But we are in the South Pacific, and I have still a good many things to find out about the “way they do things at sea,” here where the ocean is the ocean, and no playground for globe-trotting tourists.
“Are you nearly done?” asks the pirate again, shifting half a point, and throwing a glance at the clouds on the windward side. They are harmless little clouds, and only suggest a steady breeze.
“I have about half an hour’s reading left,” I answer.
“Then you’d better chuck the book into your cabin, for it’s almost eight bells, and that begins your trick at the wheel,” says the pirate calmly.
“Your trick. Your turn. Time you have to steer, see?”
“But, good heavens! I never had a wheel in my hand in my life--I don’t know how!”
“That’s your misfortune, not your fault,” says the pirate kindly. “You’ll never have to say that again.. There’s eight bells now--come along. J------ and I have had too much of the wheel, and now we’re well away from land is your time to learn.”
And from thenceforth until we made the rocky coast of Niué, more than a week later, I spent a portion of every day with the polished spokes of the wheel in my hands, straining my eyes on the “lubber’s point,” or anxiously watching the swelling curves of the sails aloft in the windy blue, ready to put the wheel up the instant an ominous wrinkle began to flap and writhe upon the marble smoothness of the leaning canvas. At night, the smallest slatting of sail upon the mast would start me out of my sleep, with an uneasy fear that I was steering, and had let her get too, close to the wind; and I deposed most of my prayers in favour of an evening litany that began: “North, north by east, nor’-nor’-east, nor’-east by north, nor’-east,” and turned round upon itself to go backward in the end, like a spell said upside down to raise a storm.
Withal, the good ship left many a wake that would have broken the back of a snake, for the first day or two of my lessons, and the native A.B.s used to come and stand behind me when an occasional sea made the wheel kick, under the evident impression that they would be wanted before long. But I learned to steer--somehow--before we got to Niué, and I learned to lower away boats, and to manage a sixteen foot steer-oar, when we got becalmed, and spent the day rowing about among the mountainous swells, out of sheer boredom. And for exercise and sport, I learned to go up into the cross-trees and come down again by the ratlines or the back-stay, whichever seemed the handiest, wearing the flannel gymnasium dress I had brought for mountaineering excursions. It was very pleasant up there on a bright, salt-windy morning, when the _Duchess_ swung steadily on her way with a light favouring breeze, her little white deck lying below me like a tea-tray covered with walking dolls, her masts at times leaning to leeward until my airy seat was swung far out across the water. Having a good head, I was never troubled with giddiness, and used to do a good deal of photographing from aloft, when the ship was steady enough to allow of it. That was seldom, however, for the _Duchess_ had been built in New Zealand, where the good schooners do not come from, and had no more hold on the water than a floating egg. More than one sailing vessel turned out by the same builders had vanished off the face of the ocean, in ways not explained, by reason of the absence of survivors, but dimly guessed at, all the same; and I cannot allow that the pirate captain had any just cause of annoyance--even allowing for a master’s pride in his ship--when I recommended him to have the schooner’s name painted legibly on her keel before he should leave Auckland on his next northward journey, just “in case.”