ould do
his best; but having often rounded the Cape, he knew the difficulties
of the navigation, when there was nothing but the dead reckoning to
trust to.

During our passage from Ceylon, it was the practice every day, at one
o'clock, for the Indiamen, as well as the men-of-war, to make signals
showing the longitude of each ship by chronometer. Thus we had all an
opportunity of comparing the going of our respective time-keepers, and
thus, too, the master of the Arniston was enabled to learn his place
so accurately, that if he had only kept company with his friends the
Indiamen, each of whom was provided with at least four or five
chronometers, the deficiency in his equipment might never have led to
the dreadful catastrophe which speedily followed the loss of this
assistance.

It was late in the month of May when we reached the tempestuous
regions of the Cape; and we were not long there before a furious gale
of wind from the westward dispersed the fleet, and set every one
adrift upon his own resources. The poor Arniston was seen at sunset,
on the day the gale commenced, with most of her sails split, but not
otherwise in danger, for she had a good offing, and the wind was not
blowing on shore. Three heavy gales followed in such quick succession
during the next week, that not only the ordinary course, but the
velocity of the current was changed, and instead of running, as it
almost always does, to the westward, it set, on the days in question,
to the south-eastward. According to the most moderate allowance for
the current, all circumstances being taken into consideration, any
navigator might fairly have supposed that, in the five days which
elapsed from the 24th of May to the 28th inclusive, his ship would
have been drifted to the westward by the current at least a hundred
miles. Our chronometers, however, distinctly showed us that we had
been carried, not, as usual, to the westward, but actually to the
eastward, a distance of more than a hundred miles; so that, in less
than a week, there occurred upwards of two hundred miles of error in
the dead reckoning.

The master of the Arniston, doubtless, after making every allowance,
according to the best authorities, and working by the most exact rules
of navigation of which he could avail himself, naturally inferred that
his ship was more than a hundred miles to the westward of the Cape,
and he probably considered himself justified in bearing up before a
south-easterly gal