It supplied nothing. The crew, once drilled, needed but a few moments each day to keep at the level of proficiency; and there was practically nothing to do, because nothing happened that required either a doing or an undoing. Under such conditions even a gale of wind was a not unwelcome change. Although little activity was required to meet it, it at least presented new surroundings--something different from the daily outlook. After a very brief period, it became the rule to ride out the storms at anchor; and I remember one of our volunteer officers, who had commanded a merchant-ship for some years, saying that he would have been spared a good deal of trouble, on occasions, had he had our experience of holding on with an anchor instead of keeping under way. It was, however, an old if forgotten expedient, where anchorage ground was good--bottom sticky and water not too deep. In the ancient days of the French wars, the British fleets off Brest and Toulon had to keep under way, but that blockading Cadiz, in 1797-98, used to hold its position at anchor, and under harder conditions than ours; for there the worst gales blew on shore, whereas ours swept chiefly along the coast. A standing dispute in the British navy, in those days of hemp cables, used to be whether it was safer to ride with three anchors down, or with one only, having to it three cables, bent together, so as to form one of thrice the usual length. The balance of opinion leaned to the latter; the dead weight of so much hemp held the ship without transmitting the strain to the anchor itself. She "rode to the bight," as the expression was; that is, to the cable, curved by its own weight and length, lying even in part on the bottom, which prevented its tightening and pulling at the anchor. What was true of hemp was yet more true of iron chains. The _Pocahontas_ used to veer to a hundred fathoms, and there lie like a duck in fifty or sixty feet of water. I remember on one occasion, however, that when we next weighed the anchor, it came up with parts polished bright, as in my childhood we used sometimes to burnish a copper cent. This seemed to show that it had been scoured hard along a sandy bottom. We had had no suspicion of the ship's dragging during the gale, and I have since supposed that it may have started from its bed as we began to heave, and so been scrubbed along towards us.