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Updated: May 24, 2025
When I came below, two or three minutes before, we were heading into The Race, west-nor'west, having left Cerberus Shoal whistling buoy to port about fifteen minutes earlier. Get her back on that course, if you please, Mr. Swain, and proceed at half-speed. Don't neglect your soundings. I'll join you as soon as I feel fit." "Very good, sir." Mr. Swain withdrew.
Jacob was in his bunk then, he being about to take the first watch, and Peter Bligh, who walked the bridge, had rung down for half-speed by the time I came out with my glass for the first view of the distant island.
Toward these the galley was directed, and I now saw with surprise that these were the objects of the sacred hunt. Suddenly, as the galley was moving along at half-speed, there arose out of the water a thing that looked like the folds of a giant hairy serpent, which, however, proved to be the long neck of an incredible monster, whose immense body soon afterward appeared above the water.
The consequence of yawing and of running half-speed by night was that we reached Jebel Hassani just before noon, instead of eight a.m., on the 25th. The island, whose profile slopes to the south-eastward, is a long yellow-white ridge, a lump of coralline four hundred feet high, bare and waterless in summer: yet it feeds the Bedawi flocks at certain seasons.
The destroyer Spitfire, which had just brought the news, would naturally have been selected to carry the message under ordinary circumstances one of the rules of the game being that the telegraph might not be used by either side; but unfortunately, while still a considerable distance from Portland, she had commenced to run short of coal, being obliged to steam at half-speed for a number of hours, and finally arrived in the harbour on the sweepings of her bunkers.
In fact, their enemies appeared to be indulging in a feeling of security from which they would awake too late! The order was now passed for the launches to ease down to half-speed, so that the sound of the churning propellers might be less perceptible, and the three boats crept forward almost in complete silence upon their prey.
Lucy, as excited as any one else, was on the bridge with him, her face aglow, and her hand on the lever of the engine-room telegraph. "Half-speed, Lucy." By canting her as he had done, she had actually floated and no more than floated an hour before the tide was at its full.
Suddenly a fog-horn smote the oppressive gloom. It drew near. A huge blotch crossed their bows. They could feel it rather than see it. They heard some order given in a foreign language, and De Sylva whispered: "The Sao Geronimo!" "The wot-ah?" demanded Coke, who was standing beside him. "The cruiser!" Coke listened. He could distinguish the half-speed beating of twin screws.
A blinding storm of wind and snow prevented the Roosevelt from starting until about two-thirty P. M., when, with all the dogs a-howling, the whistle tooting, and the crew and members cheering, we steamed out of the Harbor into Smith Sound, and a thick fog which compelled half-speed past Littleton Island and into heavy pack-ice.
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