"Heave the log every glass, Mr. Hubbard," he ordered.
"Aye aye, sir," said Hubbard. Hubbard's breast and the front of his thighs were white with snow as he turned to acknowledge the order; glancing down, Peabody saw that his own clothes were similarly coated. A master's mate and a hand came aft, trudging through the snow on deck, their foothold precarious on that giddy slope. The hand would wet himself thoroughly with the dripping log line as he hauled it in again, and the water would freeze in that biting wind. It would be an uncomfortable night for him, thought Peabody, but discomfort was part of a sailor's life when necessary. The safety of the ship depended on the accurate estimate of her speed and distance traveled. He turned to the quartermasters.
"Are you cold?" he asked.
"A little, sir," said one of them.
From those tough seamen the two words were the equivalent of a long wail of misery from a landsman. Peabody knew they would be numb and stupid before long.
"Mr. Hubbard!" he said. "Relieve these men at the wheel every half hour."
"Aye aye, sir," said Hubbard.
Hubbard was marking on the traverse board the speed and course.
"What's the speed?"
"Five knots and a bit more, sir." Even when Hubbard was shouting into a gale his voice bore the faint echo of the South Carolina which had given him birth.
The Delaware was showing her good points, doing five knots close-hauled under staysails and close-reefed topsails alone — the Baltimore shipwrights who built her away back in 1800 had left their impress on the shape of her hull, despite the specifications of the Navy Department. Five knots, and it would be more when they had weathered Elm Point and brought the wind abeam. High water at Montauk Point was at 2 a.m. Peabody stood with the wind whistling round him and the snow banking against his chest while he continued his calculations. In a blizzard like this he could be fairly certain that the British squadron would be blown out to sea; if not, it was so dark that he could hope to get through unobserved. In these conditions his ship was in a hundred times greater danger from the navigational difficulties than from the enemy, and it was only now, as he bitterly realized, that he stood any chance of getting to sea at all.
The relieved quartermasters were stumbling forward now, bent against the wind. He could tell from their gait how numb and stiff they were — they had been standing with their arms extended holding the wheel, in an attitude which fairly invited the wind to pierce them to the heart. He would be feeling cold himself if he allowed himself to do so, but he would not. He went on facing stubbornly into the wind. They must be abreast of Elm Point by now.
"Nor'east by east," he said to the men at the wheel.
"Nor'east by east, sir," they echoed.
“Hands to the braces, Mr. Hubbard."
"Aye aye, sir."
The Delaware steadied herself on her new course, heeling to the wind, rolling rather more now and pitching far less. Peabody had never known the Sound to be as rough as this — it was the clearest proof of the violence of the blizzard.
"Seven-and-a-half knots, sir," said Hubbard, marking up the new course and speed.
That was what he had expected. Now they would weather Montauk comfortably before dawn. For a few hours he could relax a little — relax as far as an American captain could possibly relax when sailing in the heart of his own country's waters in the midst of enemies.
The wind that was blowing about him from the Connecticut shore must now — he worked out a neat trigonometrical problem in his head — have just passed over the farm where he was born and spent his childhood. The memory made him shiver a little, although the blizzard did not. It was not often that those memories came back to him, except in nightmares. Against his will they forced themselves into his mind as he stood staring into the darkness. It was not the poverty, or the hunger, or the winter cold, which he hated to remember, although they had been poignant enough at the time. The bare bones of that farm had stuck through the skin of the soil, and no one could have hoped to gain more than the barest living from it. There was nothing hateful about the memory of poverty. But the other memories made him shudder again. That tall gaunt father of his, with the yellow beard and the blazing blue eyes — he winced a little in the darkness at the vivid mental picture. The bottle beside him and the Bible in front of him, and the furious texts foaming out of his mouth — drunk with rum and the Old Testament — that was one way in which he could remember his father. And then another memory, insidiously creeping into his mind, of his father lurching across the room, still mouthing texts, and unbuckling the heavy belt from his waist; lurching across the room to where a terrified little boy stood cornered, reaching for him with a huge callused hand, dragging him away from the sheltering walls. How that little boy had screamed under that searing belt! That little boy was now Captain Josiah Peabody, of the frigate Delaware.
Those memories had him on their treadmill now; there was no escape from them. There was his mother, dark and beautiful, — he had thought her beautiful, — who used to take him into her arms and rock with him and pet him; as a big baby, before he became a little boy, he could remember the bliss of those embraces. Then after that he knew that her step was uncertain, that her laugh was too loud and misplaced. He knew the reason for her red cheeks and staring, foolish gaze. After that he shrank from his mother's drunken caresses just as he shrank from his father's clutches — they sickened him equally. He remembered the nausea which overtook him when he smelled her breath as her soft arms closed about him.
Then Uncle Josiah, for whom he was named, had come to the farm, very extraordinary in his appearance to the little boy, with his hair tied into a neat queue, and a laced neckcloth and gloves and riding boots. Uncle Josiah had taken him away — Uncle Josiah was an elegant gentleman, strangely enough; his nephew could guess that queer things had happened to Uncle Josiah during the past few years. Uncle Josiah had a lace handkerchief which wafted the perfumes of Paradise about the room when he applied it delicately to his nose; apparently he was a wealthy man, and the source of his wealth, unbelievable as it might be, was somehow connected with a war which had begun the other side of the ocean.
He was engaged in the most multifarious businesses, obviously, seeing that he received as many as six letters a day at one of the taverns when they stopped on their way to New York. He had friends, too. A mere word from him to one of those friends made young Josiah a boy in the Coast Guard Service, where the beatings were not nearly so severe and where the nightmare of a loving mother gradually ceased in intensity. There was the fresh clean wind of the sea to blow about him, and the boys who berthed with him were not weakly malicious, as had been his younger brothers and sisters. And the cities he visited were vast and intoxicating, from Portsmouth down to Charleston; and somehow the lessons which the master-commandant of the cutter taught him had a peculiar, delicious charm — algebra, when he was introduced to it, gave him pleasure as great as maple syrup or honey had done.
And then, when his voice had broken and his beard had begun to grow, there had come a call for officers in the new Federal Navy. Uncle Josiah said another word for him to another friend, a word which made his nephew lieutenant at the age of sixteen. It was the last service Uncle Josiah was to do for him, for Uncle Josiah, two months later, paid the penalty of having become a gentleman, and died in Baltimore twelve paces from the pistol of another gentleman who had been his friend until the sudden disclosure of a queer scandal regarding the outfitting of privateers for the war against France.