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With this, we hauled our wind; and, by bracing the yards sharp up and keeping her full and bye, we were able to bring the ship's head a bit more to the westward than we had been previously sailing, steering now south-west by south instead of sou'-sou'-west as before, which was as near as we could get her to proceed in the direction where the lookout man had reported the vessel.
"Mr Barnes," shouted the captain to the first mate, who stood on deck near the open skylight, "how's her head?" "Sou'-sou'-west, sir." "Put her about and lay your course west and by north. Now," said the captain, turning again to Watty, with a look of satisfaction, "we'll soon rescue Captain Samson and his crew.
The doctor puzzled them, and the quantity of his belongings. "It ain't pearls," said Handy Solomon. It ain't Chinks, for we are cruising sou'-sou'-west. Likely it's trade, trade down in the Islands." We were all below. The captain himself had the wheel. Discipline, while strict, was not conventional. "Contrabandista," muttered the Mexican, "for dat he geev us double pay."
The barque was then brought to the wind on the port tack under the lower maintopsail, and she lay-to pretty well; but the wind kept on veering and beating with frequent squalls from sou'-sou'-west to west, so that at noon a strong gale prevailed again fiercer than before.
Later on in the afternoon, however, another shift of wind took place, the gale veering to sou'-sou'-west in a squall heavier than any of its predecessors; while a heavy sea, flooding the decks, broke through the hatchway and put out the engine fires.
The old sailor was thinking nothing of this sort. His eyes were fixed on a small and almost imperceptible stain on the horizon to the sou'-sou'-west. It was no doubt another island almost hull-down on the horizon. Save for this blemish the whole wheel of the sea was empty and serene. Emmeline had not followed them up to the rock.
"It is quite plain to me," said Rooney who, being in some sort at sea, was, as it were, more at home than his companions "it is quite plain to me that we have got fairly into the great Polar current, and are travelling in a sou'-sou'-west direction down Davis Straits." No doubt Rooney gave "sou'-sou'-west" in some sort of Eskimo jargon with which we are not acquainted.
"No," he continued, "that's where it was, just sou'-sou'-west, for I took the bearing of it when I saw it the third time; and I thought that, in case of anything being wrong, it wouldn't be amiss to mask the binnacle light." "Quite right," said I, peering first at the compass card and then away into the opaque darkness which prevented our seeing even the surface of the water alongside.
No no Captain Wallingford here's the wind at sou'-sou'-west, and we're heading nothe-east, and-by-nothe-half-nothe already, with that fellow abaft the mizen riggin'; as soon as we get a p'int more to the nor'ard, we'll have him fairly in our wake." "Ay, that will do very well as a theory, but what can we make of it in practice?
She had been driven to the south-east by the gale, aided by the drift of the current setting in to the Bay of Biscay. This was more than two hundred miles out of our proper track, and far too much to the eastward to be able to weather the northern extremity of the Spanish coast, which would soon be perilously near to us, running as we then were to the sou'-sou'-west.
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