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Updated: May 11, 2025
When we were at sea, he kept a running account, in his head, of the ship's way the number of knots and the courses; and if the courses did not vary much during the twenty-four hours, by taking the whole progress, and allowing so many eighths southing or northing, to so many easting or westing; he would make up his reckoning just before the captain took the sun at noon, and often came wonderfully near the mark.
We were now nearly up to the latitude of Cape Horn, and having over forty degrees of easting to make, we squared away the yards before a strong westerly gale, shook a reef out of the fore-topsail, and stood on our way, east-by-south, with the prospect of being up with the Cape in a week or ten days.
It's something unthinkable. It's impossible. It must reach ninety or a hundred miles an hour in the gusts. That don't mean anything. How could I ever tell it to anybody? I couldn't. And look at that sea! I've run my Easting down, but I never saw anything like that." Day had come, and the sun should have been up an hour, yet the best it could produce was a sombre semi-twilight.
Hawsepipe, the doctor, and I struck up as lively a conversation as we could, touching the probability of our soon being picked up, and I embraced the opportunity of mentioning casually that in consequence of the great amount of easting in the wind I feared we should not reach land quite as soon as I had at first anticipated.
No one suffered, however, and after getting out of them, we picked up a fine south-east trade wind. This carried us down to twenty-six degrees south. The meridian of the Cape was passed about the fiftieth day after leaving the Lizard. We ran down our easting on parallel forty south. The brig was going about eight knots before the wind, when one morning there was a cry of "Man overboard!"
The ship was 3 degrees 22 minutes in longitude to the eastward of the dead reckoning, which the timekeeper almost invariably proved to be owing to a current giving us more easting than the log.
That sensitive instrument refuses to take notice of the disturbance which is humming with a deep, throaty voice in the rigging. I get back to the wheel just in time to meet another gust, the strongest yet. Well, anyway, the wind is abeam and the Snark is on her course, eating up easting. That at least is well. The jib and flying-jib bother me, and I wish they were in.
Boys suck the honey of the flower-stalk; and adults drink or otherwise use, as corrective of bile, an infusion of the leaves and the under bark. They could not give me the receipt for the valuable preparation of the green apple, well known to the Fantis of Accra. After returning to Axim we heard of rich diggings two hours' march inland, or north with easting from Esyáma.
On October 26, we actually made one hundred and three miles of easting, and we talked about it for days afterwards. Once we caught a moderate gale from the south, which blew itself out in eight hours, but it helped us to seventy-one miles of easting in that particular twenty-four hours.
There I lay on my elbows, in the most trying attitude, and every now and again gave a weak stroke or two to turn her head to shore. It was very tiring, and slow work, yet I did visibly gain ground; and, as we drew near the Cape of the Woods, though I saw I must infallibly miss that point, I had still made some hundred yards of easting. I was, indeed, close in.
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