Chapter 10

"The shadow from thy brow shall melt,
The sorrow from thy strain;
But where thy earthly smile hath dwelt,
Our hearts shall thirst in vain."

Mrs. Hemans.

As soon as it would do to put his boats in the water, or at daylight next
morning, Captain Daggett came alongside of his consort. He was received
with a seaman's welcome, and his offers of services were accepted, just as
frankly, as under reversed circumstances, they would have been made. In
all this there was a strange and characteristic admixture of neighbourly
and Christian kindness, blended with a keen regard of the main chance. If
the former duties are rarely neglected by the descendants of the Puritans,
it may be said, with equal truth, that the latter are never lost sight of.
Speculation, and profit, are regarded as so many integral portions of the
duty of man; and, as our kinsmen of Old England have set up an idol to
worship, in the form of aristocracy, so do our kinsmen of New England pay
homage to the golden calf. In point of fact, Daggett had a double motive
in now offering his services to Gardiner; the one being the discharge of
his moral obligations, and the other a desire to remain near the Sea Lion
of Oyster Pond, lest she should visit the key, of which he had some very
interesting memorandums, without having enough to find the place unless
led there by those who were better informed on the subject of its precise
locality than he was himself.

The boats of Daggett assisted in getting the wreck alongside, and in
securing the sails and rigging. Then, his people aided in fitting
jury-masts; and, by noon, both vessels got under way, and stood along the
coast, to the southward and westward. Hatteras was no longer terrible, for
the wind still stood at north-west, and they kept in view of those very
breakers which, only the day before, they would have given the value of
both vessels to be certain of never seeing again. That night they passed
the formidable cape, a spit of sand projecting far to seaward, and which
is on a low beach, and not on any main land at all. Once around this angle
in the coast, they had a lee, hauling up to the south-west. With the wind
abeam, they stood on the rest of the day, picking up a pilot. The next
night they doubled Cape Look Out, a very good landmark for those going
north to keep in view, as a reminder of the stormy and sunken Hatteras,
and arrived off Beaufort harbour just as the sun was rising, the
succeeding morning. By this time the north-wester was done, and both
schooners entered Beaufort, with a light southerly breeze, there being
just water enough to receive them. This was the only place on all that
coast into which it would have answered their purposes to go; and it was,
perhaps,