The second mate warmly clad paced the weather side of the poop, sending many a weatherly glance to seaward, with a frequent lifting of his eyes to the rounded iron-hard canvas; whilst against the brilliant white wake of the ship, roaring and boiling upwards as it seemed, to the stoop of the Indiaman’s huge square counter, the figures of the two sailors at the big wheel stood out clear-cut as cameos, with the broad brass band upon the circle dully reflecting a space of copperish light in the sky over the weather mizzen-topsail yard-arm, and the newly polished hood of the binnacle gleaming as though sun-touched. A couple of midshipmen in pea-coats and brass buttons, curly headed young rogues, with a spirit of mischief bright in every glance they sent, patrolled the lee side of the poop; and up in the mizzen top were two more of them, with yet another long-legged fellow jockeying a spur of the cross-trees, with his loose trousers rattling like a flag; but what job he was upon I could not tell. The planks of this deck were as white as the trunk of a tree newly stripped of its bark. Four handsome quarter-boats swung at the davits. Along the rail on either hand went a row of hencoops, through the bars of which the heads of cocks and hens came and went in a winking sort of way, like a swift showing and withdrawing of red rags. On the rail, for a considerable distance, were stowed bundles of compressed hay, the scent of which was a real puzzle to the nose, coming as it did through the hard sweep of the salt wind. The white skylights glistened through the intricacies of brass wire which shielded them. Abaft the wheel, on either side of it, their tompioned muzzles eyed blindly by the closed ports meant to receive them, were a couple of eighteen pounders; for in those days the Indiamen still went armed; not heavily, indeed, as in the war-times of an earlier period, but with artillery and small-arms enough to enable her to dispute with some promise of success with the picaroon who was still afloat, whose malignant flag the burnished waters of the Antilles yet reflected, and whose amiable company of assassins were as often to be met with under the African and South American heights as in the Channel of the Mozambique, or eastward yet on the broad surface of the Indian Ocean. I crossed the deck to where Mr. Cocker was stumping, and asked him if he could tell me off what part of the English coast our ship now was. ‘Drawing on to the Wight, sir,’ he answered, with a sort of groping look in the little moist blue eyes he turned over the lee bow into the thickness beyond. ‘Well, we’re blowing through it, anyway,’ said I. ‘I shouldn’t have allowed these heels for any conceivable structure born with such bows as the _Countess Ida_. What is it?’ I asked with a glance at the broad dazzle of yeast dancing and whipping and slinging off the Indiaman’s tall side against the hurl of the weather surge.