It was on the fourth day, when we were roughly seven hundred
miles or more north of Samoa, that we met the edge of this gale
about sundown. The captain put on steam in the hope of pushing
through it, but that night we dined for the first time with the
fiddles on, and by eleven o'clock it was as much as one could do
to stand in the cabin, while the water was washing freely over
the deck. Fortunately, however, the wind veered more aft of us,
so that by putting about her head a little (seamen must forgive
me if I talk of these matters as a landlubber) we ran almost
before the wind, though not quite in the direction that we wished
to go.

When the light came it was blowing very hard indeed, and the
sky was utterly overcast, so that we got no glimpse of the sun,
or of the stars on the following night. Unfortunately, there was
no moon visible; indeed, if there had been I do not suppose that
it would have helped us because of the thick pall of clouds. For
quite seventy-two hours we ran on beneath bare poles before that
gale. The little vessel behaved splendidly, riding the seas like
a duck, but I could see that Captain Astley was growing alarmed.
When I said something complimentary to him about the conduct of
the Star of the South, he replied that she was forging ahead all
right, but the question was--where to? He had been unable to take
an observation of any sort since we left Samoa; both his patent
logs had been carried away, so that now only the compass
remained, and he had not the slightest idea where we were in that
great ocean studded with atolls and islands.

I asked him whether we could not steam back to our proper