Chapter 3

Meantime the Narcissus, with square yards, ran out of the fair
monsoon. She drifted slowly, swinging round and round the compass,
through a few days of baffling light airs. Under the patter of short
warm showers, grumbling men whirled the heavy yards from side to side;
they caught hold of the soaked ropes with groans and sighs, while their
officers, sulky and dripping with rain water, unceasingly ordered them
about in wearied voices. During the short respites they looked with
disgust into the smarting palms of their stiff hands, and asked one
another bitterly:--"Who would be a sailor if he could be a farmer?" All
the tempers were spoilt, and no man cared what he said. One black night,
when the watch, panting in the heat and half-drowned with the rain,
had been through four mortal hours hunted from brace to brace, Belfast
declared that he would "chuck the sea for ever and go in a
steamer." This was excessive, no doubt. Captain Allistoun, with great
self-control, would mutter sadly to Mr. Baker:--"It is not so bad--not
so bad," when he had managed to shove, and dodge, and manoeuvre his
smart ship through sixty miles in twenty-four hours. From the doorstep
of the little cabin, Jimmy, chin in hand, watched our distasteful
labours with insolent and melancholy eyes. We spoke to him gently--and
out of his sight exchanged sour smiles.

Then, again, with a fair wind and under a clear sky, the ship went
on piling up the South Latitude. She passed outside Madagascar and
Mauritius without a glimpse of the land. Extra lashings were put on the
spare spars. Hatches were looked to. The steward in his leisure moments
and with a worried air tried to fit washboards to the cabin doors. Stout
canvas was bent with care. Anxious eyes looked to the westward, towards
the cape of storms. The ship began to dip into a southwest swell, and
the softly luminous sky of low latitudes took on a harder sheen from
day to day above our heads: it arched high above the ship vibrating and
pale, like an immense dome of steel, resonant with the deep voice of
freshening gales. The sunshine gleamed cold on the white curls of black
waves. Before the strong breath of westerly squalls the ship, with
reduced sail, lay slowly over, obstinate and yielding. She drove to and
fro in the unceasing endeavour to fight her way through the invisible
violence of the winds: she pitched headlong into dark smooth hollows;
she struggled upwards over the snowy ridges of great running seas; she
rolled, restless, from side to side, like a thing in pain. Enduring and
valiant, she answered to the call of men; and her slim spars waving for
ever in abrupt semicircles, seemed to beckon in vain for help towards
the stormy sky.

It was a bad