he thought, by dwelling any longer on the past.

It was wonderful, though, how we had drifted in the short interval, comparatively, that had elapsed since we became disabled!

As Mr Fosset had been the first to find out in the morning the Gulf Stream—that great river that runs a course of some two thousand miles in the middle of the ocean, keeping itself perfectly distinct from the surrounding water through which it flows, from its inception as a current in the Caribbean Sea to its final disposal in the North Atlantic—had first carried us in an easterly direction after we had broken-down so utterly; while the strong nor’-westerly gale, aided probably by the Arctic current, running due south from the Polar regions and which disputes the right of way with the Gulf Stream some little distance to the southwards of the great Banks of Newfoundland, had pressed upon the helpless hull of the Star of the North, bearing her away whither they pleased.

So, unable to resist either the winds or the waves, these combined forces had driven her off her course at an oblique angle, thus converting the nor’-easterly, or easterly drift proper, of the Gulf Stream into a true sou’-westerly one, taking us from latitude 41° 30 minutes north and longitude 51° 40 minutes west, where we were on the previous Friday night, when we were forced to lie-to, to our present position on the chart.

To put the case more concisely, the Star of the North had been carried for the distance of four degrees and a half exactly of longitude backward on her outward track to New York and some two degrees or thereabouts to the southwards, placing us as nearly as possible in the position the skipper had already indicated, a direction of some five hundred miles more or less from our proper course and about midway between Bermuda and the Azores, or Western Islands.

While Captain Applegarth was explaining this, as much for my benefit and instruction, I believe, as anything, a thought occurred to me.

“Are we not now, sir, in the track of all the homeward-bound ships sailing on the great circle from the West Indies and South American ports?”

The skipper looked at me steadily, “smelling a rat” at once.

“I suppose, Haldane,” he said somewhat sternly, “you want to get me back to that infernal ship again? Not if I know it, my lad. As you told Mr O’Neil just now, we’ve all had enough and to spare of that vessel and the wild-goose chase she has led us from first to last. I won’t hear another word about her, by Jingo!”

Just then old Masters, who had gone up in the foretop to set something right which had struck his sailor eye as not being altogether as it should be aboard the Star of the North, raised his arm to attract the attention of those on deck below him.

“Hullo, there, bo’sun!” called out the skipper, seeing him, for he seldom kept his glasses away from the rigging of the ship and things aloft. “What’s the row, eh?”

“I sees summit to win’ard, sir.”

“By George!” exclaimed the skipper in a tone that made every one laugh who heard, all but Masters; the coincidence was so comical after what Captain Applegarth had said only a minute before. “Not another ‘ghost-ship,’ I hope!”

“No, sir,” growled the boatswain rather savagely. “It bean’t no ghost-ship this time, though she ain’t far off, I knows, to my thinkin’!”

He added the last words as if speaking to himself, but I heard him, and his remark stopped my mirth instanter.

“What is it, bo’sun, that you do see, then?” cried the skipper impatiently; “that is, if you see anything at all beyond some vision of your own imagination!”

“I ain’t dreaming,” hailed back old Masters, not quite catching what he said. “I sees summit as plain as possible out to win’ard. Aye, it be a-driftin’ down athawt our hawser, too, cap’en. Why, hullo! I’m blessed. Boat ahoy!”