At my elbow lay Nat, still sleeping. Mr. Badcock had crawled
to the bulwarks, and leaned there in uncontrollable sea-sickness.
Until the gale was done I believe he had not felt a qualm. Now, on
the top of his nausea, he had to endure the raillery of Mr. Fett,
whose active fancy had already invented a grotesque and wholly
untruthful accusation against his friend--namely, that when assailed
by the Moors, and in the act of being kicked below, he had dropped on
his knees and offered to turn Mohammedan.
That evening we committed old Worthyvale's body to the sea, and my
father, having taken his first observation at noon, carefully entered
the latitude and longitude in his pocket-book. On consulting the
chart we found the alleged bearings somewhere south of Asia-Minor--to
be exact, off the coast of Pamphylia. My father therefore added the
word "approximately" to his entry, and waited for Captain Pomery to
recover.
Though the sea went down even more quickly than it had arisen, the
pumps kept us fairly busy. All that night, under a clear and starry
sky, we steered for the north-east with the wind brisk upon our
starboard quarter.
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