This calm weather was trying to the patience; but it was perhaps well for us to have this experience at the commencement of the voyage; for it enabled the raw hands to settle down to their work quickly, and there was but little seasickness on board.
At midday, September 2, we were off the chops of the Channel, a fresh easterly wind that lasted some hours having carried us so far. Then the wind fell again, and we sailed on in a very leisurely fashion until the morning of September 5, when, being well in the middle of the Bay of Biscay, the wind, which was from the southeast, began gradually to freshen. First we were going five knots through the water, then seven, and by midday we were travelling between eight and nine. In the afternoon the wind increased to the force of a moderate gale and the sea began to rise. During the night some rather high seas rolled up after us occasionally, so that we had to bear away and run before them, and only the old hands could be entrusted with the tiller. We passed Finisterre on this night, but were too far off to see the lights; and now we had done with the Bay of Biscay, which had certainly treated the Alerte with great consideration, and not shown us any of its proverbial bad temper. The wind had gone down by midday on the 6th, and the run for the previous twenty-four hours was found to have been 158 miles.
From this date we kept up a fair average speed; though our voyage could not be termed a smart one, for there was scarcely a day on which we were not retarded by several hours of calm.
While going down Channel we had kept watch and watch in the usual sea fashion, the first mate taking one watch and myself the other. But now that we were out at sea, clear of all danger, it became unnecessary to continue this somewhat wearisome four hours up and four hours down system; so we divided ourselves into three watches, the second mate taking the third watch. This gave the men an eight hours’ rest below at a stretch, instead of only four. As we had three paid hands in addition to the cook, one of these was allotted to each watch. But before reaching the South American coast the second mate resigned his post, and we reverted to the watch-and-watch system again, which was observed until the termination of the cruise.
A good deal of useless form was kept up at this early stage of the voyage. A log-slate was suspended in the saloon, and each officer as he came below would write up a full account of all that had occurred in his watch. The most uninteresting details were minutely chronicled—only to be rubbed off the slate each midday, and I think there was a little disappointment expressed because I would not copy all these down in my logbook. Had I done so that logbook would have been a dreadful volume to peruse.
To us, however, the log-slate was a source of great amusement on account of its utter fallaciousness. The patent log was, of course, put overboard when we were making the land, but when we were out on the ocean and no land was near us we naturally did not take the trouble to do this, neither did we make use of the common log-ship or keep a strict dead reckoning. But, despite this, the officer of a watch would religiously jot down the exact number of knots and furlongs he professed to have sailed during each of his four hours on duty; he did not even try to guess the distance to the best of his ability; he was fired with an ambition to show the best record for his watch; so he would first scan the slate to see how many knots the officer just relieved boasted to have accomplished, and then he would unblushingly write down a slightly greater number of miles as the result of his own watch, quite regardless of any fall in the wind or other retarding cause.
Thus: if five knots an hour had been made in one watch, five and a quarter would probably be logged for the next, and five and a half for the next. Sometimes there was a flat calm throughout a watch, and then the ingenious officer, though he could not help himself and was compelled to write himself down a zero before three of the hours, would compensate for this by putting down a big number in front of that hour during which he imagined that all the individuals of his rival watches were fast asleep below, and would boldly assert in explanation that just then he had been favoured with a strong squall to help him along.
No one put any confidence in this mendacious slate, which soon became known on board as the “Competition Log,” and inspired our wits with many merry quips. The distance made in each twenty-four hours as recorded by the Competition Log was about fifty percent greater than that calculated from the observations of the sun.
At last, on the morning of September 13, having been fourteen days at sea, and having accomplished a voyage of something under fifteen hundred miles, we knew that we were in the close vicinity of the Salvages, and a sharp lookout for land was accordingly kept. We had seen nothing but water round us since leaving Portland Bill, and all on board were excited at the prospect of so soon discovering what manner of place was this desert treasure-island of which we had been talking so much.
The Salvages lie between Madeira and the Canaries, being
