Ever Since We Had Commenced
Sailing In A Southerly Direction, We Had Been Obliged To
Beat, But During The Last
Four-and-twenty hours the wind
kept dodging us every time we tacked, as a nervous
pedestrian sets to you
Sometimes on a narrow trottoir.
This spell of ill-luck the Icelander heathenishly thought
would only be removed by a sacrifice to Rhin, the goddess
of the sea, in which light he trusted she would look upon
the goat's body when it came to be thrown overboard.
Whether the change which followed upon the consignment
of her remains to the deep really resulted from such an
influence, I am not prepared to say. The weather immediately
thereafter certainly DID change. First the wind dropped
altogether, but though the calm lasted several hours,
the sea strangely enough appeared to become all the
rougher, tossing and tumbling restlessly UP AND DOWN - (not
over and over as in a gale) - like a sick man on a fever
bed; the impulse to the waves seeming to proceed from
all four quarters of the world at once. Then, like jurymen
with a verdict of death upon their lips, the heavy,
ominous clouds slowly passed into the north-west.
A dead stillness followed - a breathless pause - until, at
some mysterious signal, the solemn voice of the storm
hurtled over the deep. Luckily we were quite ready for
it; the gale came from the right quarter, and the fiercer
it blew the better. For the next three days and three
nights it was a scurry over the sea such as I never had
before; nine or ten knots an hour was the very least we
ever went, and 240 miles was the average distance we made
every four-and-twenty hours.
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