The rising sun the next day beheld the good ship Albatross, under the
impulse of a very gentle breeze, gliding towards the west; the Andes,
over which the sun was darting his levelled beams, were distinctly
visible. The flapping of the topsails against their masts, the pattering
of the reef-points, and the smoothness of the water, indicated an
approaching calm.
"Go aloft, one of you," said Morton, who was the officer of the morning
watch, "go aloft, and see if you can make out any sail astern of us
under the land."
The seaman who obeyed this order, after _roosting_ for fifteen or twenty
minutes on the main royal yard, came down and reported that he could see
nothing; but that the sun shone so brightly on the water that, if any
thing was within the range of sight, the reflection of the sunbeams
would render it invisible. Morton could not repress a vague
apprehension that there was some vessel in chace, though it would have
sorely puzzled him to give his whys and wherefores. After having pointed
his glass for the fiftieth time towards the eastern horizon, without
seeing any thing but smooth water and the dim, blue, cloudy-looking
mountains, the man at the wheel notified him that it was "eight bells,"
or eight o'clock. Having gone below to compare the watch in the cabin
with the half-hour glass in the binnacle, he returned to the
quarter-deck and called out,
"Strike the bell eight--call the watch."
The bell was struck, and one of the watch on deck, after a preliminary
thumping with the large end of a handspike upon the forecastle,
vociferated down the fore scuttle,
"All the starboard watch, ahoy! Rouse out there, starbowlines--show a
leg or an arm!"
This last phrase designates the manner in which "turning out" of a
hammock is accomplished, which hammock, a person unacquainted with such
kind of sleeping accommodations, would never dream contained a live man,
until one or the other of the aforementioned limbs was protruded. In a
few minutes the wheel was relieved, and the crew were clustering around
the galley with their tin pots, joking, and laughing, and shouting
"scaldings!" as they hurried forward with their respective allowances of
hot coffee.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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