It was on the 10th of May, so quickly did things move under the supervision of the bedridden captain, that the Raratonga, with Lestrange on board, cleared the Golden Gates, and made south, heeling to a ten-knot breeze.
There is no mode of travel to be compared to your sailing-ship. In a great ship, if you have ever made a voyage in one, the vast spaces of canvas, the sky-high spars, the finesse with which the wind is met and taken advantage of, will form a memory never to be blotted out.
A schooner is the queen of all rigs; she has a bounding buoyancy denied to the square-rigged craft, to which she stands in the same relationship as a young girl to a dowager; and the Raratonga was not only a schooner, but the queen, acknowledged of all the schooners in the Pacific.
For the first few days they made good way south; then the wind became baffling and headed them off.
Added to Lestrange's feverish excitement there was an anxiety, a deep and soul-fretting anxiety, as if some half-heard voice were telling him that the children he sought were threatened by some danger.
These baffling winds blew upon the smouldering anxiety in his breast, as wind blows upon embers, causing them to glow. They lasted some days, and then, as if Fate had relented, up sprang on the starboard quarter a spanking breeze, making the rigging sing to a merry tune, and blowing the spindrift from the forefoot, as the Raratonga, heeling to its pressure, went humming through the sea, leaving a wake spreading behind her like a fan.
It took them along five hundred miles, silently and with the speed of a dream. Then it ceased.
The ocean and the air stood still. The sky above stood solid like a great pale blue dome; just where it met the water line of the far horizon a delicate tracery of cloud draped the entire round of the sky.
I have said that the ocean stood still as well as the air: to the eye it was so, for the swell under-running the glitter on its surface was so even, so equable, and so rhythmical, that the surface seemed not in motion. Occasionally a dimple broke the surface, and strips of dark sea-weed floated by, showing up the green; dim things rose to the surface and, guessing the presence of man, sank slowly and dissolved from sight.
Two days, never to be recovered, passed, and still the calm continued.
On the morning of the third day it breezed up from the nor'-nor'west, and they continued their course, a cloud of canvas, every sail drawing, and the music of the ripple under the forefoot.