e care
of so big a ship was a heavy responsibility to rest upon the shoulders
of three men--and a girl, and we desired to free ourselves of it without
a moment's unnecessary delay. And, quite apart from that, the monotony
of the thing was beginning to get upon our nerves. For Gurney and Grace
Hartley it was doubtless well enough; so long as they could be together
it mattered little to them to what length the voyage might be spun out,
but so far as I was concerned--and I think I might also answer for
Saunders--I was beginning to crave for the sight of fresh faces, the
sound of new voices, and the stir and bustle and excitement of life
ashore.

At length, on our sixteenth day out from the reef, in latitude 1 degree
42 minutes north, the wind showed signs of failing us; and by sunset,
that night, it had fallen stark calm, with a rapidly subsiding swell;
yet the sky was clear, the barometer high, and, in short, there was
every indication that we were booked for a long spell of calm weather
before we should find ourselves to the southward of the Equator. So
indeed it proved; for I believe I may say with absolute truth that
never, for five consecutive minutes during the ten succeeding days, had
we sufficient wind to extinguish the flame of a candle. True, there
were occasional evanescent breathings that came stealing along from
nowhere in particular, gently ruffling a few superficial yards of the
ocean's glassy surface into faintest blue for a brief two or three
minutes at a time, and then vanishing again; but during the whole of
that period we never had enough wind to keep our canvas fully distended
for a whole minute. Or course, being short-handed, we could not resort
to the various devices usually adopted in a fully manned craft for
profiting by those transient breathings. The yards were altogether too
heavy for us to attempt to swing them to meet every fickle draught of
air that we saw coming toward us; it was therefore only the most
favourable that we made any effort to utilise; yet, despite this, we
somehow contrived to drift daily a little farther south; it might be,
perhaps, no more than a mile, or it might rise to as much as five or six
miles. Everything depending upon whether the favourable zephyrs
happened to hit the ship, or whether they passed her by--sometimes at a
distance of only a few yards.

When we first ran into this belt of calm our horizon was bare, neither
land nor ship being in sight--indeed w