“I want a good boat compass in the gig, Mr. Jones, if you please.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Hornblower hesitated before the last final order, which would commit him to a public admission that he thought there was a chance of something serious awaiting him in the fog. But not to give the order would be to strain at a gnat and swallow a camel. If that had really been a musket shot that he had heard there was a possibility of action; there was a likelihood that at least a show of force would be necessary.
“Pistols and cutlasses for the gig’s crew, Mr. Jones, if you please.”
“Aye aye, sir,” said Jones, as if nothing could astonish him again.
Hornblower turned back as he was about to step down into the boat.
“I shall start timing you from this moment, Mr. Jones. Try to get those tops’l yards across in half an hour from now — I’ll be back before then.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
The ship broke into a roar of activity as Hornblower took his place in the stern‑sheets of the gig.
“I’ll take the tiller,” he said to the coxswain. “Give way.”
He steered the gig along the Atropos from stern to bow. He took one last look up at her bows, at her bowsprit and bobstay, and then the fog swallowed them up. The gig was instantly in a world of its own, constricted about by the walls of mist. The sounds of activity on board the ship died rapidly away.
“Pull steady!” growled Hornblower to the man at the oars. That little boat compass would be swinging about chasing its tail in ten seconds if he allowed the gig to keep anything except an exactly straight course. North by East half East.
“Seventeen,” said Hornblower to himself. “Eighteen. Nineteen.”
He was counting the strokes of the oars; it was a rough way of estimating the progress made. At seven feet to the stroke less than two hundred strokes meant a quarter of a mile. But there was the speed of the tide to be allowed for. It would be nearer five hundred strokes — all very vague, but every possible precaution must be taken on a foolish expedition like Otis.
“Seventy‑four, seventy‑five,” said Hornblower, his eyes glued to the compass.
Even with the brisk tide running the surface of the sea was a glassy flat calm; the oar‑blades, lifting from the water at the completion of each stroke, left whirlpools circling on the surface.
“Two hundred,” said Hornblower, suppressing a momentary fear that he had miscounted and that it was really three hundred.
The oars groaned on monotonously in the rowlocks.
“Keep your eyes ahead,” said Hornblower to the coxswain. “Tell me the moment you see anything. Two sixty‑four.”
It seemed only yesterday that he had sat in the stern‑sheets of the jolly boat of the Indefatigable, rowing up the estuary of the Gironde to cut out the Papillon. But that was more than ten years ago. Three hundred. Three hundred and fifty.
“Sir,” said the coxswain, tersely.
Hornblower looked forward. Ahead, a trifle on the port bow, there was the slightest thickening in the fog, the slightest looming of something solid there.
“Easy all!” said Hornblower, and the boat continued to glide over the surface; he put the tiller over slightly so as to approach whatever it was more directly. But the boat’s way died away before they were near enough to distinguish any details, and at Hornblower’s command the men began to row again. Distantly came a low hail out of the fog, apparently called forth by the renewal of the sound of the oars.
“Boat ahoy!”
At least the hail was in English. By now there was visible the vague outlines of a large brig; from the heaviness of her spars and fast lines she looked like one of the West India packets.
“What brig’s that?” hailed Hornblower in reply.
“Amelia Jane of London, thirty‑seven days out from Barbados.”
That was a direct confirmation of Hornblower’s first impression. But that voice? It did not sound quite English, somehow. There were foreign captains in the British merchant service, plenty of them, but hardly likely to be in command of a West India packet.