y four bells of the
forenoon watch; but when at length it was completed we felt that we were
prepared to face anything, our royal and topgallant-mast and all our
yards being down on deck, the fore and main-topmasts and the jib-boom
housed, the great mainsail snugly stowed and the heavy boom securely
supported in a strong crutch, and the ship under fore and main storm
staysails only.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

THE END OF THE DOLPHIN.

By the time that all this had been accomplished, the wind had fallen
away to a dead calm, and the only sounds audible were the creaking and
groaning of the ship's timbers, the loud rattle of the cabin doors below
upon their hooks, the wash of the sea alongside and under the counter,
the constant irritating _jerk-jerk_ of the tiller chains, and the
violent rustle and slatting of the staysails, as the _Dolphin_ rolled
her channels under in the long, oily swell that was now running. But,
so far as the aspect of the sky was concerned, there was no more sign of
the threatened storm than there had been when I first went on deck that
morning--except that, maybe, the haze had thickened somewhat, rendering
our horizon still more circumscribed, and the heat had increased to such
an extent that, as Keene had remarked, one would gladly have gone
overboard to escape it but for the sharks, several of which were
cruising round us, while three monsters persistently hung under our
counter in the shadow of the ship's hull, hungrily ogling those of us
who chanced to lean over the taffrail to get a glimpse of them. Yet,
when, for want of something better to do, Jack Keene and I got a shark
hook and, baiting it with a highly flavoured piece of pork out of the
harness cask, sought to inveigle one of the monsters into swallowing it,
they disdained to even so much as look at it, merely glancing upward at
us, when we deftly dropped the bait upon one of their broad, shovel
noses, as though to say:

"No, no, my hearties! No rancid pork for us, thank you, when, by
exercising a little patience, we may, with luck, get a chance to learn
what one of you jokers tastes like." The enervating effect of the heat
seemed to be as strongly revealed in them as it was in ourselves.

The sun still flamed in the heavens when, shortly before noon, Jack and
I brought our sextants on deck with the object of measuring his meridian
altitude above the horizon; but we were only able to obtain a very
approximate and wholly useless resul