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Upon clearing the passage through the reef I had shouted instructions down to the man at the wheel to haul up a couple of points to the northward, which had brought our jibboom-end pointing fair between the two headlands opening into the indentation which I have termed Polson's harbour, and I now judged, from what I could see, to be of quite respectable extent.
There was plenty of work to be done, the clearing away of the wreck being our first task. Simpson and I accordingly armed ourselves with a tomahawk each, and went forward to make a commencement. Simpson began at the jibboom-end, cutting away the stays attached thereto, and working his way in, while I made an attack upon the shrouds and backstays.
About half-an-hour after this singular luminosity of the atmosphere first became apparent, and before the startled seamen had recovered their self-possession, in an instant, without any premonition whatever, there appeared at each mast-head and yardarm, at the jibboom-end in fact, at the end of every spar on board the schooner a globe of greenish-coloured light, about the size of an ordinary lamp-globe, each of which wavered and swayed, elongated and flattened, as the ship gently rose and fell over the glassy sea.
It was about an hour later that, preceded by a slight chilling of the air, the first faint pallor of dawn came filtering through the velvet darkness ahead, stealing imperceptibly higher and higher into the eastern sky, and causing the stars thereaway to dwindle and grow dim until, one after another, they vanished in the cold, colourless light that now stretched along the horizon beneath our jibboom-end, spreading right and left, even as one stood and watched it.
"Take this glass, Polson," I said, "and very carefully examine the spot immediately over our jibboom-end. To my mind there seems to be a very narrow patch of unbroken water there, which may yet prove wide enough to take the ship through with a leading wind."
"Well," said I, "I expect it to heave in sight to-morrow at dawn, under the jibboom-end, some fourteen or fifteen miles distant, if the wind and weather last as they are now which I believe will be the case, since the barometer remains steady. It is your morning watch, isn't it?" "Yes, sir; my eight hours out to-night," answered Chips.
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