embarrass him until he
could obtain others to fill their places; and I formed this opinion from
the fact that his many expressions of regret at being blown away from
his boats were every one of them coupled with a petulant repetition of
the remark that his hands would be completely tied should he fail to
recover their crews. So persistently did he hang upon this phase of the
mishap, that at length I ventured to ask him whether there were none of
them that he would be sorry to lose for their own sakes, apart from any
question of inconvenience; in reply to which he stated, with a brutal
laugh, that they were, one and all, a lazy set of worthless rascals, of
whom he should have rid himself in any case on his arrival in Havana.

However, be his motive what it might, he cracked, on every stitch of
canvas that the brigantine would bear, as soon as the strength of the
squall had sufficiently abated to permit of his bringing her to the
wind, making sail from time to time as the wind further dwindled, until
he had her under everything that would draw, from the trucks down. To
add to his anxiety, it was about two bells in the first dog-watch before
he could bring the ship to the wind, and he feared, not without reason,
that it would be dark before he could work back near enough to the spot
at which we had left the boats, to see them again--always supposing, of
course, that they still floated. However, he did everything that a
seaman could do, sending a hand aloft to the royal-yard to keep a
look-out as soon as the ship had been got upon a wind, and making short
boards to windward--the first one of a quarter of an hour's duration,
and the others of half-an-hour each, so as to thoroughly cover the
ground previously passed over--as long as the daylight lasted. But
when, all too soon, the sun went down in a blaze of golden and crimson
and purple splendour, no sign of the boats had been seen; Mendouca,
therefore, worked out a calculation of the distance run by the
brigantine from the spot where the squall first struck her, subtracted
from it the distance that the boats would probably traverse in the same
time, and having worked up to this spot as nearly as he could calculate,
he hove-to for the night, with a bright lantern at his main-truck,
firing signal rockets at intervals of a quarter of an hour, and wearing
the ship round on the other tack every two hours. The night was
brilliantly star-lit, but without a moon, still there w