AN AMATEUR NAVIGATOR 129 



kick, and a rough expletive, admonished the sleeper that 

 he must instantly arouse himself if the ship was to be 

 saved. To me it was an experience of a lifetime, and I 

 have often wondered to myself that I contrived, consider- 

 ing my inexperience, to make myself as useful as I did. 

 I knew, however, the value of a bold front, and was quite 

 aware that however unfit I might be, in a practical way, 

 for a command at sea, that a sign of collapse on my part 

 would certainly unnerve the two men on board on whom 

 the salvation of the boat must depend, for the cook was 

 no sailor, and the boy too young to be of much use. 



For several days there were gusts of wind and drizzling 

 showers, which, though no great quantity of rain fell, were 

 very cold and depressing, and occasioned a fog which 

 prevented our seeing more than three or four hundred 

 yards ahead. The wind shifted occasionally, varying 

 between north-by-east to due west, with an occasional 

 squall of exceptional violence from the south-west or 

 nearly due south. 



The reckoning we kept was all by guesswork ; and 

 though, as I afterwards found, the course was wonderfully 

 correct under the circumstances, I am afraid I must confess 

 that it was a lucky chance that befriended us. Yet I 

 had a system in my dead-reckoning. Calculating, as we 

 did, from the knowledge that the Swan could not 

 possibly make more than seven knots on a wind, and 

 that we were probably four hundred miles off the western 

 head of the Great Bight, we thought it would be perfectly 

 safe to edge away to the north as much as the prevailing 

 winds would allow us ; our great fear, as I have said, being 

 that we should be carried right out into the southern 

 Pacific. The one or two spells of southerly winds which 

 we experienced probably took us a hundred miles to the 

 north, but on the whole we thought we were gradually 

 drifting to the south. 



It was not until the 4th May that we had sufficiently 

 clear weather to enable me to take the sun, a nautical 

 operation that I performed, no doubt, clumsily enough, 

 but which was of great value to us as approximately fixing 



I 



