"Come on, Chips, I am going to make you admiral of the day. Get the ax and smash all the bull's-eyes, windows, portholes, and everything." Poor Chips! He thought I had gone off my head, but he obeyed. The smashing began. "Bo's'n," I called, "half a dozen men with buckets of sea water! Throw it around, drench everything." And now the water flew in the cabins, in the drawers of chests, in the officers' bunks, all over my Norwegian library, water everywhere. I took my shipping papers and put each page between sheets of wet blotting paper so that not only the name of _Irma_ and the other entries we had changed were blotted; but every line. I even soused the log book in a bucket of water. Then I called the carpenter again. "Now repair everything you have smashed, Chips. Nail everything." He hammered planks over the smashed portholes and bull's-eyes, and put the smashed chairs together as well as he could. Now, if the Britisher came aboard, he would say: "By Joe, Captain, you must have had a hard blow to get knocked about like this." And I would growl, "Yes, by Joe, everything is drenched, even my papers." Two days later a southwest wind sprang up. The moment was at hand. To go raiding in a sailing ship and that sailing ship with the name of _Irma_ painted on her bows--ah, it seemed more like a dream than like setting out on a real adventure. It seemed as though all the events of my life had been designed to converge to this one glorious point. Our one hundred-and-seventy-foot masts creaked. Our nine thousand square feet of sail bellowed before the wind. We sailed north under a full spread. XIII RUNNING THE BRITISH BLOCKADE IN A HURRICANE Sails bellied and motor humming, we parted the waves and left a path of foam in our wake. On deck we devoted all our spare time to more dress rehearsals. My boys took a particular relish in putting me through the "third degree," as you call it. One of them played the part of a British search officer. "Now, Captain, what is the name of your ship?" he bellowed. "She is the _Irma_, and as good a full-rigged ship as ever crossed the North Sea." "Have you any brothers and sisters, Captain?" "Oh, yes, a lot of them. There are Olga, Ingaborg, and Oscar who live in Hatfjelddalen. Dagmar and Christian are seamen like myself. Lars runs a salmon cannery in British Columbia, Gustaf and Tor are lumbermen somewhere in America. And then we have another brother, Eric, whom we've lost track of." While trying to make the narrow channel of Norderaue we hit a sand bank. The ship creaked and the masts trembled, but somehow we pushed across--further proof that the Scots of Glasgow still know how to turn out a sturdy clipper ship.