steering as he might have been. From the depths of his nautical experience—extending over several long days now—Paul scolded. The simpleton might have got the ship aback, then there would have been the devil to pay. Didn't he know that that was how top-masts were snapped off—sometimes, when a gale was blowing? This ten-knot breeze, Paul had to remind himself, was, of course, only a zephyr. Wait till they ran into a real gale—then that land-lubber would see!
Paul had learned much about gales, hurricanes and typhoons. He felt there wouldn't, somehow, be any on this voyage; the worst storms seemed to have blown themselves out years ago; nothing could ever again be as terrific as the hurricanes that the second mate and the sailmaker and the cook and the carpenter—"Chips"—and half the men in the forecastle had weathered in their time. Paul felt it was a pity he had struck such a tame sort of ship. Nothing, apparently, could be expected to happen to her. She was so much smaller—for all her two thousand and forty-nine registered tonnage—than those other fine vessels he had been told about; so much slower, so much less convenient to handle, carried so much less canvas, was so inadequately victualled, so prosaically devoid of hoodoos—and one had, in one's pitiable ignorance, thought her such a brave-looking craft, had thought the sails so vast and neat and stout, the ropes so thick and strong, the paint so fresh, the decks so velvety smooth, the food so—well, not really bad.
Even the mate and the "old man," hardy Canadians of the "blue-nose" stamp, Paul had looked upon as competent and sailorly to a degree—yet now he knew that, though the "old man understood what he was about," still he wasn't a patch on other old men under whom this weirdly variegated score of men had sailed in good old days which Paul, having been born so lamentably late in history, could enjoy only through the medium of
