as the day went on, and every knot we went the
sea got worse. The ugly cutter slid down one wet incline, drove up the
next, and squattered through the hissing crest with a good deal of
grumbling and plunging and rolling and complaining. But she had a good
grip of the water, and with decently careful steering she showed but
small inclination to broach-to or do anything else she wasn't wanted
to. She might not be a beauty; she might be sluggish as a haystack in a
light breeze; but, as Haigh said, this was just her day, and we were
not too nervous to take advantage of it. Still, considering her small
tonnage, and the fact that all her tackle was so infernally rotten, she
took a tidy bit of looking after. You see, we might be reckless about
our skins, but at the same time we were very keenly anxious to make the
Balearic Islands.

The thing that I mostly feared was that our old ruin of a mainsail
would take leave of us. If once it started to split, the whole lot
would go like a sheet of tissue-paper. However, whether we liked it or
not, we had to run on now. The wind and sea were both far too heavy to
dream of an attempt at rounding-to. And, indeed, even if we had
succeeded in slewing her head to the wind without getting swamped in
the process (the odds on which were about nine hundred to one against),
it was distinctly doubtful as to whether she would deign to stay there.
Small cutters are not great at staying hove-to in really dirty weather.

And so we topped the boom well up, hoisted the tack to prevent
overrunning the seas, and let her drive; and whilst Haigh clung on to
the tiller and its weather rope, I busied myself with a bent
sail-needle at stitching up any places within reach on the mainsail
where the seams seemed to be working loose.

Soon after dark that night--and I never saw much more inky blackness in
my life--we came across a deep-laden brig which very nearly gave us a
quietus. She was running sluggishly under lower fore-topsail, wallowing
like a log-raft in a rapid, and doing less than a third of our
knottage. We possessed neither side-lamps nor oil, and showed no light;
and as she had not a lantern astern, we got no glimmer of warning till
we were within a dozen fathoms of her taffrail. Haigh couldn't give the
cutter much helm for fear of gibing her and carrying away everything,
and consequently we did not clear that brig's low quarter by more than
a short fathom. Had we passed her to starboard instead o